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O Holy Crap

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Re: O Holy Crap

#281

Post by ejb999 »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #240
carapace wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to have inexpensive refrigerators that use less energy and last many decades. (And when they are superseded by even more efficient models there should be a clear recycle/reuse "exit" for the old appliances. I hear they have laws to that effect over in Germany, something like that. Keeps the old obsolete appliances out of the landfill.)

We have laws like it in Norway too. Old appliances can be taken to the local recycling centre or to any shop that sells appliances of the same general type. All shops that sell electrical goods have to be willing to take back discarded appliances even if they did not sell that specific article or even brand.

taking them back is good, I guess, but if they take them back and then throw them into a landfill, what has been accomplished?

Re: O Holy Crap

#282

Post by bombcar »

thewebcount wrote: post #272
bombcar wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed Queen on the washer will last awhile and parts are plentiful when they do wear out. You can replace the fridge door seal pretty easily, too.

Speed Queen washers are all tiny, though. Our current LG (a company I despise, but had the highest CR rating by far), is something like 5 cubic feet. The Speed Queens were all in the 3 cubic feet range. Depending on family size, amount of bedding, etc., something that small can be a real pain to deal with.

Alliance Laundry is the parent company for speedqueen and they make this too: https://unimac.com/product-type/washer-extractors/

Re: O Holy Crap

#283

Post by spfzero »

Manufacturers in the "old days" weren't necessarily more virtuous, but they were more constrained; by material and process choices. There weren't the options for a part that would reliably work... for three years and then fail. You had to choose from a hand-full of materials that either worked or did not, and if they worked, they likely would work for a long time. If they didn't, you couldn't even sell the thing.

Today there are myriad types of plastics, metal fab processes, treatments, etc. that can be used to build "things". So there are many variables to trade off, and (some) makers will trade off durability and reliability at the drop of a hat for a 0.1% short-term profit advantage. If they even considered those qualities in the initial design.

Re: O Holy Crap

#284

Post by function_seven »

listenallyall wrote: post #252
function_seven wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember asking for a color 13" TV for Christmas back in 1988 I think? For months I would grab the Sunday paper and pull out all the ad inserts looking for the perfect TV. It had to be cheap; I didn't want to ask for anything crazy. I finally found one that was under $200 and showed it to my parents. It was some unknown brand. It wasn't "Cable Ready", and it still had separate tuner knobs for VHF and UHF. I didn't…

> $400 for a 13" TV, in 1988. That's $1,000 in today's money. A 75-inch 4K TV. Those 1980's tvs could display Knight Rider, Miami Vice, The A-Team and Moonlighting natively, without the need for any kind of streaming service.

Another nice feature of that TV was the ability to play the audio from otherwise-restricted... um, "premium" cable channels. Good enough for this 13-year-old. :)

Re: O Holy Crap

#285

Post by bumby »

eternityforest wrote: post #273
bumby wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> glitches are usually "A power cycle fixes it" Maybe I'm becoming a curmudgeon or maybe it's my bias as a former reliability engineer, but the fact that we've normalized this drives me crazy. Imagine your frustration if your car needed to be "power cycled" on a regular basis just to keep it moving forward, yet we've become accustomed to that in our day-to-day interactions with electronics. It's the bane of my existe…

It's definitely not ideal, and I obviously try to do better than that in any product I work on. But I've seen so many things fail due to bad switches, connectors, and other simple parts, to me it's a great tradeoff to occasionally reboot something as opposed to having it totally fail at some random time within a few years. I wouldn't trust my life to it, but I'll trust my watch party to it. Plus, a consumer now only…

We can design hardware to last, but I think we often don’t for economic reasons. My larger point is that using software just trades one well-understood failure mode for a group of unknown, hard to test failure modes, usually because it’s cheaper. I think my biggest complaint comes as a result of the data economy. You can still find “dumb” tvs but they are usually a lot more expensive than their smart variants, I assume because they cannot monetize your viewing habits.

My SO convinced me to get rid of my old laser, USB interface printer. That one always worked but was old. My new WIFI enabled one requires logging into an app to use, and the USB interface maybe works 10% of the time. The app and hardware constantly require power cycling before it works. Many times it never does.

One thing becomes apparent in quality engineering: often, adding more components/interfaces undermines reliability because there are often exponentially more failure modes. It feels like we’re being trained to no longer expect reliability, and the beneficiaries are not the consumers but the companies that create unnecessary interfaces to monetize data.

Re: O Holy Crap

#286

Post by JadeNB »

bumby wrote: post #131
mathattack wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality manufacturing in the Good Ole Days is a myth. The Japanese are our lunch in auto in the 70s due to a lack of Quality. Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.

> when the market structure or incentives encouraged it. I think one argument is exactly this. There has been a march towards a market that expects a constant supply of cheap shit. When all the margins have been wrung out of globalization, reduction in quality provides the next mechanism of lowering price. People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past. But there has been change in expectati…

> People know where to find $150 denim that lasts, just like in times past.

Do they? There have been times I'm willing to pay whatever needs to be paid for quality items, and I just don't know where to find it. You can find the brands that used to make quality items, selling for the same premium prices, but often they're just selling the same unreliable stuff in slightly spiffier dress.

Re: O Holy Crap

#287

Post by JadeNB »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #251
theK wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really rooting for getting the onslaught of rubbishware to end but don't see the right to repair laws making a dent there. Those laws are engineered to make it possible to repair complex, expensive things. Dealing with intentionally misengineered things that are trash cheap is a completely different discipline.

My solution is handle this through enforced long warranties. And require muni waste transfer stations to back charge manufacturers for broken appliances under warranty AKA: Your dishwasher dies and you send it to the dump. They'll look it over document the failure and back charge the manufacturer for the retail price.

> My solution is handle this through enforced long warranties. And require muni waste transfer stations to back charge manufacturers for broken appliances under warranty.

You have given me a new utopian dream. This is a clever solution.

Re: O Holy Crap

#288

Post by nikau »

mbfg wrote: post #44
derbOac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, some things in my lifetime have seemed to get much better, and cars and refrigerators happen to be in that class. Many other things seem to have gotten worse though, like clothes and linens. I suspect there's some pattern to those things that have improved and those that have declined, and everything in between, but I couldn't explain it.

watching many youtube mechanic channels, i get the sense that they seem to think that 2000 era cars were better than today's car. The common missive is that they now have really cheap parts, and the cars are over controlled by computer systems making them brittle and expensive to repair.

2000 era cars were the sweet spot of good enough power and efficiency vs complexity.

Current cars get more power and fuel efficiency, but its at the cost of complexity like high pressure direct injection, stop/start, variable length intakes, cam phasers, etc.

Its nothing to do with computer control making them brittle, more that there's just so many extra components to fail that just didn't exist on older cars and the techs need training on how they operate and troubleshoot.

Re: O Holy Crap

#289

Post by nikau »

docandrew wrote: post #179
oblio wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your anecdata is bad. Even after the conspiracy was discovered, incandescent bulbs still had a much lower life expectancy than LED lights. It's simple physics :-)

The LEDs themselves are very robust, solid-state semiconductors that will function for a very long time, but they need additional electronics to function in a 110/220V socket, and those electronics seem to be crummier than the old incandescent filaments.

Yep - I've done a post mortem on a few LED bulbs that failed and each time the LEDs were fine but the driver failed.

This is anecdotal, but I had a bunch of bulbs of the same brand that started to fail, on the remaining bulbs I drilled a few air vent holes into them as they are used indoors only, and since then haven't had another failure.

I'm suspecting most LED bulbs fail from thermal stress on the driver circuitry.

Re: O Holy Crap

#290

Post by nikau »

nosianu wrote: post #82

I don't quite know what to say to what I found near the end in this article: > Recently, my wife needed a carrot peeler. She needed one rather quickly. Off to Target. The one she bought (the only one on sale)... I stopped at the phrase "the only one on sale". Inevitably the next part reads: > looked handsome enough, and the brand was one she recognized, but it failed in the useful department, miserably. It wasn’t sha…

> As for coffee grinders, I've got a Eureka Mignon and machines like that are expected to last a few decades easily, with a little bit of maintenance. If you buy the $99 stuff, well...

All the fawning over the Niche Zero grinder does my head it - its using a crappy brushed DC motor and a plastic gearbox more akin to the quality of a $100 sunbeam conical burr grinder I had.

And like my Sunbeam grinder the gearbox will likely start to get very very noisy after 10 years of heavy use, not to mention needing new brushes at some stage which aren't user replaceable.

But hey, one youtube guy said some good things about the Niche so it must be the best!

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