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Goodbye non-KISS appliances

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Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#51

Post by Brian_K_White »

brodsky wrote: post #25

When we upgraded our appliances, the "smart" or "wifi-enabled" ones were specifically avoided like the plague. "Dumb" appliances - especially fridges, for some reason - are becoming hard to come by, but they do exist. Electrolux, KitchenAid, even LG all make some no-frills models that can save both money and frustration. Hopefully those companies continue serving the "luddite techie" market.

Watch out for the LG "linear compressor", and it's in other brands too like Kenmore I think it was.

Even without brains, new appliances are shit.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#52

Post by arter4 »

brodsky wrote: post #25

When we upgraded our appliances, the "smart" or "wifi-enabled" ones were specifically avoided like the plague. "Dumb" appliances - especially fridges, for some reason - are becoming hard to come by, but they do exist. Electrolux, KitchenAid, even LG all make some no-frills models that can save both money and frustration. Hopefully those companies continue serving the "luddite techie" market.

Yes, I agree. I'm not a luddite per se - heck, I make a living out of making stuff talk to one another on a network. But I don't get the appeal, from a customer standpoint, of having all physical objects talk to you or to the Internet. Like, why?

I get it when it comes to alarm systems. Being able to get a notification when someone breaks in is nice, because the alarm system is mostly doing its job when you're not at home. It makes sense.

What it does not make sense, in my humble opinion, is pretty much everything else. Why do I need voice activated lights, outside of a cool party trick ("hey, I can turn the lights on with my voice")? Why should a vacuum cleaner, even if a robot one, be able to upload a picture of a woman on the toilet to the Internet (which has actually happened)? Why should the fridge talk to you?

Ironically, this kind of stuff might become less and less appealing with remote working. If you're at home anyway, can't you just stand up and look at the fridge or turn that light on?

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#53

Post by rentseekingb »

kmoser wrote: post #23

My parents have a clothes drier from the 1970s and a fridge from the 1990s. They have needed repairs, but they were infrequent and not so costly as to necessitate buying a new unit. My A/C is only four years old and the maintenance guy is telling me one of the fans is drawing too much power and will need to be replaced soon. Despite the part being free under warranty, they want $600 to replace it. This seems to be st…

This frustrates me to no end.

Nearly every industry feels like a scam now.

Outright lying to customers, over-charging them. Heck, I get it, they’re a business and need to make money. But there are reasonable limits.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#54

Post by rentseekingb »

jamiek88 wrote: post #50
kmoser wrote: post #23

My parents have a clothes drier from the 1970s and a fridge from the 1990s. They have needed repairs, but they were infrequent and not so costly as to necessitate buying a new unit. My A/C is only four years old and the maintenance guy is telling me one of the fans is drawing too much power and will need to be replaced soon. Despite the part being free under warranty, they want $600 to replace it. This seems to be st…

Anything that doesn’t involve coolant bleeding can easily be done yourself or by a handy pal via the university of YouTube.

1000x this.

I’ve started to learn how to do everything myself via YouTube.

Am I an expert? Heck no. Can I do a dang reasonable job for easily 1/10th the cost? Sure seems to be true.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#55

Post by neilv »

aartav wrote: post #34

For the most part I agree with this, over engineered feature creep is really just horrible stuff. I never need a fridge with wifi and I absolutely swear that that anything more than auto-off is a waste in a coffee machine. But I think the "Other appliance anecdotes" part suggests that the author has very different requirements than I do. I grew up without a garbage disposal, but its a huge convenience to have one. Al…

On the garbage disposal, I've heard that water treatment facility managers hate them (or at least one does), because it encourages people to put through food waste.

I've also heard landlords say garbage disposals are a net-negative for maintenance visits: disposal-related problems are more costly than the occasional clog because someone put down something the disposal would've stopped.

Also, in multi-tenant buildings, disposals can be a nightmare. Too many people with varying folk wisdom of what's good to put down it. Some people create blockages for the entire stack or more, which ends up causing powered backflows of nasty wastewater into some units. And then what eventually gets snaked out of the drain, and dragged across their kitchens... mere bleach will never get that sufficiently clean. (Even after 3 of these kitchen-apocalypse episodes, you just can't get some people to understand that they can't keep grinding orange peels in their disposal to freshen the air, even when the rot of previous orange peels in the increasing blockage they created might be the reason they want to freshen the air now.)

I try to tell people that pretty much only water and dish soap should go down the drain, and that one of those few-dollar mesh drain strainers is a great tool to help follow this rule. (Also, a container for collecting most of the grease/oil that would otherwise go down the drain.)

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#56

Post by gmac »

computator wrote: post #33

> the combustion engine and hybrid cars are surprisingly reliable The OP brings up an interesting contradiction: appliances have become less reliable but cars have become more reliable. Cars have become worse in some of the same areas as appliances, like the use of touch screens instead of physical controls, but cars have nevertheless become more mechanically reliable. What would explain this opposite trend?

Maybe part of it is that there are few enough models of cars that it’s possible to collect reliability data (and people do), and it’s a big enough purchase (and breaking down is annoying enough) that people pay attention to it?

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#57

Post by oldpersonintx »

jabits wrote: post #42
msadowski wrote: post #5

I’m about to buy all the appliances to a new place in Europe and could use some more horror stories and learn which brands to avoid. So far I’ve been told to stay away from Samsung ovens. Anyone has any regrets on appliances?

We bought all new appliances for a kitchen remodel about 1.5 years ago, everything pretty nice, mostly LG. Even after this time I am still in love with the LG fridge, glass door, two kinds of ice, middle drawer chill or freeze. It’s pricey but I’ve never marveled over an appliance this much.

[dead]

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#58

Post by ljf »

spdustin wrote: post #3

I just replaced the condenser fan (was squealing) and the evaporator defrost heater (it wasn't working at all, leading to the coils icing over) on my 20-year-old GE fridge. I threw in some SwitchBot BLE temp sensors that I monitor with Home Assistant, with alerts set to fire if it can't hold temperature or if the defrost cycle doesn't seem to be working, as measured by the swing between the "pre-chill" before defrost…

I cannot speak for that fridge as I don't know the energy usage. But the sad fact is that often buying a brand new machine will pay for itself in only 2 or 3 years over a 'free' older fridge or freezer (at least here in the UK).

I have a 'keezer' - a chest freezer I run at fridge temps to store and serve homebrew beer.

Buying a new A+ rated chest freezer cost me £199 but only costs £35 a year to run. A friend scored a free 15 yo freezer from Facebook and it costs just under £100 a year to run. So he saved £200, but now is down £65 a year. It won't take long for my keezer to be significantly cheaper over a 5 year horizon.

I hate to see old tech wasted, but the energy and cost savings can be significant.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#59

Post by czechdeveloper »

imjonse wrote: post #9

Appliance engineers probably have their equivalent of "Kubernetes and SPA used for no good reason at all and now we can't focus on the actual features"

By now, making UI with (by now not completely) SPA frameworks specifically made for that task is just better developer experience. I won't go back to pretty much html string concation via templates. Why do people keep pretending it's better in any way is lost on me.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#60

Post by krasin »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #51
brodsky wrote: post #25

When we upgraded our appliances, the "smart" or "wifi-enabled" ones were specifically avoided like the plague. "Dumb" appliances - especially fridges, for some reason - are becoming hard to come by, but they do exist. Electrolux, KitchenAid, even LG all make some no-frills models that can save both money and frustration. Hopefully those companies continue serving the "luddite techie" market.

Watch out for the LG "linear compressor", and it's in other brands too like Kenmore I think it was. Even without brains, new appliances are shit.

Related: LG Settles Class-Action Lawsuit Over Refrigerator Compressors, https://www.consumerreports.org/lawsuits-settlements/lg-sett...
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