The worst offenders aren't large appliances, it's the cheap crap. If a store sells me an electric toothbrush for $79 and it breaks after a month shouln't just be required to replace it, it has to be worse than that to make products where even 1/1000 fail. And the result of such action would be that electric tooth brushes soon cost $200 instead of $79. But that's a good thing.
When I browse appliances or electronics, I want to know the lifespan. Not just the warranty. I want to know how long people actually use this particular product. And it can't just be based on some Amazon review system, it needs to be reliable and cover every seller. Like car mileage I need to have a decent idea about what to expect. And even if just 10% of product have this rating - that's also a good thing. It would mean less churn because manufacturers would be reluctant to replace an officially labeled product with a new one.
So we'd have longer lasting, rarely replaced models, more expensive products. Which is what we need.
At $70 per hour it doesn't take long for repair to become more expensive than a new item.
There's several of them, but it really depends on the value of the device more than the cost. A lot of what Northridgefix repairs is valuable for the data being recovered more than anything, where the value proposition isn't clear. That said, if someone's paid $2000 for a GPU, I can understand their willingness to pay $300 to get someone to painstakingly microsolder some components back on.
An approach for this is to switch from owning to renting.
Say you rent your washing machine for 1000 runs.
Consequence then is that you have predictable cost per run and since the vendor is responsible for maintenance and deposition, thus they have an interest in making the machine repairable and recyclable.
Problem is then you'll have to pay a premium for people who are careless with their appliances, or just use them 10x as much as you etc.
And of course this allows the lender to make profit margin as well. So as a consumer, I end up paying more.
But still, for many appliances and devices which I am not an expert in repairing, I'd be OK with this deal.
Many tenants here do this already with the lender being their landlord.
I knowingly pay a premium to use a simple bike with this model:
(they're pretty successful here in Europe / NL and germany at least)
I know that the price for this exceeds a good used bike after a year or two at most.
But it often took me months to getting around to fixing my bike, I'm not very good at it, and professional bike repair is also expensive and takes me time.
Renting the bike is still more expensive, but it allows me to have a working bike without hassle; and if something breaks it takes a maximum of a workday or two to have it fixed or get a replacement.
It covers anything that's not a wear-item breaking due to normal use. The shop who sold it has the burden of proof in case they want to claim it's been exposed to non-normal usage.
The shop has the right to try to repair the damage, but after two times (for the same issue), you have the right to get your money back.
Now surviving 5 years doesn't mean the thing will last 20. But it should at least keep the crap away.
And I have no clue about what dishwasher is crap or not, and they do.
I wonder what amount of years would be good for an absolute guarantee. Maybe something like 10 years and then 5 years of some limited sort?
The guarantee probably need some odometer limit though to prevent commercial or multi housing usage on the long guarantee.
One can also look at past judgements.
So far, the logic is that an expensive fridge should last 10 to 20 years. Same for other appliances. And if companies give the run-around, those costs are added to judgement costs too.
These laws, such as Norway's and this one in Quebec, are vital. And to anyone saying they care about the environment, creating a massive appliance like this, and then making it purposefully bork early to kick a replacement, is absurd. The environmental cost of production, shipping, and then trashing such an appliance is silly, just to pad the pocket book.
Note: I'm the first to say profit = awesome. Let the market decide. But LG (for example) is famous for having a compressor issue with fridges, to the extent that there have been class action lawsuits against them. And on top of that, having an inability to get any parts... so people cannot even get fridges fixed! Replacing fridges every 2 years (an example) instead of once a decade is probably incredibly bad for the environment... for no valid reason!
From:
https://www.opc.gouv.qc.ca/en/consumer/good-service/goods/ap...
What is a “reasonable lifetime”?
The reasonable lifetime warranty provides that an appliance must serve for normal use for a reasonable period of time. However, the law does not specify, for example, that a stove must have a lifetime of 10 years. Why? Because several factors, such as the price paid, the contract, and the conditions of use, must be taken into account to determine the reasonable lifetime of the item. Thus, a $700 stove cannot be expected to last as long as another one with the same features, but that costs $1,500.
Also, add to the above another bit of logic I've heard. If you buy a clothes washer, and use it 3x every single day, obviously that might fall into "non-consumer use" or "excessive use", thus shortening the above "reasonable lifetime". Meanwhile, if you're a bachelor that uses the washer once a week, the inverse is true! It should last longer.
We have 6 years in the UK but only in the first 6 months is a defect assumed to be a manufacturing defect, which is naturally the period with your strongest rights and when it’s easy to get a repair or replacement. After that, you need to argue quite a lot
For example if a mobile phone stops working they can't just take a look and say "oh water damage", they have to open it up and show the water stains or similar.
If a few larger markets would start having similar laws, it'd essentially fix the problem for the rest of us. I imagine currently Norway is small enough that manufacturers can just keep making crap and eat the cost of Norwegian returns.
The "buy-it-for-life" brands ran into this problem because once you sell someone the classic product, they aren't going to sell another one unless it's to another (new) customer or purchased as a gift for someone by their existing loyal customer. So then they start entering into new product areas and eventually end up compromising quality.
As other have mentioned, this is becoming particularly annoying with home appliances and cars. "They don't make them like they used to" are true words.
Appliance manufacturers survived most of the 20th century making reliable products for a smaller global population. On the other hand, it's hard to have never ending quarterly profit growth without planned obsolescence to create extra demand that normally wouldn't exist.
Servicing. High-end appliances seem to last just fine.
I turned off the range with my Cast Iron on it, the cast iron cooled slower than the glass and the glass cracked. Poor design not built for cast iron.
This happened twice.
That meant I got to spend good time chatting with the service tech. He said he’s the last of a dying profession for a few reasons:
1. Nothing is fixed anymore except really old stuff. The things are simply replaced because the cost of fixing is higher than just replacing it with new. This means we’re literally throwing what are effectively new products into the landfill months after being installed. Even the old stuff, they are pushed into suggesting new build because the supply chain for old parts is small and there’s no money in it anymore.
2. There’s no career path for technicians because of 1 so where he used to be training apprentices they are going for other trades.
I specifically did not call them "repair" people BTW since most have lapsed into doing mostly installs...it's not even worth it to repair today's s junk and most people just replace. Cost of parts and labor now can easily exceed replacement cost (by design obviously)
Maybe Speed Queen is the one exception. I've had folks explicitly single out Bosch as a brand people still mistakingly believe is high quality. Follow the supply chain...it all comes out of just a few factories with most parts shared.
There are no longer high quality brands, only high price. High price is usually just for the name or appearance.
Yet reality is more like - completely new markets are opening, new rich people look for quality good brands, or father happy with his knife for 20 years will buy another one for his son. Or Miele, brand completely built on just its perceived reliability. They cost 2-3x more compared to even Bosch/Siemens, without any unique features apart from this.
The problem is, as almost everywhere in corporations - C-suite bonus incentives. Quick milking without care about long term strategies or brand name is the name of the game.
Personally, I really like the Filson brand from the United States, but they also suffered from their core products being too-good, ownership changes eventually to a private equity fund, and ended up being driven into a lifestyle brand with a variety of otherwise unrelated product lines and collaborations (e.g. t-shirts) which often get manufactured overseas with lesser quality of materials and construction.
Another example might include other American "heritage" brands of footwear, such as Red Wings and Wolverine; they still make and sell their heritage products at a premium price but have been driven to use their brand to sell other, lesser quality goods with better profit margins.
Most people don’t, or don’t know how to make their appliances last much longer.
For example the minimum of maintenance for water tanks, or changing air filters more often when your home has AC.
Don't people bring their appliances with them when moving?
Who wants some iFridge/iOven when the equipment made in the 60s was built to survive two zombies apocalypse and one nuclear war and won't connect to the internet for a firmware update.
Also the CIA can't hack your fridge so you get salmonella from your chicken because they have access to your shopping patterns from the super market.
Older appliances may cost more to run but it’s possible they pay themselves off by virtue of not having to re-buy them every few years.
Speculation, of course. I wonder if anyone’s done the math on this.
- energy loss in resource extraction and refinement (steel, aluminum, plastic, etc, etc)
- manufacturing energy use
- shipping energy use
- disposal energy costs of old device (including recycling costs)
- all the pollution in the above, versus pollution from local energy sources
It's entirely possible that an energy efficient fridge that lasts 2 years, could cost more energy than a fridge from the 60s that keeps on running.
So outside of "cash cost" even the energy cost may be higher!
Of course, this was almost a decade ago, so the numbers might have changed; and a newer device would have an automatic defroster.
Not sure you can buy one like anymore.
Most of my appliances were bought recently, none has anything like this.
He has mentioned that they have software that can calculate the average lifespan of the finished product by entering the different components that goes into the product (like this piece has this amount of iron, this amount of tin, etc).
Based upon this the software can calculate the lifespan very precisely and determine if they have made it "too good". If it's too good the quality is decreased on purpose in order to reduce the lifespan such that people will buy more. Other testing goes into the equation as well, but enough data has been collected over the years that it can be calculated/simulated.
The original one had what looked like a custom/in house engineered motor with a solid structure and beefy battery. The new one had those cheap toy motors that cost a few pennies each along with a flimsy frame and tiny battery to match.
Put some thread lock on it and it’s been totally fine since, but that seems like it’s intentionally planned to fail. Good job, Philips.
So, unless she is lying, there is actually no story?
My father was a tool maker (top of his profession, top shop at Molex for a time). He and everyone he knew had such pride in their work. They also knew who would use their products. They cared about the quality and worked hard to deliver. It was a personal pride thing, as much as anything else.
When you export manufacturing, people don’t know who they’re building for. Nor does near slave labor in some places create quality.
Not to mention, companies are trying to maximize profit. To contrast, the owner of molex at one point heard my dad needed a surgery. He came down on the shop floor, called him over and sent my dad (and our family) to the Mayo Clinic for 2 weeks to have the surgery done (all expenses paid). It wasn’t for profit, it was for a good business.
In a way you can think of PO as a sort of subscription. If my AirPods last 3 years on average they cost me around $25 per year to own.
I don't know how often this happens in Western mega corporations (which is probably why you're surprised).
And you obviously haven't been to Japan. Yes, long hours, but your employer takes care of most aspects of your life. Healthcare, apartment, marriage, your kids education, everything. See this article by patio11: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...
In the non-crappy businesses in India other people — coworkers, bosses, etc — taking care of you is routine. And — okay this is a terrible example — in the unfortunate situation that somebody dies, for instance, trust me, random people just help the family with funeral and stuff like that.
What I'm trying to say is this: the rest of the world isn't filled with morons and cattle.
Oh and by the way, across the world people want quality products. Even people from — gasp — the global South. We too want our fridges and washing machines and TVs and cars and everything else to last forever.
However, I think you missed part of what I was saying, which patio11 actually touches on.
The west, particularly America, is individualistic & meritocratic. This leads to a lot of self-interest & overall refines the system as a whole. It'll also spur competition in a free-market, as people leave to start competitors. Etc. This is in contrast to "salary men" in Japan.
When you have globalization, you have:
(1) The cheapest possible workforce will be used and will drive out competitors who have higher expenses (the west does)
(2) Those goods are then exported and corners can be cut because there's little direct risk.
(3) The companies themselves have no employees where they're selling their goods, so there's little feedback (besides profit) to employers.
(4) Innovation & competition is dramatically reduced. To compete you effective need a very cheap workforce & sell below the larger players (who already have scale).
The ultimate result ends up being, poorer & cheaper quality products, made by people who don't use the products. This actually increases the profit margin to corporations. Yet, it's ultimately a race to the bottom at that point. Anyone who attempts to produce a higher quality product has to be significantly more expensive, and often fails in the market. It's why most "high quality" brands have slowly been bought out by the more profitable (low cost) players, then their brand names are used like a skin suit (as their quality decreases).
On the LG side, I feel like the quality has really gone downhill over the years. I had a GE washer which gave me 13 years of life -- not bad for $400. I replaced it with an LG now and already regretting it -- complicated controls which seem somewhat redundant, more electronics instead of just knobs to turn.
Also bought an LG microwave. Kept blowing my circuit (and yes, it was rated for 15A and I have 20A circuits). Replaced with smaller model, still Chinese garbage, but less complicated. It's worked perfectly.
When I was a kid, "Made in Japan" was code for cheap junk. Until Japanese products whomped entire sectors of US employment.
I recently bought the Gaggia Classic Pro coffee machine for this very reason. You can get into and fix anything in this machine in under 5 minutes.
I can buy a lot of $20 sale price black and decker coffee pots for the $500 that repairable one costs though. There should be a sweet spot between junk and bougie high end stuff.
Labor used to be relatively more abundant compared to capital. In these conditions, servicing an older machine makes economic sense.
With capital becoming relatively cheap compared to labor, servicing becomes more expensive. It then becomes cheaper to simply replace an appliance, utilizing efficiencies of scale unlocked on the factory floor though greater automation. Repairmen don’t enjoy the same efficiency gains because diagnosing and repairing an issue is still fundamentally a manual process.
It’s classic greenwashing - a more efficient fridge is obviously better, right? Except they use extremely thin oil so it dies in a few years.
Another interesting narrative is how Segway shut down the production of their scooter because they were so well made that they weren’t selling enough! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23621279
It’s a weird world and I wish I could just have my cake and eat it too.
It’s getting even more ridiculous these days. “Green underlay “ which is just recycled plastic. “Green clothing” oh also recycled plastic.
And then there's Bosch, etc... now, I'd like to buy a Bosch, but my current partner doesn't want to spend the money, she likes buying outlet / second-hand / feeling like she got a deal, which is a problem. But - even the top end consumer Bosch is relatively small and I'm not sure the plastic bits are any more durable. I do like the dual compressor system though.
And then there's dishwashers... oh Maytag, how you've fallen thanks to VC/ PE...
Have you documented any of the builds?
I would be very interested in open-source plans like this, and joining (or helping form) a community around the idea of appliances built to last, or more importantly, using modular standard parts and designed for repair.
https://www.fingers-welt.de/gallerie/eigen/maschine/kaffee2/...
With hilarious quotes like:
> The first test produced the following conclusion: perfect fountain. The valve distributed the coffee perfectly outside the cup, the inside remained completely dry. So a “coffee deflector” had to be installed around the outlet.
> Somehow the thing is starting to look like a construction site compressor... Well... In the meantime I've brewed my first coffee on the moped. Tasted like crap. After some optimizations to the software, the second cup tasted better, but not as much as I thought it would.
> An increase in the pump pressure resulted in the hose bursting from my boiler and I was suddenly standing in a white cloud. GRMPF!
There is a video too.
The drier died after 3 years. Everything else worked by it didn't heat, so, it didn't dry.
I called someone to try to fix it, and they said the heat pump was gone and that they see a lot of that. He advised me to buy one that used the old technology of heating the air through an electric resistance. According to the repairman, those are way more reliable (problem is that, while I can live with the increased energy consumption, they need an external exhaust for the moisture).
What is the difference to the electric one? The process is the same up until the point where the hot air with the moisture passes to some sort of cold condenser to transform it back to liquid state? Doesn't the condenser use a heat pump to cold itself?
Smart toaster ovens may change that equation a bit, both in terms of not burning your toast (due to cameras and various sensors and control systems) and also with even more rapidly accelerated obsolescence as apps and cloud services stop working.
They have been given cancer!
Thank God for American Hpme Warranty, it actually does pay at least two-fold over 5-year worth of its premium costs.
This is not a shill but a testimony of the ridiculous lifespan of dishwasher, refrigerators, stove, garbage disposals, washing machines, dryer, and air conditioner condensor unit.
EDIT: and a water heater. House was built in 1990.
Hah, your experience was very different to mine, then.
Bought a house two years ago, realtor purchased an AHW policy.
I knew the AC was on its last legs from inspection, and no problem, since it was an older 80% old refrigerant system, probably closing on 30 years old. Figured it could wait one summer, in between all the other purchases with a new home.
That year, Seattle decided to have a heat wave. Maybe not much for those in Phoenix, but four days in a row of 105F+. That's still hot.
And it's even hotter when you have no AC, as ours died a couple of hours into day 1.
So I call the HWC. They "are having trouble" finding someone for "emergency service". Their idea of "emergency service" is "we have a company that will be out there in four WEEKS".
So I found someone who could come out that day, for a surcharge. Reasonable. And the AC was dead. But this company were nice - the tech said "no promises, no commitments" and he did some shifty magic and got it running for about six more hours before it was permanently to the graveyard.
So we started getting quotes for a new HVAC system.
Responses from AHW:
- we won't pay if you don't use our suppliers
- we won't pay if you don't choose from our list of models (which were all low end, 80%, 1 stage systems)
- even if you use our supplier, we won't pay above $X. If they quote you higher, the difference is on you.
- if you used another contractor for ANY maintenance work on the existing system, we won't pay
- if the maintenance schedule wasn't followed (whether you owned the system/property at the time), we won't pay
There's a common phrase in each of those statements.
And they came next day, and replaced it in four days.
Sure, it was hot but the Popular Mechanic in me made a couple of makeshift swamp coolers and we could have ride out the entire heat waves using those jerry-rigged contraptions.
Sure, the cartel existed. At the same time, the engineering trade-offs are still there.
The induction stove that boils water in 40 seconds?
This day and age, the knowledge is at our fingertips. But when shopping, we select the appliance with the most futuristic LCD and that plugs into Alexa to notify us that the laundry is done...
Life cycle ownership: Just like handling hazmat in industrial processes is considered the ownership of the entity using the materials, so too should the waste stream resulting from the end of life of the product. Encourage products that are easy to dis-assemble into mostly parts that can be usefully recycled (used by someone else!)
TCO and Right to Repair assistance. All service manuals and instructions should be public domain. Parts with various cryptographic keys and enclaves must also be serviceable by future end users; physical access (and possibly installed jumpers or other easily replaced parts) to reset and enroll in a new security domain must be part of the design. (I would like to see PCs ship with a 'jumper' connected to a physical key position. Enabling that jumper would E.G. allow BIOS updates, including changing the installed / enabled list of allowed signing authorities, including locally provided options. Empower the end user.)
Firmware blobs for the various chips on a product should also be submitted to the copyright office(s) and ownership of the product constitutes a valid license to obtain a new copy of the blob (for programming / replacement of any chips).
This would make most users never update their BIOSes, even for security fixes.
I don't feel this way at all. I don't know how to access information about products that I know to be unbiased. I can certainly find comparison websites and blog posts, some of which I'm sure are unbiased, but it's not clear to be how to reliably ascertain which is which.
Product reviews were never the right place to look, because they don't get published after 10 years of use. But unlike in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, you are one search away from appliance repairman forums that lay it bare.
I confess to not having done this when I first bought my LG appliances, but that's on me. And then when they broke and I called a number of SF Bay Area appliance repair shops and they all said "we don't touch LG", I had an epiphany.
I disagree, there's lots of 'information' at your fingertips, but not knowledge. It's really a ton of work to find well designed and built appliances, that can be repaired etc, but that also have modern efficiency and essential features.
You can no longer necessarily even trust the expensive brand names, as many of them seem to be cashing-in on their, um, cachet, and reputation, and churning out similar junk to the rest of them.
Social coordination problems are solved by coordinated action - 99% of time that is law.
That's the point - only junk fridges would need to be worked on in the first 5 years. I know if a freezer from the 80s and a fridge from the 60s that have never seen a technician in their lives. At this rate, that one from the 60s will probably have a longer lifespan than I will.
I quickly searched HomeDepot.com and see at least 10 LG and 10 Samsung refrigerators without “bells and whistles”.
