it's truly sad when greed causes the pollution of ground water. It should be considered as a crime against humanity and heavily punished. I had a look at Lockheed Aerospace and it's sad to read.
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Appliances are crap these days and they last three to five years if you are lucky... I have a friend in California that bought a GE Monitor Top Refrigerator that was made in the mid 1930's... They last for ever.Comment
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The underlying issue is that being built well and lasting a long time used to be a selling point for appliances (remember the Maytag Man). There would be enough profit margin that they could sell you one appliance every 15 or so years and be fine with that business model. Then, companies realized that they could increase sales volume and improve profit by manufacturing in China and using cheaper, lower quality parts that were likely to only last a few years before needed parts replaced. People spoke with their wallets and decided to purchase lower cost appliances instead of quality appliances.
I can't remember what it was but I replaced a plastic part in something a year or two ago. I remember thinking that if it was made out of metal it would have lasted practically forever.Comment
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I had a mid-high grade stainless tub kitchenaid dishwasher for about 7 years. It cleaned wonderfully and I could pack an entire 4 place table full of dishes along with serving ware and kitchen stuff in it. About every 2-3 years the main wash pump would go out. The first time it was $100, the second $160. By the time it died a third time, it was well over $200. It went on the curb and a $300 samsung plastic wonder replaced it. Its a nightmare to load, plays annoying noises, and doesn't clean as well as the kitchenaid did. Shrinking profit margins, far flung supply chains, and government regulations seem to be killing all that used to be good about consumer goods. If the wash pump had a conventional motor in it instead of one loaded with components, I would probably still be using the kitchenaid.
You used to be able to pay for quality, but I'm not sure anyone in the manufacturing or support industries knows what that means anymore. I hear even the high end stuff they put in rich folks homes is constantly breaking down.Comment
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And to make matters worse, the cost of those replacement parts is, I suspect, deliberately set high enough to discourage repair and encourage replacement, as Josh's experience shows. The same thing is happening in our business, too. The cost of one-time parts for out of warranty DCI projectors has at least doubled in real terms (after factoring inflation) in the eight years I've been servicing them. The business model of all three manufacturers seems to be to push you to extend the parts warranty until you replace the projector, such that if you let it lapse and then need to make a one-time part purchase, you will likely have the same thought as I did, faced with $300 for a dishwasher pump: is it worth it, given that another board costing in the mid four figures could fail in a month's time?Originally posted by Lyle RomerComment
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My mom, who passed away several years ago at age 99, never wanted a dish
washer, because she believed nothing on earth could get dishes cleaner than
she could. When I was about 10yrs old, my folks were designing the kitchen
of a house they were going to have built, and my mom refused to have a
dishwasher included in the plans. When my folks retired and moved to
another state, both the houses they bought already had a dishwasher in
the kitchen, but, except as a place to park dishes inside of to dry after she
washed them by hand, the dishwasher got used maybe once or twice a year
on holidays like Easter & Thanksgiving when we had a lot of relatives over for
dinner. When she passed away, one of my cousins stayed at my folks former
home for a while, to help dispose of the estate. She made the mistake of putting
a load of dishes in the dishwasher and then making a quick run to the local store.
When she got back, the kitchen was flooded because the door seals in the
dishwasher had deteriorated due to non use.Comment
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My two grandmothers had diametrically opposed approaches to domestic technology. One of them regarded it as the work of the devil: she continued to do her laundry in the bath, and to dry it using a hand-cranked mangle that was likely made in the nineteenth century, well into the 21st. I think the idea of having a dishwasher in her house would have filled her with horror. The other was a sucker for household gadgets, much to Grandpa's frustration, who regarded most of them as unnecessary and in some cases dangerous. Granny particularly liked the SodaStream, which was middle-class kitchen's infamous status symbol of the 1970s. It was a device that enabled you to make your own carbonated soda beverages using bottles of concentrated syrup, water, and a Co2 cylinder that attached to the machine. The special bottles that you were supposed to use with it attached to the device using a pressure-tight seal, and the liquid inside was then charged with Co2 under pressure.
The gotcha was that it was very easy to apply too much pressure, whereupon the bottle exploded in a ballistic shower of glass fragments and sticky, gooey liquid. If you were lucky enough to escape injury, you were then in store for half an hour cleaning up the kitchen. Grandpa was a major in the Royal Engineers, who spent most of World War II defusing unexploded German bombs that landed on Bristol (if you have ever seen the movie The Small Back Room, Grandpa regarded the final bomb disposal scene as not an exaggeration of what was involved). So he was no wuss. But as soon as Granny pulled out the SodaStream to make some homebrew tonic water for her G & T, Grandpa made a smart exit from the kitchen, remarking that he didn't risk his life fighting the bloody Nazis just to be killed by a bottle of fizzy pop.Comment
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A pedant writes...not in Scotland it isn't. I'd never seen limescale in a kettle until I moved from Glasgow to London.
Again, not in Glasgow it doesn't, thanks to the ingenuity of Victorian engineers: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-47238701. The only people buying bottled water in Glasgow are tourists.Comment
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In an attempt to out-pedant you, I've never sampled the water in Glasgow, but I do remember from a family holiday on the Isle of Barra that the tap water was yellow - it literally looked like urine - thanks to the peat that found its way into the groundwater. This was about 30 years ago and so my memory is not fully reliable, but my recollection is that we boiled it for drinking, but did not filter it. The taste was certainly distinctive! What that would have done to a dishwasher I don't know, because the house we rented didn't have one.Originally posted by Allan Young
Used but OK pump arrived on Friday and, for as long as it holds out, the dishwasher is now fixed.Comment
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The gas igniter in our (also Samsung) clothes dryer failed on Thursday, and I've just finished replacing it. My wife pointed out that all four of the appliances we bought when we moved into our current home in 2015 have now needed at least one major repair involving a part replacement. The washer was recalled less than a year later because of a direct drive motor shaft defect that could have caused the drum to separate and possibly burst out of the chassis (Home Depot sent someone round to replace the component). The fridge iced up and needed a new evaporator cover. The dishwasher's circulation pump failed, and now the dryer's igniter died. I suppose that in 11 years of constant use that's not too bad. But it does make me wonder how many households would have just tossed these appliances out rather than repaired them, especially if the repair option would have meant a contractor call costing half the price of a new appliance.Comment
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On Wednesday of last week I replaced my Kenmore clothes dryer that was either 28 or 29 years old. It got so it would (unpredictably) overheat and stop in the middle of a drying cycle, and cleaning the exhaust path and the outside vent didn't solve it. Parts were NLA, which was not exactly a surprise.
The new one is a Whirlpool so we'll see how long this one lasts. Probably not 29 years.Comment
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I'm guessing that a temperature sensor and/or thermal fuse was/were to blame. Sorry to hear that that the necessary part was NLA, as the machine was likely OK otherwise.Comment
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Whirlpool is just borderline crapola those days, most of the "Whirlpool" labeled stuff here is just generic white-label crap built in Turkey for cheap and with the Whirlpool name slapped onto it. Whirlpool as a company is just a licensing entity, just like many other former relevant brands. The sad story is that even premium brands that were known to be rock-solid until not that long ago, like Kitchen Aid or Miele are nowadays also complete and utter crap.
Miele used to be the state-of-the-art for washing machines. My previous one lasted 30+ years, my new one, I recently found out, has a drum made out of plastic after it started leaking... like it came directly from Ali-Express. According to the guy that replaced it with a new plastic one: That's normal those days, they're ALL made out of plastic, no matter if you pay a few grand or just a few hundred bucks for the thing...
Same with my Kitchen-Aid mixer... the one that my parents own is like 50 years old, the gear in mine went up in smoke just after the warranty expired... I opened it up... all plastic. It's made to fail and that for an appliance that costs like 5 times as much as the cheapest product with identical functionality and the same cheap plastic gears... I've got a "Kenwood" now... They used to make killer HiFi products for top prices... but I guess that came out of a different factory.
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Plastic is fine IMHO - the issue is that most of the drums you find in washers nowadays are welded together so if your bearings fail, you need a whole new drum assembly which is obviously not worth the money.
They used to bolt the two halves together but that stopped because clearly you sell more machines with a one-piece drum.
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