• chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    We keep having to replace the logic board on our dryer.

    Motherfucker, your job is to get hot and spin. I want the old “egg-timer that flips a switch” tech to come back.

  • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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    2 hours ago

    What are people doing with their laundry equipment and other appliances? I’m not saying you’ll get 30 years out of new appliances, but I still routinely get 10ish.

  • Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.ca
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    2 hours ago

    Bet someone chimes in with “but the new one is better because it uses less energy”. I’m too lazy to figure the math on that but I can’t imagine that the 20% more energy usage of my old machine is greater than the energy cost of manufacturing, shipping, extra repairs (parts, transportation) that the new “better” machines need on 1yr to 18month cycle of fixing or outright replacing.

  • Soapbox@lemmy.zip
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    5 hours ago

    My wife hates our “ugly” fridge that came with our house. It’s about 25 years old works perfectly, even the ice maker. She is a frugal person that can’t justify replacing it until it breaks. Yet it keeps on ticking. Everyone I know who has a fridge made in the last 10 years has a broken ice maker. I’m happy with the “ugly” perfectly functional fridge.

  • 13igTyme@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    My washer I bought in 2015 for a condo worked all the way to when we sold in 2024. Likely still going because it never had an issue.

    New house washer purchased last year, still no issues.

    My inlaws have gone through several in the last 10 years.

    Biggest difference is user error. My inlaws wash a big load of towels every single day and load the washer to the lid. I load 3/4 full and don’t go through towels like crazy.

    People just don’t know how to use appliances.

    • MBech@feddit.dk
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      3 hours ago

      99/100 times user error is the answer to most stuff. Users are idiots who will not accept responsibility as long as they can say “well it’s the appliance that is built bad”.

  • phx@lemmy.ca
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    7 hours ago

    Is it really that it worked for 30 years or just that the couple times it failed that actually got somebody to repair it?

    I had my washer/dryer for 8+ years now. Actually got the extended warranty for sure reason and it covered having a repair when it started leaking, but given the cost of repairs hasn’t just elect to buy a new unit.

  • But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    I went back to my birth country and my grandmas toilet is ancient, like 100 years old and the insides are original, never replaced and they work. Meanwhile im in Canada and I’ve had to replace the mechanisms inside the water tank like twice in 3 years

  • MiDaBa@lemmy.ml
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    21 hours ago

    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.

  • Gorilladrums@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    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.

    • phx@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      Not AliExpress, but fucking Samsung. They may appliances with all the cool smart features and they’re everywhere, but holy shit are they terrible for reliability (both per my own experience and according to repair people I’ve talked with).

      • MrFinnbean@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Dunno.

        My samsung washing machine is now 9 years old with zero problems.

        I think its mostly a bias. If manufactorer-A sells 10 apliances and manufactorer-B sells only one, its means repair people should also see 10 machines from A for every machine from B

      • MBech@feddit.dk
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        3 hours ago

        Every single one of my Samsung appliances work great. Most notably my washing machine and dryer. Never had a single hickup in the ~6 years I’ve had them. A lot of the time people have issues with stuff, is because they don’t take care of their machine, and expect an appliance will run reliably for 10+ years with 0 maintenance. They don’t.

      • Gorilladrums@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        More expensive doesn’t necessarily mean better. You could easily spend $2000 on some “smart” washing machine, but that doesn’t mean it’s better than a standard $500 washing machine. I would argue that a lot of these gimmicks actually make the products worse.

    • 1D10@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      This is my mother in law to a tee, she buys second hand washing machines on craigslist for $100 - 200 they last about a year and she buys a new one. Always complaining about “planned obsolescence”. I keep telling her “no one is selling a good used washing machine, they had problems with it and got a new one” Meanwhile she criticizes me for spending $700 on a washing machine we have had for 10 years now.

      She has a saying “poor people have poor ways” which she thinks means that when your poor you work with what you have, I have told her it is an insult that means poor people are poor because of their actions and decisions.

    • MIDItheKID@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      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.

      • jenesaisquoi@feddit.org
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        7 hours ago

        It will also use much more energy and water, because they’re built to wash extremely quickly, efficiency be damned.

      • derpgon@programming.dev
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        15 hours ago

        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?

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        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°.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    If it’s a side-loading washer, you’re not supposed to close the door all the way when it isn’t in use. That’s why it smelled.

  • JamesTBagg@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • rayyy@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      The old order Amish are still using the 1940s Maytag wringer washers. They convert them to gas engines and run the exhaust outside.

  • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      This the argument I have with clients on a daily basis, in regards to all kinds of manufactured goods. People are astoundingly awful at understanding and visualizing inflation and the value of a dollar over time, even people who are specifically educated on this point and even work with it as part of their jobs. Everyone has some threshold beyond which they absolutely won’t countenance paying more than $X for Y, but this is always arbitrary and whenever the course of events drives the median price of whatever-it-is past that line they lose their minds.

      Durable goods manufacturing is a race to the bottom because it has to be in order to overcome everyone’s moronic preconceptions about what a product “ought” to cost. This isn’t just a capitalist greed thing, although it’s certainly that, too – corners have to be cut, panels have to be made thinner, it has to contain more plastic and less metal, because otherwise it’ll never be cheap enough for 99% of the population to agree to buy it and even then they’ll all still bitch about how shoddily made it is. Year over year every manufacturer has to figure out how to make it cheaper to slide under MSRP. The manufacturers who take the opposite strategy inevitably wind up as niche players, because as much as people spout that they’d happily pay more for a better built thing, the flat out truth is they’re all full of shit and to the nearest decimal point, none of them actually will if given the opportunity.

      • tempest@lemmy.ca
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        23 hours ago

        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.

        • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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          12 hours ago

          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.

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      1 day ago

      I spent a thousand dollars replacing the cheap compressor in my fridge because I asked the repair guy to replace it with better quality than it originally came with, and he used a commercial (as opposed to residential) grade compressor that was three times the price

      But aside from a short lifetime, the big problem with cheap AC motors is they’re imprecisely built and often waste more electricity as heat and noise than they put into their output shaft

      Of course even with the better stuff there still “cot death” where a new product fails almost immediately (because noone tests their products), but at least those failures are under warranty, the cheap motors typically last at least a few years

      • MouldyCat@feddit.uk
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        4 hours ago

        I spent a thousand dollars replacing the cheap compressor in my fridge

        So was it worth it? How long ago did you do it and what are the differences you’ve noticed so far?

        • psud@aussie.zone
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          2 hours ago

          It should work for ages, compared to the cheap compressor that came with the fridge that lasted 3 years. It’s a thousand dollar fridge new, so the repair was about the cost of replacing it, but I won’t need to replace it in another 3 years

          I did this only two weeks ago, so all I really have is expectations

          It’s less noisy than the previous compressor

    • slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org
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      1 day ago

      You can also buy really good machines that last forever, you just have to pay a lot more. To me it seems the guy complaining just buys the cheapest washing machine build and delivered by slave workes from Amazon

      • kiagam@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Problem is you can’t trust anything. The fancy $2k machine might just be fancy in name. You don’t know if stuff is good before it starts not being. And reviews don’t help, because they won’t test a product for 5 years to check durability before posting

        • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          The speed queen I mentioned comes with a 7 year warranty and they’re the brand used by laundromats who need them to be reliable to make money. That said, the consumer grade ones are not as solidly built as the commercial units, but that’s because nobody is going to put laundromat levels of abuse on their home washing machine.