Built to last
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My apartment is furnished with slightly older appliances for laundry. They rattle the floors. I know when the downstairs neighbor is doing laundry etc. They are so ugly and yet so reliable.
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That's because Whirlpool bought up all of the competition. Whirlpool, Kenmore, Maytag, Amana, JenAir, Roper, Kitchenaid etc are all the same company and the competition they didn't buy has less incentive to produce much better units because now they have to compete with cheaper built machines.
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That is very nice of you, looking up the numbers stating exactly what i said. thanks.
No. I am saying that these well made appliances are just as affordable today as they were back then, but most people want the cheaply made alternatives, and manufactured goods were generally less affordable back then than they are now. People generally just had less stuff in the past, and paid more for it. You simply couldn't buy a new washer for the same fraction of your income as the cheap ones today. A lot of things are worse for us economically than for our parents but this simply isn't one of them.
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This is some bullshit. You can go to Home Depot or Lowe's right now and get yourself a pretty decent washing machine for $600 that will last you a decade.
The only people who end up in the situation like OP are the people who buy overly cheap products or overly gimmicky products, and then wonder why they don't work as well as the standard products. If you buy a $150 washing machine from AliExpress or buy a washing machine that requires wifi, then don't be surprised if they stopped working not too long after you bought them.
One of these days I hope to eventually own a home. When I do, I want to buy one of the industrial-ass washing machines and dryers they use in laundromat and hotels. I'm sure it will be very expensive, but I firmly believe in "buy once, cry once". I want a laundry machine that is built to run 24/7 for 10+ years. Used at a personal pace, it should last forever.
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I'm not sure Miele is struggling that much, was a few years ago now but I remember a sales rep telling me the story of the annoyed German executive who "was unhappy" with a division of Miele as they had run out of room and had to "off shore" a factory to keep up with demand. The new factory was in Austria.
I am a huge advocate for them, back when I sold white goods and small appliances they often had really solid products and they maintained their "prestige brand" status by testing their products to an extent I haven't seen many other brands bragging about.
Usually we sold to new customers on word of mouth from existing, and existing customers who wanted to scale up or down as family requirements changed.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Well, these predetermined breaking points can be found in all appliances. However, this is nothing new. The current problems at Miele are for other reasons. For example, pushing prices down as far as possible during production.
Wave of layoffs
It is questionable to what extent the wave of redundancies will take place
Well
as many have already left as a result.
Another reason...
After Germany had managed to turn "Made in Germany" into something positive, things went downhill again. Since many work steps are carried out in China or elsewhere and only the final work steps are carried out in Germany... Just enough to allow the label to be used legally.
Our legislators should have done more. Why should you pay more for alleged German quality when most of it is not German quality? -
…which is why we shouldn’t be using WiFi for IoT devices when we have Zigbee and Z-Wave. I’ll never know why they’ll insist on using the more expensive and always changing WiFi standard.
This is 1st time hearing about ZigBee and Z-wave. How would they work with existing electronics?
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This is not the case. Washers used to be more expensive as a proportion of median income back then. According to this page a new Kenmore washer cost $289 in 1980. The median family income in 1980 was $21,023, so a new washer would cost 1.37% of a family's annual income. Compare to now, where the median household income is $83,150. As a proportion of median income, a $289 washer in 1980 would cost about $1500 today, which is about what a durable, well made washer with a 7 year warranty costs. Manufactured goods were largely more expensive compared to wages in the past.
Median income isnt the whole story as rent, transportation, medical, and other costs have increased at a greater rate so people dont have the money to buy the 1500 dollar washing machine.
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Well, these predetermined breaking points can be found in all appliances. However, this is nothing new. The current problems at Miele are for other reasons. For example, pushing prices down as far as possible during production.
Wave of layoffs
It is questionable to what extent the wave of redundancies will take place
Well
as many have already left as a result.
Another reason...
After Germany had managed to turn "Made in Germany" into something positive, things went downhill again. Since many work steps are carried out in China or elsewhere and only the final work steps are carried out in Germany... Just enough to allow the label to be used legally.
Our legislators should have done more. Why should you pay more for alleged German quality when most of it is not German quality?Huh, the more you know. It was some time back that I was selling them, a depressingly long time ago now I guess. It's a shame they have bowed to economic circumstances, the article I just read (which was translated so nuance may have been lost) makes it sound like they fell into the pandemic trap of scaling to meet demand during an unforseen boom and then couldn't justify the size and scope of the workforce once that demand rationalised.
My family recently purchased a Bosch front load washing machine (autodose 1 button operation and teenagers is a match made in heaven) and they have 3 series available, 2 are manufactured in China, the other is manufactured in Spain. I had several retailers tell me to steer clear of the Spanish product, it carried a higher price tag than the Chinese lines and had a higher fault and return rate. We have been happy with ours so far but time will tell.
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I have a 7-year old fridge from them, bought discounted at the appliance outlet because of damaged packaging, it's still like new and sips electricity. It's a basic model, brushed stainless, no displays or anything.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Interesting, I heard plenty of horror stories about their fridges being low quality.
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Huh, the more you know. It was some time back that I was selling them, a depressingly long time ago now I guess. It's a shame they have bowed to economic circumstances, the article I just read (which was translated so nuance may have been lost) makes it sound like they fell into the pandemic trap of scaling to meet demand during an unforseen boom and then couldn't justify the size and scope of the workforce once that demand rationalised.
My family recently purchased a Bosch front load washing machine (autodose 1 button operation and teenagers is a match made in heaven) and they have 3 series available, 2 are manufactured in China, the other is manufactured in Spain. I had several retailers tell me to steer clear of the Spanish product, it carried a higher price tag than the Chinese lines and had a higher fault and return rate. We have been happy with ours so far but time will tell.
One way or another, the pandemic has put a lot of things in extreme disarray here and politicians are helping to destroy our industry because lobbying and their own pockets full of money are more important... the pandemic in particular has revealed the worst corruption among our politicians. Von der Leyen... the same at European level and now is the time when she has to face up. But it will come to nothing otherwise she wouldn't have been re-elected...
As far as quality is concerned... Well, the West (not just Germany) has outsourced a lot to China. Many people still make fun of the fact that the Chinese only copy and produce poor quality. But that has not been the case for a long time. They have left the West behind in many areas (even if there is still a lot of crap from China, of course).
You can't keep up with China, especially when it comes to prices.
But well, you can get very good or better quality from China. -
- they are often "cheaper" then what you would have paid in the 80s and they are built to that price
- they are more efficient, which means every thing has tighter tolerances and thus more likely to break
- they are more complicated due to the above which means more to break
- with the above efficiently they use way less water but in my experience that means they clean worse
And also planned obsolescence
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One of these days I hope to eventually own a home. When I do, I want to buy one of the industrial-ass washing machines and dryers they use in laundromat and hotels. I'm sure it will be very expensive, but I firmly believe in "buy once, cry once". I want a laundry machine that is built to run 24/7 for 10+ years. Used at a personal pace, it should last forever.
Monkey's paw: It is made to run 24/7 for 10 years, but you run it every 3 days, which makes it degrade faster.
For real now, probably not like that, but found it funny. Anyone knows how the phenomenon is called?
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That's because Whirlpool bought up all of the competition. Whirlpool, Kenmore, Maytag, Amana, JenAir, Roper, Kitchenaid etc are all the same company and the competition they didn't buy has less incentive to produce much better units because now they have to compete with cheaper built machines.
They didn't buy up Bosch (to my knowledge) but maybe they're not in the us?
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One of these days I hope to eventually own a home. When I do, I want to buy one of the industrial-ass washing machines and dryers they use in laundromat and hotels. I'm sure it will be very expensive, but I firmly believe in "buy once, cry once". I want a laundry machine that is built to run 24/7 for 10+ years. Used at a personal pace, it should last forever.
I'd just buy a good solid brand, a hotel one might also not have the few programs/temperature you'll need but blast everything at 60° or 90°.
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The old order Amish are still using the 1940s Maytag wringer washers. They convert them to gas engines and run the exhaust outside.
Here in Europe we use thousand year old slaves to do ours.
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This is some bullshit. You can go to Home Depot or Lowe's right now and get yourself a pretty decent washing machine for $600 that will last you a decade.
The only people who end up in the situation like OP are the people who buy overly cheap products or overly gimmicky products, and then wonder why they don't work as well as the standard products. If you buy a $150 washing machine from AliExpress or buy a washing machine that requires wifi, then don't be surprised if they stopped working not too long after you bought them.
Damn. So if you have money, you get decent products. Thanks for the great reminder.
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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.
Wifi is there to avoid pressing the capacitive buttons.
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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.
there are calculations and tables on exactly this, when a machine is to be replaced. Including production and shipment of a new one etc., some should be replaced. Look it up!
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The problem is it is rarely an easy proposition to just "pay more and get a better product" especially when it comes to home appliances.
In most big box stores every option will be shit. Companies know that there are consumers at every price point and so they have a product for every price print.
The problem is the expensive isn't really better, it's the same fridge with the same compressor as a cheap one except it has a wifi dongle or a tablet in the door.
Of course there are the Vikings and Thermidors and whatever but those are Velben goods that priced so high that you could get 5 to 10 of the cheap options for the price of one.
Yeah you have to do research but thankfully we also live in a time when most people have high power computers connected to the Internet on their person at all times. You can buy a cheaply made expensive wi-fi enabled "smart" appliance that costs even more than a well built "dumb" appliance and will fail incredibly fast because of all the computerized parts. You just have to do some research.
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Most of this can be achieved in other ways (like a smart plug measuring the current draw
Idk about other people, but this is actually harder than you'd think. I've got zigbee and zwave hubs in my house for my home automation system, but there's really not anything that uses those technologies and has the screwy power plug my washer has. I grabbed some inducement sensors (I think that's what they're called), but I can't use them near my washer since they have to be hooked to the line to have a reference and my washer is too far away from my fuse box.
In the USA I use a Zooz Zen15 on the power plug for my heat pump dryer (120v). This works very well to notify my Alexa system that the dryer cycle is complete, and turns the dryer off. The Zooz is a zwave device connected to an Aeotec zwave hub.
