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I’d just build my own, like I did for my water purifier. It ain’t that hard.
I have never seen someone build their own washing machine or refrigerator. It’s intriguing. A whole new level of diy
Gonna have to rebrand all that to Just A Dream, unless you have a plan to secure the capital to start that all up, and also somehow not be beholden to short term profit crazed investors who will change that business model.
Hooray! Hypercapitalist Realism!
Shut up and take my money.
It’s the Linux philosophy in appliances. I’m down.
I’m not against it having an open API to allow it to be controlled by some computer system, though don’t even bring up the word “cloud”.
The problem is they start including features no one wants. Like my dishwasher has an app, why?
It’s not like it can fill itself so I can put the dishes in the dishwasher and I can start it remotely, but since I have to put the dishes in the dishwasher it’s pointless to then not immediately turn it on, it’s not like the dishes will care if they’re sat in the dishwasher for a few hours. What is the point in me being able to remotely turn it on from my phone?
The app also lets me set a start time, which is a doubly pointless feature because I could just remotely turn it on with the app whenever, if for some reason I cared about that.
Imagine how much better the dishwasher would be if the people who’d spent the time building the world’s most pointless app, instead worked on literally any other aspect of the dishwasher.
There’s a huge demand from consumers for that. Just not from investors.
Investors need not be shareholders, to be fair.
There’s a huge demand from consumers for that.
Is that actually true, though?
Yes. Cars especially right now.
Very likely. Why not?
Because consumers have shown to prefer features over reliability:
French Door refrigerators are the most popular and most complex design.
Built in ice makers are popular but also complex and prone to failure due to physics.
They still sell very basic refrigerators and washer/dryers. But these don’t sell as well as more feature rich models.
In my albeit anecdotal experience, these ‘very basic’ appliances suffer their own variant of faults. They take no modern design cues; they are more prone to reliability issues from bargain bin components; or they somehow cost only slightly less than their fancy feature rich counterparts.
Just because I don’t want off-white equipment in my kitchen, I shouldn’t have to buy an ‘AI’ oven. But the companies want to know when and what I’m cooking so when I go to the grocery in the middle of dinner prep, the AI price labels can adjust a bit higher because they know I need an ingredient right now for a meal I’ve already started making.
The variant of fault these normal appliances have aren’t truly a fault. It’s intentionally made to be less appealing, less reliable, and more expensive than it should be, so when we’re looking at a white oven in the store for $800, we’ll opt instead for the $1,000 Alexa powered stainless steel double range that’s sitting right next to it.
Oh and if you’re in a spot and need to finance your new appliance, sorry but our financing isn’t available for the budget tier.
This comment kind of went off the rails, didn’t it.
My recent experience buying such is that it is very very hard to find basic but quality models. If you’ve had a water dispenser or ice maker once, you realize how awful they are. They take up massive amounts of fridge and freezer space and need expensive filters every 3 months and break as soon as the short warranty is over. But if you want double door and bottom freezer you pretty much have to buy the crap extras as well.
I don’t think complex design is the opposite of “just” it’s more that the refrigerator is just a kitchen refrigerator that doesn’t have weird proprietary temperature management system, and easily accessible replacement parts. It’s not also a built in tablet for example
But does it have AI?
My washing machine and dryer likes to throw about AI. The model came out around or just before the current LLM craze started, and I’m guessing they wanted to capitalise on the buzzword.
AI in the case of my washing machine means that it keeps track of the time and day of week, and what washing programmes I tend to run within a certain timeframe. It then suggests that programme when you turn it on. For the dryer, AI means “suggest the programme matching what the washer just washed.”
Lately the washer has taken to flash “AI Cycle Complete” on its stupid little screen whenever it completes a wash, even if I keyed in every single setting myself. Such AI.
Nothing has Ai. Everything that does refuses to explain what their use of that term means. It’s like buying the name brand cereal over the generic because someone slapped an “asbestos free” sticker on it.
I want to produce boxed recipes under a product line named “Jamaican”
- Jamaican a pie
- Jamaican mac and cheese
- Jamaican chicken with mushroom gravy
I also wanna make a perfume line named “Eureka,” following the same general idea but with awfully generic scent names
- Eureka flowers
- Eureka citrus
- Eureka chicken with mushroom gravy
What Jamaican?
And easier to repair, too.
A GE washing or drying machine from 30 years ago has easily removable panels, about 4 to 6 screws each and large easily identifiable parts, but one from a couple of years ago requires the top to be propped up or secured and the panels removed in a specific order such that you can them remove the internal plastic panels through which wires need to be dismounted around the drum with like 8 or more screws each of varying sizes and when it comes time to put it back together I hope you’ve got more than three arms because fuck you thats why.
I just want everything with a heating element to use a heat pump instead. Electric heating elements are so horribly inefficient and wasteful in comparison.
I have a ventless heat pump combo washer/dryer. It takes up half the space that two machines would, plugs into a regular 110V outlet, gets HOT (way hotter than I expected a heat pump has any right to achieve), drains all its drying water into the drain, vents none of my indoor air outside, doesn’t require changing laundry from one machine to the other. Practically and mechanically it seems brilliant and I can’t imagine why I would ever buy a traditional machine ever again. Except…
It’s chock full of horrible apps and shit that I’ll never use. It’s way too “smart”, and those “smarts” are not there for my benefit. After a month or two it finally gave up trying to pester me to connect it to a network and install the app, which I’ll never, ever do. It’s never going to see an update or new firmware if I can help it, but I’m afraid that if/when it ever breaks, I’ll have no choice. I know it’s going to do things like eventually refuse to work until the computer has been “updated” to be “compatible” with new parts. And it’s not even just that it’s going to be expensive. It’s that I don’t trust it, and I don’t trust it to remain functional in the future, even if there are parts, that they won’t let me install the parts, or will require me to agree to play by their “rules” before I can.
Right to repair needs to be a thing, and people need to be able to break the ridiculous amount of both legal and practical control these manufacturers have over their devices after they’ve left the factory. We cannot and should not trust the manufacturers to support it. We need to allow independent repair.
I thought electric heaters were 100% efficient? All the electricity you put into it becomes heat yeah?
Yea but heat pumps have a coefficient of performance of greater than 1 cause you’re moving heat instead of generating it.
Yeah my heat pump is something like 2000% efficient. It can cheat because it doesn’t convert electricity into heat, it uses electricity to move heat from the outside to the inside (or vice versa).
Heat pumps require a line to the outdoors, which may not be possible to create for existing use cases.
Also, if I recall, hot water heaters that use heat pumps can’t actually get hot enough to completely heat the water and rely on electricity a bit. Therefore, I’m not sure everything with a heating element (ie. stovetop, oven, espresso machine, etc.) would work for that.
Edit: for those downvoting, please link me where I can buy a heat pump oven and stovetop. Would really like to install one.
Incorrect, no connection to outdoors is required for these appliances. In the case of the ventless combo, it literally hooks up to nothing other than the standard washing machine hookup. 1 normal 15 amp power outlet, 1 hot water hose, 1 cold water hose, 1 drain hose. No dryer vents, no other tubes or hoses, no drilling or cutting, no changes at all required. It is literally a drop-in replacement for any washer, but it also dries, with a heat pump, powered from the same circuit the washer uses and the same drain the washer uses.
Also, let me blow your mind a little bit: theoretically, the cold water main running to your house contains enough heat energy to completely heat your house all winter on its own. It is cold to us, but thermodynamically it’s a goldmine and you have an extremely generous supply of it. Water represents an enormous reservoir of heat, and you can play some really fun games with latent heat of evaporation and condensation (which is exactly how heat pumps work in the first place). Dehumidifiers add as much or more heat to a room than a space heater does, using a fraction of the electrical power. That’s the power of the heat contained in water. I’m not saying that a heat pump dryer is doing this with your water supply, simply pointing out that once water is in play, it becomes way more of a complex issue than performance figures on paper actually represent.
Obviously, clean drinkable water is also a scarce resource, so using it directly for any form of heating would be wasteful in its own way, but the point is that it would be technically possible. Including water in the discussion adds a lot of really interesting possibilities to the way we manage heat and energy, and we will eventually need to start understanding how much heat we literally throw away down the drain and how wasteful that actually is. And in the process we’ll learn to save some money and maybe even make our lives a bit more convenient.
Are you Alec from Tech. Connections?
Unfortunately not, but I am proud to be compared to him.
I can definitely read your comment in his voice, particularly the “also, let me blow your mind a little bit” part.
Heat pumps absolutely do not need to connect indoors and outdoors, every fridge and freezer is just a heat pump connected to a box.
Ive had a ventless heat pump clothes dryer, about 5 years ago, maybe 6. Technically it made the room it was in slightly colder while it ran, but that heat from my house was just concentrated inside the box and then allowed to escape back into my house.
I also think there have been advances in heat pump technology either with the refrigerant used to transfer the heat or with cascading systems that run multiple loops with different heat capacity so that one loop takes room temp water to “warm” temps and a secondary loop takes the “warm” water to hot.
I think they mean appliances that don’t necessarily heat an area but heat is a function of their purpose.
In the example given, a combo washer dryer, it is not necessary to have a link to the outside it merely uses the ambient air as it’s source of heat, The same is also common among heat pump water heaters.
What brand is it? I want a heat pump dryer, but I don’t like “smart” stuff.
GE Profile PFQ97HSPVDS. Not a sponsor, and not even a recommendation. It feels icky even admitting it. The only reason I am mentioning it at all is because I did manage to get it to (eventually) stop aggravating me about installing the app and connecting it to wifi and now it just works without annoyance as it should have from day one, and I recognize the possibility of having access to that feature alone may be valuable to someone. I can’t guarantee the one you buy now will even act the same way, as these things can be and are updated without notice.
I found some third-party home assistant stuff for GE smart home products on github if that’s important to you, but I haven’t even tested it for this as it still involves the appliance phoning home and everything is still gatekept through GE’s website and like I said I refuse to ever let this thing touch any form of internet connection or wireless.
For maintainability heat pump dryers are shit though. You can’t take the heat pump condenser out and thus you cannot properly clean it 😐. If you get lint stuck in there it starts reeking. The old condensers you could just take out and rinse.
There is a nonprofit org called Open Source Ecology that is aiming to create what they call the “Global Village Construction Set”, a collection of basic industrial machines required for modern living, designed in a way where everything can be built DIY by a single community (Including modular generators). I imagine that they have a plans for home appliances, I think as of now they’re still working on construction equipment.
Love the concept but doesn’t seem to have many plans.
It does seem to have fizzled out a bit, sadly. They need to collaborate with other established groups doing similar things, IMO.
That’s so cool. Yeah I’ve been thinking a great design strategy would be to build exclusively out of commonly accessible parts. Like, even repurpouse car parts if they’re more accessible, or use arduinos as the microcontrollers.
I thought about this too. People are sick of this shit.
Maybe not only just work for 15+ years. But allow parts to be purchased and easy manuals to read for at home repairs.
It’s now required by law in Europe that spare parts needs to be available for at least 10 years.
That’s been a law in the US for cars for ages.
This specifically makes me so much more likely to buy a product.
seriously, being able to fix the washer/dryer ourselves has saved us so much money
I’d go even further and say, release documentation that shows how to DIY new parts from scrap you got laying around or can find in construction debris and junkyards.
Just Uncomplicated Socialist Tech
This often actually exists still, but those companies dont do big marketing and their products will cost 3x that of a “normal” one.
For groceries, Hofer (Aldi Süd) kinda does that where i live. They sell very basic, barely-processed food from no-name brands. Stuff typically costs about half (or at least it feels like it to me) of what you’d spend in other supermarkets, where they sell highly-processed foods (think fast food and such).
As I’ve heard it:
- Bosch makes the best dishwashers
- Speed Queen makes the best laundry machines
- Asko
and Mielemake the best stoves and fridges
And yes, they are all very expensive. But I want to get me a Speed Queen so bad.
Miele is the GOAT. Love our Miele appliances. All of them are now 15 years old and not a single problem. Buying the 10 year warranty was a waste. Buy once, cry once. Only appliances I would consider are Miele and Bosch Benchmark.
Speed Queen IPOd recently. Make of that what you will.
They overdosed on Internet Protocol‽ /s
For those like me who actually didn’t know: Initial Public Offering. It’s the first time (initial) the company sells shares (offering) on public stock exchanges. Aka: they went public.
I bought a Bosch dishwasher because of this reputation, and I hate it.
The drying function is a joke. Everything plastic comes out with water still all over it. My Maytag (which admittedly died) used to dry everything perfectly.
Also the racks on the Bosch are poorly organized. It’s always a challenge to find places to fit everything.
Not to mention that newer low end Bosch dishwashers require an account and app for some functionality.
High end ones do too if you want to access all of the wash features; they can’t be entirely programmed from the device itself.
Miele was sold to a private equity firm and they’ve been reputation-fracking, so their recent stuff is supposed to be pretty mediocre but priced as if it’s top-end.That’s not true at all.
Do you have a source for that? Their wiki page says that they are still family owned.
I do not - I’ve heard it so many times from so many places that I didn’t bother checking it before repeating it, but it looks like it was wrong.
Damn. I hate to hear that. Guess I’ll scratch them off my list.
Cafe (spinoff from GE) does a pretty good job with stoves. AFAIK they are still pretty well respected.
The brands to stay away from at all costs are LG and Samsung.
The cheapest LG refrigerators that are 2 door freezer on top are pretty well regarded. Their more expensive refrigerators have linear compressors that aren’t a great design to begin with and an even worse design for the refrigerant used in the USA compared to the refrigerant they were designed for in Korea. (As I understand it)
As I posted a little lower down:
If the company has ever made a TV or a cell phone I’m not buying their appliance.
Samsung burned me once….
LG is actually pretty highly regarded for their clothes washers and dryers.
Their refrigerators have been a mess. That makes it hard for me to trust their other appliances.
If the company has ever made a TV or a cell phone I’m not buying their appliance.
Samsung burned me once….
Just get a Speed Queen. Incredibly durable, easy to repair, and surprisingly quiet.
It’s kind of crazy that like heating air is not perfectly mastered in every stove, heating and pumping water in every dishwasher and laundry machine etc. It’s very simple stuff after all.
How fuckin cheap du you have to be to make a non perfect machine 🤷🏻♀️?!
For stoves, the thing that breaks is the control board. Hot + electronics is bad.
An induction stove avoids most of that problem because the hot happens in the pot and not inside the stove.
But I agree, there’s not much reason a stove can’t last 50 years. In fact, my parents have a 50 year old resistive stove that still works.
Washers have the most to go wrong of things you listed.
Is Asko stil good? Owned by Gorenje since 2010
Got links?
Anything made for commercial kitchens.
Also second hand lab equipment. I was tired of my kitchen scale breaking and having annoying features like auto off after like 60 seconds. Got an ohaus lab scale off eBay for like $50, handles 18lbs, has a configuration menu with tons of options and features like count mode, sequential weight summing, and lets you set auto off for up to 30 minutes or completely disable auto off. Takes regular AAs or plugs into an outlet. I love it and it’s built like a tank.
Man, having worked in a couple research labs in a previous life, there’s no way I’d use a used lab scale for food. Especially when $50 will actually get you a pretty decent scale that has not been potentially used for weighing everything from diseased mice to stool samples to unidentified precipitates from a failed chemical reaction.
Since you’re here to type this, it was probably not used for anything too nasty, but I do not endorse that as a way to save a few bucks!
Idk worrying about a lab leak type pathogen scenario through an ebay sale seems far fetched to me. I picked one that looked lightly used and clean and wiped it down with disinfectant when I got it. The chance of a pathogen surviving that long doesn’t sound like a realistic concern. Most things it plausibly would have been exposed to, save for like highly radioactive dust getting lodged in its crevices, is easily handled with basic sanitation and hand washing. And it’s not like I’m putting food on the surface anyways.
Only thing I would be scared of is ethidium bromide on your food, but that probably wouldn’t be measured on a kg scale.
Yeah I think if I was gonna start using used lab equipment, a new autoclave would be my first purchase.
Salmonella recall? Nah, I’ve got a kitchen autoclave, I’ll be fine
In general anything made for businesses. They might be fine with us having stuff that doesn’t work, but businesses still need things that work to produce things that don’t.
Speed queen is one for washers and dryers
$1700 for a seven-year warranty. How much you want to bet it’s specifically engineered to last no more than eight years?
The water heater that came with my house I bought in '98 lasted 20 years. I replaced it with the best I could afford at the time, which had a seven-year warranty. It lasted just over seven years. I replaced that one a couple of months ago with the longest warranty one I could find, which is twelve years. I know I’ll be replacing it in twelve years.
The water heater that came with my house I bought in '98 lasted 20 years.
And by the time you got rid of it it was criminally inefficient.
One thing to note is that planned obsolescence for machines is not something that is easy to do to the level that you’re describing it.
Even if they use substandard materials at specific junctures with an estimated wearout time limit, there’s always the chance that a manufacturing flaw can increase the time between breakdowns
I think a good follow-up plan would be something more like finding the parts that break down and then digitizing them and then contracting with a service like JLCPCB to manufacture those individual parts on demand.
You could probably start a fairly successful company on just that if you had the time and energy to get the whole process rolling.
A combination of a SLS 3D printer to make the parts out of metal, or, you know, really high-quality 3D printer to make them out of nylon or whatever plastic is necessary, and getting the appropriate springs and levers and bearings and everything to fill in the gaps, you probably could make a nice side business for yourself just custom making the parts that break down the most often for appliances.
Anything that’s sold in Canada? I’m in the market for a new washer after my last two died on the 2 year mark.
No warranty? If you bought with a credit card they usually have a warranty extension feature and will extend the manufacturer’s warranty for you.
The first one was 2 weeks outside of warranty, the second one we’re currently waiting on the manufacturer and their mechanic. It’s a whole thing but it’s looking like it might be a refund at this point since it’s taking so long for them to even come look at it.
The first one wasn’t repaired because the part was back-ordered and by the time we repaired it it wouldve ended up costing the same as a new one.
Speed queen washing machine
If it’ll run in a Laundromat for 30 years… it’ll run in your home.
My cousin had a coin operated speed queen washer when I briefly lived with her. The laundromat was getting rid of it not due to functioning, but because it would cost too much to retrofit it to use credit or bills, when it was already quite old.
You could use coins to make it work, but the panel was missing and you’d just stick your hand in and flip the switch. Always felt like you’d electrocute yourself.
Sucker ran great and she was doing 2 loads a day minimum (clearly no understanding of birth control, but she got her tubes tied after the 6th kid came out, so…)
She got it for far less than the price of a new bare-bones machine, so that could be a great option for anyone who may want one!
Speed Queen for washer / dryer.
Vzug. Sadly only 2 year warranty
Yeah I was gonna say you can do this today by looking for the company that only makes whatever it is you’re trying to buy and costs double what you expect to spend on it based on the competition.
If you want something that lasts, you generally need to pay for it.
(Though if you get the opportunity, ask someone who repairs the thing you’re trying to buy what the best brand is, they’re the people that know)
Yup, the whole, “They don’t make things the way they used to,” thing is part survivorship bias, and part people not understanding that appliances used to be very major purchases.
If you spent the equivalent of what they cost back then, you’ll get an appliance that lasts decades.
Adding to this: just call around to different repair shops for the product you’re shopping for and ask them. Not only might you get some great advice, but you’ll also get an idea of who to call when you do need their services. How they respond when they know you’re not spending any money is a pretty good indicator of their true customer service.
Until private equity gets their grubby paws on the company.
Make that shit a self-funded slow growing cooperative.
Or at the very least steward ownership
