Real
Real
Real
And it will use as much energy as everything else in the house combined.
I wonder how true that is. Does it come down to effective insulation? I also thought the old refrigerants were more efficient but really bad for the environment. The only other factor is motor/pump.
Compressors are variable and much more efficient. More efficient and variable speed fan motors along with more efficient blade design. Insulation now is drastically better than glass wool of the past. Electronics are able to be integrated in order to provide more fine grain control and overall design has been improved just due to efficiency standards being placed on a bright yellow sticker. In the past design and component choices never really considered efficiency, while efficiency doesn’t always win out it’s a weighted factor and influences the overall engineering and design in ways that just didn’t happen before efficiency regulations came about.
Here's a good article. From 1970-s to 2014 power use of refrigerators decreased by 4 times. My modern European fridge only uses 270kWh per year, which is even further decrease.
You really do not want to still use a fridge from 1970-s.
Edit: changed Wh to kWh.
Remember, friends don't let friends buy Samsung or LG appliances!
(Also, long lasting appliances still exist, you just have to be ready to pay the price, otherwise get something from the Maytag family)
Anything from BSH group is good from what I've heard online from other netisens
Which is
Miel are also good especially for vacuum cleaners
All of this information I remember from reddits buy it for life subreddit which really should have a lemmy version
I second this motion.
For people interested an extensive report by French appliance store after sale service. It gives the reliability of each brand. There is a note for the reliability, ease and cost of repair.
It's only in French unfortunately : https://www.darty.com/achat/services/barometre-sav/barometre.html
Honestly I don't get why Rossman cry so much about "he expected that his $2000> LG TV would not track him or at least have the option turned off by default."
Why shouldn't they? Why would anyone expect in the first place that by buying a more expensive product they are going to care about your data? Obviously it benefits them to sell everyone's data, from Rossman's point of view it sounds like people who buy cheap products deserve to have their data sold because the company is making a loss by selling them the product.
I usually agree with Rossman's points, but this one in particular sounds ridiculous to me.
from Rossman's point of view it sounds like people who buy cheap products deserve to have their data sold
I watched him and it is obvious he is against "You bought from X? Lol, screw you!" mentality.
citing Rossmann?
There's some appliance breakdown vids (idk if Rossman is one of them) but the gist is Samsung and LG like to put cheap plastic parts in high wear locations which inevitably fail.
Fridges are dead simple appliances. A compressor and evaporator coils with a temperature sensor. There's absolutely no reason they shouldn't outlast you and everyone you love.
It's insane these "premium" brands are built to fall like they do.
I like our used Samsung dryer. For basic drying. It has all those other bells and whistles that I don't care about, but it's done well for years. That damn finished drying tune though...with the option to turn it off or...not turn it off. omg
I wish I had friends. It would’ve prevented me from buying the shitty dishwasher that last less than 3 years.
7 years ago I bought a brand new Samsung washer and dryer. After I hooked up everything for the washer (correctly), when I set it to hot water, cold would come out, and vice versa. Had it taken aware and Lowe's replaced it with another brand new one. This time, the two guys who dollied in the firstly one, I had them hook everything up. Exact same thing happened. Hot for cold, cold for hot. These two guys were flabbergasted. They couldn't believe two brand new washers were having the same defect. Same two guys brought another one the next day. Finally, the third one worked correctly.
I haven't had any problems since. But still, ridiculous it took three tries to get a functioning washer.
Moreso, the fridge will stop working in two years cause that is when their subscription cloud service to access your fridge will be updated with firmware that is no longer compatible.
My fridge doesn't have a TPM chip and won't upgrade to FridgeOS 11.
Also the required app will no longer be supported
Sure it will work forever, but it also never really worked right in the first place. Those are definitely the fridges where one section freezes and other areas are almost room temp
People also have survivorship bias with these things. Sure your refrigerator might have lasted forever but quite a few others did not. There is a reason why appliance repair places existed and were much more common than today.
While that is true, items are purposely made unrepairable now. You don’t have right to repair movements because John Deere and Apple devices are so much more complex to repair for common failure points. You have those movements emerging because companies make it extremely difficult in the name of profit or style. With equally skilled (and due to the internet more informed) and capable repair personnel not being able to even partake in the process.
yeah thats because they are made intentionally uneconomical and difficult to repair now
people underestimate how useful and frequently necessary icepicks used to be.
I bet there is a Technology Connections video on this.
If I remember correctly there is.
There is no problem in sticking second compressor wirhout greatly reducing fridge lifespan.
Survivorship bias
Yeah, but can you survive a hydrogen bomb blast in a 1980s fridge? No, you need a 1950s fridge for that.
Thnx Indiana
We called the dog Indiana.
It's the lead lining.
Remember in Australia, if you're persistent enough, you could get this replaced under Australian Consumer Law, if something breaks in an unreasonable amount of time (outside of warranty, even). Considering fridges can easily last for 10 years, anything well within that should be fairly easy (but require many, many emails and threatening to taken them to your local small claims) to get replaced.
That is if you can do without a fridge in the meantime 😅
This is not legal advice.
While consumer laws in the US generally suck, there are a few stores that have amazing return policies and go out of their way to please customers, Costco being one of them.
I know a guy who brought back his 10-year-old broken plasma flatscreen TV without a receipt. They replaced it with a new model, no questions asked.
My TV came with a five year warranty - two year manufacturer, two years Costco, and one year from my Costco credit card.
My washer and dryer got seven. Same deal, but Costco was offering an extra extended warranty plan for free.
The best part is that they design their warranties to run consecutively instead of concurrently. Unfortunately, Citi got rid of the extended warranty with the Costco credit cards about a year and a half ago.
For real, we bought a fridge in November and it is already breaking
Back when my dad bought a new whirlpool fridge, it didn't take long for the LEDs inside to start failing.
Today’s products are built to just barely cross some finish line and not a day longer. It’s bad for you, and bad for the environment.
Samsung fridge had the ice maker stop working 5 times in a span of 2 years. The tray mechanism inside would break so often. I actually started buying replacements from AliExpress and treated it as a consumable product.
Samsung appliances are garbage
I just replaced a Samsung fridge after about 6 years when I bought it new.
Never again will I but Samsung appliances.
This is what they expected you to do
Shout out to our 30 year old Miele washing machine
That will cost you a shit load of energy does it?
In 2016 my parents bought a new microwave oven and gave their old one to me. That new microwave is broken now and the one I got is still operating the same as it did in the 90s.
You probably forgot to pay the monthly subscription of your refrigerator.
I used to rent this tiny little house from an elderly couple a little over a decade ago. It was their first house when they got married in the late 40s and they'd been renting it out since they moved to a bigger house in the 50s. In all that time the refrigerator has been replaced ONCE in like 1968 and that fridge still worked perfectly when I moved out lol
Don't buy the overly fancy fridges: Buy a basic one from a decent company and it will probably last for years.
Decent company = not Samsung or LG
Maytag and its subbrands can actually be fixed and parts are available long term
There's two sides of the spectrum really. Buy cheap but durable or really fork out and buy commercial-grade. Both will require maintenance and yes one costs more to maintain and requires a contractor to install but if done correctly it'll last 20+ years and be consistent. Same applies to other kitchen hardware.
Brands: Sub-Zero, Wolf, Viking, Coldline
These aren't like the overpriced Samsung/LG whatever. They don't have any special wifi/tech. Just rugged industrial motors, lines, and insulation designed to be operated at high use daily.
My refrigerator fridge machine that fridges and refrigerates is from the early 2000s. Still works like a charm.
It even has a square on it that says "OK".
I still have my $120 fridge from like 2010-2011ish back when Sears was a thing and it's still going without any issues. Zero maintenance ever needed thus far.
No ice maker in it, and the freezer part is on top like in the pic. Apparently if the freezer is on the side instead of on top, those break down way more often.
I have a freezer on the top too. It did collect some ants for whatever reason (my house is a literal ant colony at this point) but it still works OK, just like the bottom part (where it says OK).
damn, can't argue with that, OK it is
Zero kelvin? That sensor is broken...
It's not really a temperature sensor, it always says that regardless of how cold you set the fridge (and no, absolute zero is not possible, sorry for ruining the fun).
But, depending on how cold the fridge is, it turns blue, but the bit that says OK stays white.
“…I am also the size of a dorm fridge”
I'll rip you a new ozone hole
But is it AI?
Just bought a brand new shitty fridge, can't wait for it to die next year
I had one that lasted 15 years. In that time it had to be repaired twice, and the rail for the drawers broke out so I had no crispers. It was remarkably expensive.
Last one I got was free so I can't really complain lol but I also have no idea how old it was
Enshittification, also known as the overall tendency of profit to decline.
A fridge is a fridge, the basic mechanical working principle of it didn't change over the past 40 years. But people have a lot more expectations put into what a fridge should be able to do nowadays, and electronics or complex mechanism such as the ice maker is generally the first to break on a modern fridge.
The moral of the story is, don't buy a fridge with an icemaker or have a tablet attached to it, and you should be fine.
I moved into a dated house that came with dated kitchen appliances 70/80s. I've updated the floors under, the water line and gas line to them. Mostly everything around them. I've still kept the appliances. Still work great.
I'll keep my money and the fridge that still does what new fridge does, keeps shit cold. And the stove that does what a new stove dies, make shit hot.
Yeah, growing up we had a harvest gold Frigidaire from the 1970s. It didn't leave us, we left it.
(Don't miss the gallons of ice water in the freezer that had to be defrosted every few months.)
I guess one could make the claim that an automatic defrost system is a luxury, lol
Its not fully the fault of tech companies, yeah there is some planned obselecence. But there won't be anymore "I will outlive you" appliances cause the more mechanical it gets the more cheaper and easier it is to repair and they also tends to have less individual components.
I don't think any of those new smartish watches even from the best of Swizz makers could last like it did 100years ago.
But why? Like what is failing so often in new fridges?
Shitty solder in wiring. Plastic for things that used to be aluminium, aluminium for things that used to be steel.
Just cost cutting by value engineers. I remember reading that the 3rd year of a cars model was probably the best, as they'd worked out the kinks in the design and hadn't watered everything down much... I couldn't back that up if you wanted a source, however
Source: I work in/with electronics manufacturers
Tl; dr - a mix of value engineering and consumer preference. You wanna buy a $3k TV, or a $700 TV? How rock solid does your automatic sprinkler really need to be, compared to a satellite radio in the Sahel?
Per IPC industry standards, there’s three classes of electronic workmanship/quality control used:
We bought our current car used years ago with a similar philosophy - it was the first year of a new change, and they hadn't changed or recalled anything in the few following years. Combine that with a one car owner locally, and it obviously was a good buy at 17 years old running strong.
But I will say even the best car makes, models, and years have their lemons. You have to look hard at each car's history and evidence to really win. We got pretty lucky.
Compressors fail way too often nowadays. The higher priced old ones were built sturdier and if they didn't fail in a year because of a defect they run almost indefinitely.
The idea that they never fail comes from survivorship bias.
All the control boards are always a popular thing to fail. They always cheap out on the components and out the board where it's done get moisture damage.
I see your refrigerator and raise you a freestanding oven. The one with coils.
Survivorship bias
Contemporary appliances actually do fail more often, and earlier, than their predecessors. They have added a bunch of extraneous things to what was a very simple, stalwart, design. These additions have drastically increased the complexity of their designs and created many fold more points of failure than there used to be. It isn't so much that the manufacturing is sloppier, or that the materials aren't as good, though in some ways that is a contributor, just not the main one.
If you by a recently manufactured fridge like the following, you will get a fridge that will last decades if you do the minimum to keep it in good condition. However if you buy one that has an in door ice machine, lcd touch screen, complex lay out that requires the basic mechanical devices, to keep the fridge cool, to have a bunch of extra tubing, wiring, connections, etc. it is much more likely to fail because of all the extra points of failure you added.
Real answer is planned obsolescence.
All of those systems can be maintained and serve for long. Electronics is not the culprit - it can serve for decades easily. Also, most people don't need their fridge or whatever to be extra fancy.
But the producer really wants for their product to die - this forces you to buy another unit, which increases their revenue.
Not only do they want the product to die, they also make it really hard to repair. Not offering spare parts, except through official repair centers which charge so much you might as well buy a new unit. Not providing any kind of documentation or schematics. Using chips with custom firmware you can't download anywhere, so even if you were to replace the hardware, without the software it's useless. Locking off communication/programming ports behind passwords and custom programming software.
This is why right to repair is so important. It isn't just phones, it's all consumer electronics. With proper care, maintenance and repair, a lot of devices could easily double their lifespan. This reduces e-waste and saves consumers money, it's like a win for everyone except for the people trying to sell you new shit.
This is only partially true. Yes we do engineer things to fail at a certain point, but that's only because back in the day we naively assumed that we could engineer things not to fail at all.
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Yes a stator of an electric engine will probably not fail for 100 years, but the seals will - yes the statically stressed metal part will hold until it crumbles to rust, but the dynamically stressed plastic part won't - yes the silicon in an IC-Chip is protected from corrosion, but the connector pins aren't.
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The point I'm trying to make is that there's always a part that will fail before another, there's no way to economicaly engineer around that, today we simply have the data to statistically define a failure point.
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A fridge usually has a 10 year warranty. This isn't even the end of life point. After 10 years it's most likely that 80-90% of devices will still work. This means that if your device survived 10 years it will most likely work for another 5-10 years.
Those things have worser energy efficency and probably contain worser refrigerants
“And I will eat your children”
Only available in harvest yellow, burnt sienna, olive, and white. Upgrade yours with some simulated wood grain accents to match your station wagon for a reasonable price. Don't leave it outside in your vacant lot where kids might play inside. Be nice to the Sears appliance department salesperson. They really want a promotion to the vacuum cleaner department so they can buy their kid a high-fidelity 8-track cassette this Christmas.
I'd keep waxing nostalgic but it will never buff to a nice sheen these days. My parents got a toaster as a wedding gift and it was still in daily use when I went off to college. Appliances nowadays are junk.
How much of that is also survivorship bias. Why is it that if appliances were better back then people ended up buying new ones? Most people tend to only buy new appliances and furniture if the old one breaks regardless if there's a new model. At least that has been my experience with the vast majority of people I've known at more than an acquaintance level. Most people aren't privileged enough to be able to afford new stuff just cause.
Have had mine for going on 10 years now