Built to last
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I want to start an appliance company that offers 10 year warranties with an additional 5 year replaceable parts availability promise. The designs will be simple, functionality simple with minimal quality of life improvements, and all repair manuals will be published on the website along with tutorial videos, while also banking on building a product that simply lasts longer.
I'm willing to bet that if that is what you advertise on, the longevity of the product at a minimal price, then the company should do fine.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Good luck getting affordable steel or aluminum for manufacturing in this economy. If you do have some investors/capital, though, I would love to apply as an engineer. I think a good selling point would be displaying them in-store with the panel open, or training distributors to open them as demonstration, showing how reliable it is and how easy they are to service.
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I have a ten year old Samsung washer. It started leaking badly a couple years ago. I opened it up and replaced one small rubber tube for $5. If I had to pay someone $500 to fix it, I'd have been better off buying a whole new appliance. I won't be surprised if this is the only repair I have to do for many more years.
I suspect this is actually what's changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it's only a little more than fixing their old one. And when they replace, they tend to think of the old brand as bad, and look for a new brand.
So everyone has negative stories about their appliances across just about every brand, except Speed Queen because those are so expensive, you'll actually pay a repair person to fix it instead of replacing it. It's like how some sports car brands are notoriously high maintenance, but what Ferrari owner cares about maintenance costs?
Decades ago the relative cost of a washer or dryer was much higher compared to repair labor. You'd pay the Maytag man to come fix your dryer if it had a problem.
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We have a Miele we bought 13 years ago and which has far outlived the projected amount of washing cycles. I had to replace the water splitter, but apart from that it's still running fine. I heard that more recent Miele machines don't last as long, though.
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Your appliances and devices will all be enshittified and you will be happy.
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Candy
Buy European and not cheap
Reddit nitpickers have moved over
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I have a ten year old Samsung washer. It started leaking badly a couple years ago. I opened it up and replaced one small rubber tube for $5. If I had to pay someone $500 to fix it, I'd have been better off buying a whole new appliance. I won't be surprised if this is the only repair I have to do for many more years.
I suspect this is actually what's changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it's only a little more than fixing their old one. And when they replace, they tend to think of the old brand as bad, and look for a new brand.
So everyone has negative stories about their appliances across just about every brand, except Speed Queen because those are so expensive, you'll actually pay a repair person to fix it instead of replacing it. It's like how some sports car brands are notoriously high maintenance, but what Ferrari owner cares about maintenance costs?
Decades ago the relative cost of a washer or dryer was much higher compared to repair labor. You'd pay the Maytag man to come fix your dryer if it had a problem.
I suspect this is actually what's changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it's only a little more than fixing their old one.
The guy on an assembly line who places a particular assembly in place and connects the tubes/bolts can perform that task on hundreds of machines in a day. The guy who has to drive to each person's house to replace the exact same part can do maybe 2 a day, assuming he has the right part on hand, and assuming that it's easy to diagnose which part has failed.
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"And for some reason it has Wi-Fi ." will be the last line in humanity's epitaph.
The latest xkcd has one of my favorite hover texts of all time:
It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.
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Your appliances and devices will all be enshittified and you will be happy.
I receive them with joy.
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Yeah being new home owners we didn't know you had to clean them. Just like a bachelor guy saying "why do I need to clean the shower it gamers soapy every day!"
Got us a couple of those tablets and it cleared right up
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I don't know what it is, but those cleaning tablets will cause my machine to suds up so much that bubbles/water start pouring out of the exhaust and all over my floor. One of the first times it happened, all of the bubbles were screwing up a sensor and I couldn't get the machine to work for a week. I thought it was broken, and was just about to buy a new one when I got the idea to try sucking everything dry with a shop vac.
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I don't know what it is, but those cleaning tablets will cause my machine to suds up so much that bubbles/water start pouring out of the exhaust and all over my floor. One of the first times it happened, all of the bubbles were screwing up a sensor and I couldn't get the machine to work for a week. I thought it was broken, and was just about to buy a new one when I got the idea to try sucking everything dry with a shop vac.
Weird, that didn't happen to us, glad you caught it and figured it out though
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You know the funny thing?
You can still buy appliances that last and have good service.
But you don't earn enough to afford them, like your parents did.
Meh. Buy them second hand. Not even joking. As you said, good one last forever. while there's a bit of a logistics difficulty with second hand large appliances, you can also just rent a van for the day and ask a friend for help.
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This has literally been me over the last 3 years. Started making decent money so figured we would replace our old faithful washer and dryer, mostly due to growing family and needing bigger capacity. Fuck Samsung. Washer shit out 2 months outside warranty, and would have cost the price of the washer to fix it. The 'auto balancing system' is fucking bullshit. I don't care if my washer bounces around because the load is unbalanced. My parents' washer could be as unbalanced as shit and didn't matter because the whole bin had supports to the frame of the washer. Was it loud if it was an unbalanced load? Fuck yeah. But you could simply rebalance yourself, and continue if you really wanted to. Not necessary though. It would finish washing if it had power, and no force could stop it.
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Your parents washing machine also cost more because it was made better. The best price I could find for a standard washing machine in 1980 was $289. To put that into perspective, according to CPI inflation that is the equivalent of about $1,100 today. As a proportion of median individual income, that's like $1,550 today. You can still buy a Speed Queen washer for consumers that costs $1,500 and will last a long time, but people largely don't because the shitty one costs less than half of that.
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We have a Miele we bought 13 years ago and which has far outlived the projected amount of washing cycles. I had to replace the water splitter, but apart from that it's still running fine. I heard that more recent Miele machines don't last as long, though.
Lol sadly. The long life is a loss business. People only buy a new one as soon as the old one is scrap. Once the market is served, the problem of longevity arises and therefore no revenue. That's why a lot of money has been invested in predetermined breaking points, which are usually designed for shortly after the warranty. (A lot of money, because it has to be achieved by material weakness or something else that cannot be proven. ) This means that there are always customers and therefore revenue. It's stupid but unfortunately it has to be that way. In many other areas too.
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Buy European: Miele, Rex Electrolux, Beko (Turkish, don't get into that), Smeg, Candy, AEG, etc...
Don't want to jinx it, but my Electrolux washer-dryier is 7 years old and still like new, despite being relatively cheap and despite combined machines being more problematic.
My Bosch washing machine is eight years old and works fine.
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More water and energy efficient to run, yes. If you have to replace them every couple of years the resources used to make new ones need to be included too though, and that will have a big impact on the comparison. That said, I have had a modern front load pair for at least 5 years now, no issues.
The newer more efficient machines also give worse washing results.
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Buy European: Miele, Rex Electrolux, Beko (Turkish, don't get into that), Smeg, Candy, AEG, etc...
Don't want to jinx it, but my Electrolux washer-dryier is 7 years old and still like new, despite being relatively cheap and despite combined machines being more problematic.
Candy
Haier bought it in 2018
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Similar story for clothes dryers:
My parents' dryer had 2 knobs for temperature and run time, and a start button. Ran forever and dried clothes.
My dryer has like a dozen programmed cycles that rely on a moisture sensor that doesn't work and leaves clothes damp unless you use the manual time & temp settings, which takes several capacitive button presses on a circuit board that is likely to die before any of the actual mechanical components of the dryer. Also for some reason it has Wi-Fi.
I can confirm, I only use the manual time on my dryer because it's the only way to reliably get it dry.
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You can go buy those old washing machines. They're still out there. I got my washer and dryer used for 100 dollars each.
Nothing digital on them, all analog. Fixed a washer overflowing issue by replacing the $20 pressure level switch. Twice I've had to replace the heating element for the dryer, $20 bucks for those. Everything is replaceable with a flat head screwdriver and a youtube video.
Go buy those old washers and dryers.
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They would need to double the costs to accommodate both 2.4GHz and 5Ghz bands if they choose the latter for backwards compatibility with electronics.
âŚwhich is why we shouldnât be using WiFi for IoT devices when we have Zigbee and Z-Wave. Iâll never know why theyâll insist on using the more expensive and always changing WiFi standard.
