Are there any common household items or products that you think are designed incredibly poorly?
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I just replaced my windshield wipers last night and it was a nightmare. The wipers I got are supposed to be universal, which means the little plastic bit that connects to the wiper arms has a bunch of little sub parts that you're supposed to remove based on what wiper arm connection your car uses. Well, considering I'm not well versed in modern wiper arm connection standards, and I'm also stubborn and don't think you should need to dig out your car manual just to change your fucking wipers, coupled with the fact that the instructions that came with the wipers are just 6 wordless diagrams vaguely showing you what bits to remove based on which esoteric wiper style your car uses, I struggled with those sons of bitches for like 20 minutes in below freezing weather.
Wordless instructions make the world a more equitable place by making everyone equally frustrated
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Everyone seems to have a cup plunger for sinksnext to their toilet instead of a toilet plunger near their toilet.
A toilet plunger has flanges:
I have seen this plunger close to zero times when visiting people and using their bathroom.
For the topic of the thread I'll throw in "toilets that are so bad at flushing that you need to keep a plunger next to them"
The only time I've owned a plunger was in a house with a broken clay sewer pipe that was about to kick the bucket.
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Sheets? For the washing machine? Wouldn't those require a plastic shell or base like the laundry pods do?
Nah, they have the texture of fruit leather and completely dissolve in water. A few brands make them like Seventh Generation, Earth Breeze and Ecos
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I have one of those...in my bathroom and I really don't care for it. It turns itself inside out when you use it.
Do you have a multi use one? Some can invert the flanges into itself to become sink plungers.
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Space consideration is a bit more obvious with the seat though
I just measured my usual toilet and while the hole is more squarish than the round one in the picture, the 16.5 length is about right. I don't have any problem. I've got average sized junk, and have maybe a slender to medium build.
Maybe weight, whether one is a 'shower' vs a 'grower', or some particular anatomical proportion play into it, I don't know. Maybe how far back one sits is key. Maybe people vary in their butthole to junk measurement. But I don't think this is as universal a problem as OP thinks. But, hey I'm all in favor of a longer toilet standard for those for whom it is.
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Humidifiers.
It's just a pool of water with a little nebulizer and a fan to blow the mist out a chimney.
Trouble is, they're all made by the fucking plague demon Nurgle with the sole purpose of aerosolizing mold and bacteria by having the tiniest nooks and crannies than cannot be reached to be physically cleaned.
And before I get the "you gotta clean it with vinegar every week" comment, two points:
- You don't soak your hands in soap and rinse them off and call them clean. You gotta scrub them.
- Am I supposed to fill a 5 gallon bucket with vinegar to soak the whole water tank every week? Because the chimney goes right through that bitch.
Don't use a mist humidifier. They suck. Use an evaporative one and add bacteriostat to the water.
Mine is a tub of water with a wick in it. It has a fan that blows air across the wick. That's it.
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Light bulbs! I thought when we moved away from the traditional incandescent the new stuff was supposed to last forever. Why do they die all the time!?
I use the Phillips Hue bulbs and spots and I’m yet to have one die on me. Some of the bulbs has been in use for more than 10 years. However, I see my fair share of other LED spots that dies too soon.
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I'll mention you can get detergent sheets and they work fine. No more messing with powders of liquids for me.
Don’t know what you’re using but the tests of the ones available to me all shows very weak washing performance, some on par with washing only with water.
Explanation is, in short, that there is not enough washing detergent in the sheets.
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Not to be annoying but I actually carry a nice steel thermos with me and pour anything I might drink into the thermos.
It only feels like a hassle the first time. You get a steel thermos with a steel straw and now you're really cooking with gas.
Doesn't work for my tonic i have with gin, as I don't want to be drinking gin the majority of the time. Well, I do want to, I just can't.
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Why not put tooth paste in a jar with a little spoon?
Yah, I want a nice crusty jar of toothpaste with a nasty spoon and then I need a spatula to dig out the last bits vs just squeezing a tube. Just push on the tube with you thumb into the back of the opening and the last bits come out.
Why would it be crusty? Just close the lid, and a wide and short jar is much better than a tube.
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You can get tooth powder in jars.
Wow, did not know about that!
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Keyboards are the obvious one.
The standard keyboard layout is designed to slow down typing, because typing too fast lead to the arms of a typewriter hitting each other.
And why is one of the most accessible large keys fucking Capslock?
And why is there empty space around the cursor keys, so you have to use WASD as a workaround in games?
I'm not even talking about the menu key, Windows key and Copilot key.Recumbent bicycles are better in almost every way
No thanks. Might be nice for some long trips but for my daily use, I need something a little bit more compact and easy to load up with stuff and a kid.
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For example, I'm incredibly confused about how you're supposedly to measure liquid laundry detergent with the cap. At least the kind that I have sits on it's side, so if you measure it with the cap it just leaks everywhere and makes a mess.
Or at my parents house they have a bag of captain crunch berries that has a new design, where instead of zipping along the top of the bag like normal, it has a zipper in the front slightly beneath the top. That way when you poor it you can't see what you're doing cuz the bag is in the way. Like what the heck who's idea was that?
I'm going to go with that horrendous, non-absorbent, 1/8th ply toilet paper that gets stocked in public and office bathrooms.
I'm on Team Bidet now, so it doesn't bother me as much as it once did... but the stuff should not exist.
I'm guessing that one day, the people who buy the stuff will figure out that it they're not winning if it costs one-third the price of normal TP when everyone has to use ten times more of it, but who knows when that day will happen. Because it hasn't happened yet.
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Humidifiers.
It's just a pool of water with a little nebulizer and a fan to blow the mist out a chimney.
Trouble is, they're all made by the fucking plague demon Nurgle with the sole purpose of aerosolizing mold and bacteria by having the tiniest nooks and crannies than cannot be reached to be physically cleaned.
And before I get the "you gotta clean it with vinegar every week" comment, two points:
- You don't soak your hands in soap and rinse them off and call them clean. You gotta scrub them.
- Am I supposed to fill a 5 gallon bucket with vinegar to soak the whole water tank every week? Because the chimney goes right through that bitch.
I've taken to using an old cake pan, a desk fan, and a towel. Fill up the pan with water, stick one end of the towel in the water, drape and clip the other end to the fan and let it sit running for a few days. Before the towel gets gross, toss it in the laundry when it's dry and grab another towel
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I've always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don't need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it's not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I'm seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.
Stove vent hoods that don't actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.
I've frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV's a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It's actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I've ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn't fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn't allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I'm pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It's possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn't)
I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you've ever used.
On the subject of toilets, I can't think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It's probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.
Stove vent hoods that don’t actually vent outside are fucking stupid
Some places you can’t (for whatever reason) install a proper ventilator. Then these with carbon filter will remove some things. But yes, they are far inferior to the full blow vents.
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I'm going to go with that horrendous, non-absorbent, 1/8th ply toilet paper that gets stocked in public and office bathrooms.
I'm on Team Bidet now, so it doesn't bother me as much as it once did... but the stuff should not exist.
I'm guessing that one day, the people who buy the stuff will figure out that it they're not winning if it costs one-third the price of normal TP when everyone has to use ten times more of it, but who knows when that day will happen. Because it hasn't happened yet.
Okay Team Bidet, how are they actually supposed work?
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Uhhhh what?
My gas oven has vents like this. So when it’s actively burning to get it up to temp, that’s where the exhaust comes out.
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Stainless steel ones are the way to go
I prefer wooden pegs with a stainless spring, but plastic has to be pretty much the worst choice.
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I always run into the common problems with my plumbus, no further explanations needed it think.
As a Roman Legionary. I have multiple plumbata, but one plumbus gives me troubles. I i feel like I can relate
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Okay Team Bidet, how are they actually supposed work?
- Spray bum
- Pat dry with TP
The tricky part with phase 1 is managing water pressure. Too little is ineffective. Too much blasts shit everywhere.
Do a test squirt into the bowl so you know what you've got to work with. Start with low pressure to get most of it, adjust angle of necessary, then hit it with everything.
