When I moved out, I lived with a flatmate for a few years and I left the washing machine door open after using it and my flatmate closed it.
I explained to her why I left it open and she just stared back at me. Not once had she ever thought of this and said it made so much sense. She is about 20 years my senior.
Certain habits seem to be so obvious, but unless handed down, someone may never even think of it.
Reminds me of that guy that never thought to let the shower water get warm before stepping in.
Huh... I have a top loader and grew up with one so it'd never occur to me this is needed, since with a top loader there's no reason to close it, it doesn't get in the way by being open
I'm glad I saw this thread, if I ever have a front loader now I'll know to leave it open :)
If you ever need a new one, front loaders tend to fit more and I believe they're more efficient too. Plus if a top loader grenades itself, it might be a pain to get your laundry out if the drum doesn't move anymore. Front loaders are more expensive though.
Totally fair about habits being passed down. However, I lived with someone who I had to explain the whole leave the washer open 2 or 3 times over the course of a couple years. She'd even complain about the smell. She was one dense mother fucker tho.
As well as the hatch where the detergent goes in. Otherwise it will get swampy in there. That part of the post kinda makes me wonder if maybe her mother just takes better care of hers.
I take the detergent tray out after every wash so it dries properly. Occasionally wipe the tray slot down if it needs it, and wash the tray. Seen a few horrible swamps in shared housing over college years.
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.
That is true to an extent, but the main point is that it's not like the past was a glorious land of milk and honey where everything was cheaper and easier. I am always amazed when I see how much things used to cost back then compared to incomes, especially TVs and other electronics. That's a big part of the "built to last" reputation of older goods- they were literally built better, but they were also priced accordingly. A cheap appliance back then was a used one. There simply wasn't an option to buy a cheap one new.
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.
wow, you actually don't understand it. Fascinating. Lets get simple:
70s : Expensive appliance, works long time. can afford it.
Today: Cheap appliance, breaks early, can afford.
Also Today: Expensive appliance, works long time. can't afford it.
Meh. Buy them second hand. Not even joking. As you said, good one last forever. while there's a bit of a logistics difficulty with second hand large appliances, you can also just rent a van for the day and ask a friend for help.
Only if it's worth fixing instead of replacing the thing outright. If you have a cheap washer, it may be cheaper to just get another, rather than having to call the repairman and get parts.
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.
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.
In the 2008 economic slump, the U.K. had something called a “car scrappage scheme”. Shit was the most wasteful thing ever. Also saw really cool classics cubed.
USA had the same thing, "Cash for Clunkers". Some of the cars we were better off getting rid of. Some of them not, whether because they were rare or classic, or old but still more fuel efficient than a truck or SUV. Sure increased the average price of a used car though.
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!
That's the same way i look at it. How much energy is involved in building a new washing machine? How much energy is spent scrapping it? So much waste. I recently had a run of energy-efficient washing machines that all had the same problem with the main CPU board. In 2 weeks i had 4 instances all come out of the woodwork. Only 1 opted for the repair but it cost them almost as much as a new washer. The rest got scrapped. These washers were all about 2 years old when i witnessed this phenomenon (and I ran into yet another one just a couple weeks ago)... Other techs online are sharing similar reports.
Not only are they over-engineering the fuck out of these things for "energy efficiency" which i swear is just an umbrella they use to cover their real goals--to make appliances less user and tech friendly. They want their guys selling their overpriced junk and bespoke computers/sensors/gizmos so they can extract every last cent of value out of the product, then try to sell you another one every 3-5 years almost like leasing a car.
Still, that doesn't mean the tech used to extract greater efficiency is a bad idea -- it's all the approach they take to get there. They're making the cheapest tech possible while trying to sell it for the most $. These digital electronics they design to handle the various functions that give them such energy efficiency are often made with design flaws that aren't worked out before release and/or they're made with the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel components and/or manufacturing standards. If they wanted to make nearly-indestructible computers and sensors and transmissions and motors they absolutely could. They could even make them extremely energy efficient as well, but it's simply not gonna happen.
Energy efficiency is a valid goal, but if that's really what they're going for they need to make some major changes to the way they're approaching it. The engineers in these companies are too smart for this to be the best they can do.
I haven't had an issue with an unbalanced load since I started using a front loader. Mine washes all our blankets without issue other than the >15# weighted blankets, and that's just me not wanting to risk my washer to not go to the Laundromat.
If repairman laugh at durable machinery they either just want your money or don't care about longevity. My father usually tells people to keep the old one if it's still working cuz the newer ones break down after a year or two and suck to repair (simple stuff just replaced with electronics that you have to replace whole for half the price of the whole machine).
As a repair guy that gives a shit about his customers, i encourage folks to fix their older appliances when feasible. I prefer the older stuff and find them to be easier to diagnose and repair a lot of the time.
A couple years ago i had an elderly lady with a Kitchen Aid washer and dryer that were in pristine condition. Based on some lookups, i determined the units to be 37 years old. Until that day, neither unit had been serviced once. Dryer needed a new door switch, lol. To be fair though, i got another call on the dryer a couple years later and it had a bad motor. Almost 40 years with virtually trouble-free operation! They loved the unit and didn't want to deal with the flimsy bullshit on the market today so they opted to repair it. I overhauled the dryer in addition to replacing the motor and it's quiet as the day it was new. What a well-built machine!
Oldest dryer i still service has to be from the 60's or something -- one of those old Maytag dryers that just has the timer in the center of the control panel and you push the timer in to start it. I swear the motors on some of those old units may never die, lol.
And just for the record I am an appliance repair tech for the last 20 years.
Hands down appliances from the early 90s to about the 2010s are significantly better than new appliances today.
They are better in everyway. They were made under a different philosophy, they were made to be fixed.
When I stated my career in 2004 I would have a box of common parts that would break for each kind of appliance I would service. Fridge, washer, dryer ext. I wouldn't have to order a part for weeks. I would just drive down to the parts supplier stock up and move on to my next work order. Now all I do is order proprietary parts that are dedicated to one specific model number.
The materials and build quality of older appliances far exceeds that of new ones so much so that I am actually recommending to my clients that they try to find a used appliance rather than buy a new one because it'll probably last longer.
And I've had this argument so many times already on this platform the savings on energy are absolutely negligible. They can easily be ignored. To clarify the way they notate change in energy is by percentages so it'll appear that an appliance is saving 70% more energy but in reality that saving is stretched across 365 days which equates to maybe 25 to 30 cents of savings a day. Or it'll look like you're saving 400 kilowatt hours but again stretched across 365 days that's just over 1 kilowatt hour a day.
The only caveat is the fact that washers use less water which can actually turn into some kind of savings over the course of the year because your water heater will have to heat less water but that's about it.
Generally I fix appliances that are less than 10 years old most of those are refrigerators the extreme vast majority of those are Samsung appliances.
Not a repair tech, but this matches my experience maintaining and repairing my appliances. My early 80s whirlpool range and oven have had small issues here and there, but generally require swapping one part hidden behind some screws and will take under an hour. My Samsung dishwasher not only does a piss poor job, it also throws LC codes every few days. After the fourth time pulling it from the cabinet I had to put a series of shims to lift the leak sensor off the drip tray and buy a separate Wi-Fi moisture detector. My Samsung fridge (4yo) has a broken door ice dispenser and intermittently decides not to dispense water too. Old LG unit had a linear compressor that shit the bed three times before they refused to do any more warranty work on it.
the extreme vast majority of those are Samsung appliances.
Bro, fuck the Samsung fridge engineers that decided my ice machine doesn't need to actually be properly insulated and designed an ice box that's basically going to break and it's only a matter of time.
I have to keep reminding myself to defrost and clean it out. Last time it got so bad I couldn't even take the ice tray out without a ton of force. Then I melted the ice but derped and warped the little guide post thingy with heat. Had a tech come out and say it's unfixable, cool time flushing my money down the toilet ... After that I did what I should have done and just reheated it again and bent it and voila problem (I made) solved.
But seriously I hate that fridge with a passion. So much so I'm going out of my way to never buy Samsung again, their customer care is atrocious and quality is hit or miss. I have some Samsung appliances that have been bulletproof so far but I genuinely don't want to have to cross my fingers their QA didn't fail because trying to deal with their support for anything is a Kafkaesque hell.
We work on very very little Miele. So much so that I only encountered the brand a handful of times and have no recollection as to how those repairs went which usually means I didn't come back to do said repairs.
However, Miele has a very good reputation for reliability.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
I want to start an appliance company that offers 10 year warranties with an additional 5 year replaceable parts availability promise. The designs will be simple, functionality simple with minimal quality of life improvements, and all repair manuals will be published on the website along with tutorial videos, while also banking on building a product that simply lasts longer.
I'm willing to bet that if that is what you advertise on, the longevity of the product at a minimal price, then the company should do fine.
You won't. You'll get annihilated by the next Chinese competitor who produces a piece of shit machine that breaks in 13 months like clockwork (and has a 12 month warranty), but sells for 1/2 or 2/3 of the price of your machine.
The average consumer is dogshit at conceptualizing the actual value of a product over its lifetime in proportion to its cost. They'll just see that the next machine on display at Best Buy or whatever looks modern and costs less to buy up front, and then they'll buy that one. When it breaks they'll bitch and moan on Facebook and Nextdoor and write ranty one star reviews everywhere, and then wheel right back to Best Buy and buy another machine just like it.
At the end of the day these are commodity items. It's reasonable for consumers to buy whatever's cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.
The solution can't come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can't be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.
The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don't often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can't buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore... So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.
Weirdly enough, the washing machines I've seen here in China aren't that cheap, like 800-1500 USD price range, and they tend to be much smaller than the US ones.
Stuff made in China for domestic use bears little to no resemblance to the stuff that Chinese factories are contracted to make for export.
So much so that two doors down from my work is a place that does a booming business whose sole purpose is to allow people in China to purchase made-in-China stuff that's only sold in the US that they can't get at home and ship it back to China. It sounds absolutely asinine but there's a huge market for it and those guys are busy all day long packing stuff up and cramming into shipping containers to send right back to where it was made... but can't be bought.
Good luck getting affordable steel or aluminum for manufacturing in this economy. If you do have some investors/capital, though, I would love to apply as an engineer. I think a good selling point would be displaying them in-store with the panel open, or training distributors to open them as demonstration, showing how reliable it is and how easy they are to service.
Your product would be about three times the price of the cheap shit.
It might work in the current world with good advertising - Smarter Every Day (on YouTube) is part of a project to make a better, made in America, barbeque brush cleaner
There are a few companies now selling better quality stuff successfully, but I have seen no one doing so in whitegoods
Buy European: Miele, Rex Electrolux, Beko (Turkish, don't get into that), Smeg, Candy, AEG, etc...
Don't want to jinx it, but my Electrolux washer-dryier is 7 years old and still like new, despite being relatively cheap and despite combined machines being more problematic.
Our super cheap Candy (Washer and a drier) has been going for 5 years now without issue 🤷
Though i'd buy a different brand if i had to again and wasn't pressed for money, I am definitely surprised how well it's doing.
that could be, or maybe I got lucky. In any case, I'm not complaining.
i remember it was like 750 bucks for both machines, and with other brands it would have been 800-1200 for a single machine
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.
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.
You can get a rough estimate of how much of those reliability figures are down to absolute scattershot luck of the draw, because Roper's (Whirlpool) only laundry machines on the market are literally rebadges of the only Amana machines (also Whirlpool) with no mechanical changes whatsoever, but they score "better." Squinting at that image, it appears Amana is possibly #20.
Also, the Kenmore bar is complete bullshit since Kenmore/Sears never manufactured a single appliance at any point in history. Every Kenmore model is actually a rebadge of some other manufacturer's product (handy lookup chart located here) so the build methodology can vary wildly from model to model. So the fact that these are not separated out into their actual brands given how trivial this is to do indicates to me once again that Consumer Reports does not actually have any idea what the hell they're doing.
Even if you want to group things just by their nameplate since that's what the consumer will see, fine. But those examples in particular need to have a big fat asterisk next to them and an explanation of what's actually going on behind the scenes.
It's possible that consumer's perception of reliability is affected by warranty and how well/quick repairs are made, which might be a point of difference. There's also possibly binning of parts going on, with higher reliability batches going into one brand over the other.
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.
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.
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.
I think you could maybe use less time on the Internet. Social media has a nasty habit of telling everyone that everything they hear is a code for something else; spend too long reading that junk and it’ll convince you that everyone in the world is a secret bigot.
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.
Honestly buy something that is good quality but doesn't have stupid shit, do I need my washing machine and my toaster talking to each other? No but the stripped down no frills ones are normally built to be as absolutely cheap as possible.
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.
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).
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
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.
There’s some people in this thread who’ve had shocking bad luck with their appliances and think it’s normal. The only appliances I’ve ever had break in the last few decades were either already decades old or broke because I did something dumb.
A good dryer senses the moisture and adjusts the heat so it dosnt shrink your clothes and you dont have to take them out damp and hang them anyway, throws in a few reverse spins so clothes dry more evenly, and some other stuff Im sure.
It really depends, Ive stayed at hostels where the machines run 3+x a day and sometimes some machines will be 5+ years old. There doesnt seem to be any rhyme or reason as far as brand or usage pattern, though I've never seen an old combination unit.
There's no comparison between an old Maytag washer and dryer and a new/current Maytag washer and dryer. This is a case where survivorship bias does not apply, imo. Appliances were built more durable back in the day. There are plenty of older appliances working just fine today while some stuff under 5 years is already getting scrapped because it's too expensive to fix and/or parts aren't even available. It's total nonsense
I'm seeing 20+year old machines taking the same work load as newer machines a fraction of their age and they're still going just fine while some of the new ones are breaking for no reason outside shitty electronics and/or plastic garbage components. I guess it is survivorship bias. Whatever the case i still can't take anyone seriously when they claim modern appliances are better than the older stuff. Reliability is a key feature of an appliance but also serviceability in the long term and neither of those are features of modern appliances (at least prole-grade appliances like i work on)
Anecdotally, I loathe my LG and am trying to figure out what to replace it with.
I have replaced the drain pump on it 5 times, because they did a terrible job designing the strainer basket, and the impeller is very fragile. It only takes a few strands of long hair to reach 3/4" past the strainer basket to tangle and break the impeller.
It's also an all in one, but the dryer functionality was clearly designed as a bolt on afterthought. There's no lint filter so inevitably lint builds up and choked off airflow. Then the air temp gets hot enough to melt the front boot.
When we first got the unit, our 40psi water pressure ruptured two internal hoses because lg couldn't be bothered to use fiber reinforced hoses. Dealing with potential water damage so lg could save a few cents is not worth it.
Ah I see, I feel like lot has changed since that model (nervously looking at my LG). Just remember that current heat pump dryers still have issues with lint clogging the coils dispite the filters and coil cleaning systems.
I have heard Samsung is bad so often on the internet, but my personal experience is different. I've used a Samsung washing machine for almost 10 years now and it still works and looks like the day I bought it. It's very easy to use, has a large front loader door, is quiet and power efficient (as far as that's even possible with a washing machine). Never regretted it.
My brother also has a Samsung washer and dryer, because he loved how large the door was on my washing machine, so he bought one as well. It has served him fine for about 5 years now.
But hey, maybe I'm just lucky with the one I've got.
Before this one I had a Beko washer and dryer. I was unemployed at the time and didn't have a lot of money, so I wanted a cheap model. The salesman in the store said it was bad (this was a long time ago, when they still had salesmen) and would break within a couple of years. But they did upsell an extended warranty for 5 years, which my mom paid for so I could afford to get the washer and dryer. Those units had served me very well for over 15 years. I did have to repair them a couple of times, but nothing major and some normal wear items. I sold those when I bought the Samsung as an upgrade. I switched to natural air drying instead of a dryer for environmental reasons, so I didn't buy a new dryer.
I was lucky enough to get a speed queen washer dryer set on sale because it was a floor model. We've only had one issue with it, a water pump that was making a bunch of noise but was still functioning fine, they ended up swapping it out under warranty anyways.
If that’s the one with the bottom agitator instead of the tower agitator that washer is assssssssssssssss
I had it and my clothes never came out clean. It was supposed to agitate them to roll but it just twisted everything into a knot. Clothes would come out with dry center bits, like water didn’t make it to them AND it took forever.
Everyone always talks about speed queens and I always have to chime in. The cost isn't worth it. As shitty and consumerist as it sounds, it has been far cheaper to replace every few years than buy a speed queen. For one SQ washer I could buy 3 of my Samsung washers, and for one SQ dryer I could buy 4 of my Samsung ones. I got both my washer and dryer used. The washer was bad within the first year and replaced with a near new referb and it has been good for 5 years. The dryer is still working After the 6 years I have had it. They cost me a fraction of the SQ price even with the extra washer purchase and still work. Even if they both broke every other year and got replaced, my 10 year cost is still less than buying a SQ. The price just isn't worth it.
I had to buy 4 little plastic things for $15 every few years to keep my 25yo machine working. Last time I got like 50 of them for $25. I can keep her running for the rest of my life.
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.
I've repaired a few dryers, the new ones have the same aluminium drum like you would expect but for some godforsaken reason they're allowed to mount that drum in place on a plastic ring. The dial components and thermostats used to safely operate the heating elements are also much smaller, which is problematic given that gives them less capacitance for high voltage and heat causing them to fail easier.
But worst of all is that when they fail, not if but when, you can't just take the dial off and file the corrosion off the metal contacts, you have to order an entirely new board completely if they offer it at all. You can't just open the top and front panel with a few screws to take the drum out and do repairs, you have to unscrew every panel in order and detatch them from the additional internal chassis, and you're gonna need like 7 fucking arms to put the damn thing back together.
If I were in charge, these sort of blatant obsolences would be punishable with extradition and federal prison.
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.
It's not like the reasons new ones are more efficient is inherent to the reasons they're more fragile though. You know how you can tell? Because machines at laundromats are just as efficient and don't break all the time!
this, plus what's important to not to use too much detergent and not just use them on 40°C the whole time, because thats a really good temperature for an incubator. Give them a 95°C load once in a while, that kills off whatever is trying to smell in there.
It can tell you it's done, so you notice the notification after a couple hours instead of finding musky clothes a day or two later
It can tell you it's time to do the self-cleaning cycle
If you're doing something unusual, like washing reusable diapers which need extra rinse cycles, you can upload a custom program for that to the washer
Even more unusual, someone had stacked units and was too short to reach the buttons on the washer, so they liked to start it via the app instead of getting a stool
Most of this can be achieved in other ways (like a smart plug measuring the current draw and a simple monthly reminder), but non-techies want turnkey solutions.
I can't see any reason to have WiFi on your dryer, though.
All the things that you mentioned are already possible and have been since a decade or before.
It can tell you it's done, so you notice the notification after a couple hours instead of finding musky clothes a day or two later
There's an estimate and a timer and the machine let's you know when its done. This is a 2014 model to say the age.
It can tell you it's time to do the self-cleaning cycle
This is also something that is already automated and the machine does itself and can do manually if you ask.
If you're doing something unusual, like washing reusable diapers which need extra rinse cycles, you can upload a custom program for that to the washer
You can add extra Rinse cycles for specific clothes and have custom programs too.
Even more unusual, someone had stacked units and was too short to reach the buttons on the washer, so they liked to start it via the app instead of getting a stool
The controls being an inconvenience I can give you that. But, barring that its not stone age you would think it to be.
Fully automatic machines without WiFi work fine and don't need any software updates to begin with.
Love how you took the time for a point-for-point rebuttal while ignoring that I already acknowledged all of that:
Most of this can be achieved in other ways (like a smart plug measuring the current draw and a simple monthly reminder), but non-techies want turnkey solutions.
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.
Which country is this? I think both American and European (or at least Norwegian) washers use standard plugs (although American dryers do not), so I'm just curious which areas use something custom for that.
A regular plug should be able to supply a washer with power, but dryers are a different story in countries using 110V power.
…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.
The manufacturer would have had to have already installed a radio for either of the two. Another downside would be having to have a gateway device for either.
Philips hue uses Zigbee (the hub they give you is a Zigbee gateway). I’m also into the Aqara ecosystem which uses the two as well.
Yeah being new home owners we didn't know you had to clean them. Just like a bachelor guy saying "why do I need to clean the shower it gamers soapy every day!"
Got us a couple of those tablets and it cleared right up
I don't know what it is, but those cleaning tablets will cause my machine to suds up so much that bubbles/water start pouring out of the exhaust and all over my floor. One of the first times it happened, all of the bubbles were screwing up a sensor and I couldn't get the machine to work for a week. I thought it was broken, and was just about to buy a new one when I got the idea to try sucking everything dry with a shop vac.
Why are appliances shit nowadays >:( i bought a house with 20-30 year old appliances that work fine, but decided to start upgrading so I bought a new washer and dryer. The new machines dont work nearly as well and I know they're not going to last even 10 years. We're already having issues with them 4 months later.
The wisdom then was same as now, they don't build em like they used to. Within 5 years the stove stopped working and a year later the air conditioning went out. However the rest of the original stuff is still going and the replacements have lasted fine too and now are the prime examples of what people will point to to say things lasted longer back then.
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
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.
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".
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.
My washer/dryer unit stopped working properly after less than 5 years. Out of warranty. I was damned if I was going to toss it or pay the equivalent to fix. So, I researched, found the problem, purchased the part and fixed it myself. I'm a 58 yo woman who is so sick and tired of the games corporations play to part us with our money.
We have a Miele we bought 13 years ago and which has far outlived the projected amount of washing cycles. I had to replace the water splitter, but apart from that it's still running fine. I heard that more recent Miele machines don't last as long, though.
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.
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.
Got a "entry point" Miele about 9 years ago. Same experience as you. If they have started compromising on quality I don't know where to go.. Asko is now Gorenje and produced in China, and have not pulled out of Russia.
I have mixed experience with Electrolux. Tho' it has excelent representation in Norway.
V-Zug looks really interesting, but only sold in Switzerland and Germany... Perhaps Denmark.
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.
We're suffering from design issues. People want refrigerators with the freezer on the bottom and washers that open in the front.
Then companies want to make you connect to the internet so they can put an app on your cell phone and sell your data to every bidder.
Then, adding insult to injury unless you buy the top of the line they skimp. (And even then sometimes, looking at you Samsung refrigerators) That mid-range dishwasher no longer has a mascerator in the sump and the walls and the swing arms are all made out of plastic with no bearings. They're not putting good seals and isolation around the logic boards.
You can buy good long-lasting stuff if you're careful. But man are you going to pay.
When people look at a $3000 - $4,000 laundry set vs a $1200 set They start to ponder if it washes clothes does it matter.
I just had to get the fridge-freezer in my apartment replaced because the freezer started growing ice everywhere like that was its job, nothing I did helped. When the landlord came to take a look he was surprised by how old the one I had was, he looked it up and it's been here since 1993. I've lived here since 2016, and it worked perfectly until a couple of months ago. While the new fridge-freezer combo (one of those that's half fridge, half freezer on top of each other, same as the old one) is much better in many ways, it's obvious it won't survive for even 1/3rd of the time that the old one did. The one thing that annoys me is that my fridge magnets can't hold themselves up on the new doors because the metal is too thin, they just slide down to the bottom edges.
This has literally been me over the last 3 years. Started making decent money so figured we would replace our old faithful washer and dryer, mostly due to growing family and needing bigger capacity. Fuck Samsung. Washer shit out 2 months outside warranty, and would have cost the price of the washer to fix it. The 'auto balancing system' is fucking bullshit. I don't care if my washer bounces around because the load is unbalanced. My parents' washer could be as unbalanced as shit and didn't matter because the whole bin had supports to the frame of the washer. Was it loud if it was an unbalanced load? Fuck yeah. But you could simply rebalance yourself, and continue if you really wanted to. Not necessary though. It would finish washing if it had power, and no force could stop it.
I'm so thankful my house came with a super old washer and dryer. They work so well. I had to replace the one vent hose thing for the dryer, but that's because my cat thought she could sit on it and it ripped out of the wall when she landed on it.
I'm not saying it is the case in your situation but sometimes very old appliances are so inefficient that it makes sense to replace them on energy savings alone, we had a fridge that I put a meter on to see what it cost us to run, it was a little over $100 more per year then the larger one I was thinking of buying So if this new one lasts 10 years or so it will have paid for itself.
My apartment expects me to pay to use their machines, but they don't fucking clean them. Most of the time, my clothes come out looking and smelling worse than when they went in!
I keep seeing people say this, but they only have a 3 year warranty. Samsung, siemens, and random chinese companies I've never seen in the US offer 20 year, on much cheaper machines.
Samsung is willing to bet they can make a profit while covering 20 years of repairs, whereas Speedqueen is only willing to bet 3. That says to me the speedqueen is less repairable or Samsung and others expect to weasel out of their warranty.
But the actual price is cheaper too, do you suppose the 650USD samsung costs 200 USD to build and ship? A 250 dollar machine with a 6 year warranty would be impressive, and triple their profit margin.
They can. The newer ones have mandatory 'drum clean' cycle every 20 washes or so that runs hot with no detergent and helps to kill and blast out any potential accumulating grime/mould.
So far so good with ours (midrange Samsung front loader). Not expecting it to match the record of of last one, which was an LG and ran for 20 years, but so far it's been great.
I have a ten year old Samsung washer. It started leaking badly a couple years ago. I opened it up and replaced one small rubber tube for $5. If I had to pay someone $500 to fix it, I'd have been better off buying a whole new appliance. I won't be surprised if this is the only repair I have to do for many more years.
I suspect this is actually what's changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it's only a little more than fixing their old one. And when they replace, they tend to think of the old brand as bad, and look for a new brand.
So everyone has negative stories about their appliances across just about every brand, except Speed Queen because those are so expensive, you'll actually pay a repair person to fix it instead of replacing it. It's like how some sports car brands are notoriously high maintenance, but what Ferrari owner cares about maintenance costs?
Decades ago the relative cost of a washer or dryer was much higher compared to repair labor. You'd pay the Maytag man to come fix your dryer if it had a problem.
I suspect this is actually what's changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it's only a little more than fixing their old one.
The guy on an assembly line who places a particular assembly in place and connects the tubes/bolts can perform that task on hundreds of machines in a day. The guy who has to drive to each person's house to replace the exact same part can do maybe 2 a day, assuming he has the right part on hand, and assuming that it's easy to diagnose which part has failed.
Sure, but I don't think the price balance was historically close to today. Appliances may have been, relatively speaking, a much bigger investment to the point where paying a repair technician for a service call was usually the better option. Today, not so much.
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.
Please upvote this comment so it gets visibility. I just want people to hear this.
European brands in America are not good. They are few and far between and are very difficult to repairs when and if they break.
There are a few exceptions like Bosch dishwashers which are very prevalent in America. Don't get the others recommended in this comments thread. At the very least in America they're hard to repair hard to get parts for and are extremely expensive you are much better off sticking with American brands.
What you want to avoid is whirlpool and Samsung. Everything else is fine hands down Whirlpool makes the worst appliances they are truly terrible and should not be purchased under any circumstance. Samsung makes the worst refrigerator worse than even whirlpool. The other appliances to Samsung makes are very mediocre although I will admit their washers and dryers are not bad.
In my opinion LG makes the best appliances in America right now because I service very very little of them. If I do up the service them it can be a little difficult to find parts for them but I still recommend them me
GE is very middle of the road and generally a good option for anything that you want to get they make appliances that are absolutely not the worst but also not necessarily the best.
Stick with the major brands don't get one off European brands here in America they're not worth it.
You always have to leave the door open...
I picked this up from my parents.
When I moved out, I lived with a flatmate for a few years and I left the washing machine door open after using it and my flatmate closed it.
I explained to her why I left it open and she just stared back at me. Not once had she ever thought of this and said it made so much sense. She is about 20 years my senior.
Certain habits seem to be so obvious, but unless handed down, someone may never even think of it.
Reminds me of that guy that never thought to let the shower water get warm before stepping in.
Huh... I have a top loader and grew up with one so it'd never occur to me this is needed, since with a top loader there's no reason to close it, it doesn't get in the way by being open
I'm glad I saw this thread, if I ever have a front loader now I'll know to leave it open :)
If you ever need a new one, front loaders tend to fit more and I believe they're more efficient too. Plus if a top loader grenades itself, it might be a pain to get your laundry out if the drum doesn't move anymore. Front loaders are more expensive though.
Front loaders also wash better.
Totally fair about habits being passed down. However, I lived with someone who I had to explain the whole leave the washer open 2 or 3 times over the course of a couple years. She'd even complain about the smell. She was one dense mother fucker tho.
As well as the hatch where the detergent goes in. Otherwise it will get swampy in there. That part of the post kinda makes me wonder if maybe her mother just takes better care of hers.
I take the detergent tray out after every wash so it dries properly. Occasionally wipe the tray slot down if it needs it, and wash the tray. Seen a few horrible swamps in shared housing over college years.
You know the funny thing?
You can still buy appliances that last and have good service.
But you don't earn enough to afford them, like your parents did.
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.
That is true to an extent, but the main point is that it's not like the past was a glorious land of milk and honey where everything was cheaper and easier. I am always amazed when I see how much things used to cost back then compared to incomes, especially TVs and other electronics. That's a big part of the "built to last" reputation of older goods- they were literally built better, but they were also priced accordingly. A cheap appliance back then was a used one. There simply wasn't an option to buy a cheap one new.
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.
I understood that. the point you don't understand is that people today HAVE LESS MONEY than their parents.
Do you know what median means?
wow, you actually don't understand it. Fascinating. Lets get simple:
70s : Expensive appliance, works long time. can afford it.
Today: Cheap appliance, breaks early, can afford.
Also Today: Expensive appliance, works long time. can't afford it.
I don't think i can make it any easier.
Meh. Buy them second hand. Not even joking. As you said, good one last forever. while there's a bit of a logistics difficulty with second hand large appliances, you can also just rent a van for the day and ask a friend for help.
Problem is you don't know how well it was maintained /cared for by its former owner.
You should be able to get parts, though. It's better to replace a part on a machine that will last 20 years than a part on one that will last 5 years.
Only if it's worth fixing instead of replacing the thing outright. If you have a cheap washer, it may be cheaper to just get another, rather than having to call the repairman and get parts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory applies...
A Speed Queen set sure would be nice to have.
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.
"And for some reason it has Wi-Fi ." will be the last line in humanity's epitaph.
The latest xkcd has one of my favorite hover texts of all time:
I can confirm, I only use the manual time on my dryer because it's the only way to reliably get it dry.
Wifi is there to avoid pressing the capacitive buttons.
I assume they have some better mode options if you get the app and connect it and all…
Never
The washer and dryer at my mom's are 30 years old. She's had repairmen laugh at her for having them, but they're much better made than anything new.
Newer machines are several times more water and energy efficient.
Still nice that they lasted long and were easier to repair.
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.
The resources used to make anything should always be included; called embodied energy.
Of course. Those resources are just a much larger impact percentage wise on an appliance replaced every two years vs 25.
In the 2008 economic slump, the U.K. had something called a “car scrappage scheme”. Shit was the most wasteful thing ever. Also saw really cool classics cubed.
USA had the same thing, "Cash for Clunkers". Some of the cars we were better off getting rid of. Some of them not, whether because they were rare or classic, or old but still more fuel efficient than a truck or SUV. Sure increased the average price of a used car though.
You could find driveable used cars for ~$700 before. Even accounting for inflation now, all you can find now are mechanic specials and parts only.
The newer more efficient machines also give worse washing results.
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!
Efficiency does little for your wallet and the environment if you need to buy/produce a new machine every few years.
(Not to say that we shouldn't strive for efficiency.)
That's the same way i look at it. How much energy is involved in building a new washing machine? How much energy is spent scrapping it? So much waste. I recently had a run of energy-efficient washing machines that all had the same problem with the main CPU board. In 2 weeks i had 4 instances all come out of the woodwork. Only 1 opted for the repair but it cost them almost as much as a new washer. The rest got scrapped. These washers were all about 2 years old when i witnessed this phenomenon (and I ran into yet another one just a couple weeks ago)... Other techs online are sharing similar reports.
Not only are they over-engineering the fuck out of these things for "energy efficiency" which i swear is just an umbrella they use to cover their real goals--to make appliances less user and tech friendly. They want their guys selling their overpriced junk and bespoke computers/sensors/gizmos so they can extract every last cent of value out of the product, then try to sell you another one every 3-5 years almost like leasing a car.
Still, that doesn't mean the tech used to extract greater efficiency is a bad idea -- it's all the approach they take to get there. They're making the cheapest tech possible while trying to sell it for the most $. These digital electronics they design to handle the various functions that give them such energy efficiency are often made with design flaws that aren't worked out before release and/or they're made with the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel components and/or manufacturing standards. If they wanted to make nearly-indestructible computers and sensors and transmissions and motors they absolutely could. They could even make them extremely energy efficient as well, but it's simply not gonna happen.
Energy efficiency is a valid goal, but if that's really what they're going for they need to make some major changes to the way they're approaching it. The engineers in these companies are too smart for this to be the best they can do.
I haven't had an issue with an unbalanced load since I started using a front loader. Mine washes all our blankets without issue other than the >15# weighted blankets, and that's just me not wanting to risk my washer to not go to the Laundromat.
Obviously
If repairman laugh at durable machinery they either just want your money or don't care about longevity. My father usually tells people to keep the old one if it's still working cuz the newer ones break down after a year or two and suck to repair (simple stuff just replaced with electronics that you have to replace whole for half the price of the whole machine).
Not to mention the waste it creates.. In theory it can be recycled. In practice electronic waste is not recycled at the level you'd expect...
As a repair guy that gives a shit about his customers, i encourage folks to fix their older appliances when feasible. I prefer the older stuff and find them to be easier to diagnose and repair a lot of the time.
A couple years ago i had an elderly lady with a Kitchen Aid washer and dryer that were in pristine condition. Based on some lookups, i determined the units to be 37 years old. Until that day, neither unit had been serviced once. Dryer needed a new door switch, lol. To be fair though, i got another call on the dryer a couple years later and it had a bad motor. Almost 40 years with virtually trouble-free operation! They loved the unit and didn't want to deal with the flimsy bullshit on the market today so they opted to repair it. I overhauled the dryer in addition to replacing the motor and it's quiet as the day it was new. What a well-built machine!
Oldest dryer i still service has to be from the 60's or something -- one of those old Maytag dryers that just has the timer in the center of the control panel and you push the timer in to start it. I swear the motors on some of those old units may never die, lol.
This is like that fridge post from yesterday..
The difference is that...cheap washing machines didn't exist. Good modern washing machines last a long time while not wasting money and electricity.
You can't compare the only available appliances of the 70s to the bottom-of-the-barrel now
No. That's not what's happening here.
And just for the record I am an appliance repair tech for the last 20 years.
Hands down appliances from the early 90s to about the 2010s are significantly better than new appliances today.
They are better in everyway. They were made under a different philosophy, they were made to be fixed.
When I stated my career in 2004 I would have a box of common parts that would break for each kind of appliance I would service. Fridge, washer, dryer ext. I wouldn't have to order a part for weeks. I would just drive down to the parts supplier stock up and move on to my next work order. Now all I do is order proprietary parts that are dedicated to one specific model number.
The materials and build quality of older appliances far exceeds that of new ones so much so that I am actually recommending to my clients that they try to find a used appliance rather than buy a new one because it'll probably last longer.
And I've had this argument so many times already on this platform the savings on energy are absolutely negligible. They can easily be ignored. To clarify the way they notate change in energy is by percentages so it'll appear that an appliance is saving 70% more energy but in reality that saving is stretched across 365 days which equates to maybe 25 to 30 cents of savings a day. Or it'll look like you're saving 400 kilowatt hours but again stretched across 365 days that's just over 1 kilowatt hour a day.
The only caveat is the fact that washers use less water which can actually turn into some kind of savings over the course of the year because your water heater will have to heat less water but that's about it.
Generally I fix appliances that are less than 10 years old most of those are refrigerators the extreme vast majority of those are Samsung appliances.
Not a repair tech, but this matches my experience maintaining and repairing my appliances. My early 80s whirlpool range and oven have had small issues here and there, but generally require swapping one part hidden behind some screws and will take under an hour. My Samsung dishwasher not only does a piss poor job, it also throws LC codes every few days. After the fourth time pulling it from the cabinet I had to put a series of shims to lift the leak sensor off the drip tray and buy a separate Wi-Fi moisture detector. My Samsung fridge (4yo) has a broken door ice dispenser and intermittently decides not to dispense water too. Old LG unit had a linear compressor that shit the bed three times before they refused to do any more warranty work on it.
Ya... The liner compressors on lgs were bad. They did resolve that issue though so it's not a problem anymore.
Man... Used to do a lot compresor 3-4 times a week.
Bro, fuck the Samsung fridge engineers that decided my ice machine doesn't need to actually be properly insulated and designed an ice box that's basically going to break and it's only a matter of time.
I have to keep reminding myself to defrost and clean it out. Last time it got so bad I couldn't even take the ice tray out without a ton of force. Then I melted the ice but derped and warped the little guide post thingy with heat. Had a tech come out and say it's unfixable, cool time flushing my money down the toilet ... After that I did what I should have done and just reheated it again and bent it and voila problem (I made) solved.
But seriously I hate that fridge with a passion. So much so I'm going out of my way to never buy Samsung again, their customer care is atrocious and quality is hit or miss. I have some Samsung appliances that have been bulletproof so far but I genuinely don't want to have to cross my fingers their QA didn't fail because trying to deal with their support for anything is a Kafkaesque hell.
Use a steamer instead of a blow-dryer or heat gun, next time. I just had to defrost my Samsung freezer to fix a leak, no warping with the steamer.
Ya... I tell my clients that Samsung fridges aren't going to make ice. That's just the way they're made.
Samsung makes the worst fridge period. Their other appliances are fine. Very middle of the road. But their fridges suck ass.
Agree, I have other Samsung appliances and they're just fine. Just the fridge is a goddamn nightmare.
But isn’t your sample biased because you’re a repair tech? People with working appliances don’t call you.
How often do you encounter, for example, a broken Miele washing machine?
We work on very very little Miele. So much so that I only encountered the brand a handful of times and have no recollection as to how those repairs went which usually means I didn't come back to do said repairs.
However, Miele has a very good reputation for reliability.
Cuz nobody can afford them, or they just don’t do real sales numbers in your geo, or because they’re phenomenal……. I wonder!
This new washer is High Efficiency!
btw you’ll want to run a double extra rinse if you don’t want the clothes to immediately stink when you open the washer cough yes super HE
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.
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.
Missed that, what’s the joke?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
So was it worth it? How long ago did you do it and what are the differences you've noticed so far?
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
!remindme a decade
Hope it outlasts you (200 years!!)
Hope our instances last that long
I want to start an appliance company that offers 10 year warranties with an additional 5 year replaceable parts availability promise. The designs will be simple, functionality simple with minimal quality of life improvements, and all repair manuals will be published on the website along with tutorial videos, while also banking on building a product that simply lasts longer.
I'm willing to bet that if that is what you advertise on, the longevity of the product at a minimal price, then the company should do fine.
This was unironically Maytag, they enshitified with the rest. The Maytag man was a real thing.
You won't. You'll get annihilated by the next Chinese competitor who produces a piece of shit machine that breaks in 13 months like clockwork (and has a 12 month warranty), but sells for 1/2 or 2/3 of the price of your machine.
The average consumer is dogshit at conceptualizing the actual value of a product over its lifetime in proportion to its cost. They'll just see that the next machine on display at Best Buy or whatever looks modern and costs less to buy up front, and then they'll buy that one. When it breaks they'll bitch and moan on Facebook and Nextdoor and write ranty one star reviews everywhere, and then wheel right back to Best Buy and buy another machine just like it.
At the end of the day these are commodity items. It's reasonable for consumers to buy whatever's cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.
The solution can't come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can't be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.
The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don't often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can't buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore... So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.
Weirdly enough, the washing machines I've seen here in China aren't that cheap, like 800-1500 USD price range, and they tend to be much smaller than the US ones.
Stuff made in China for domestic use bears little to no resemblance to the stuff that Chinese factories are contracted to make for export.
So much so that two doors down from my work is a place that does a booming business whose sole purpose is to allow people in China to purchase made-in-China stuff that's only sold in the US that they can't get at home and ship it back to China. It sounds absolutely asinine but there's a huge market for it and those guys are busy all day long packing stuff up and cramming into shipping containers to send right back to where it was made... but can't be bought.
Incredibly clever, businessfolk & manufacturers in China. Some will tell you “hoverboards” were essentially invented in the bars of Shenzhen.*
Are external factors preventing them from selling directly to the audience you’re describing?
Edit: *source
Bizarre. I wonder why they go all the way to the US instead of Vietnam or Taiwan.
Good luck getting affordable steel or aluminum for manufacturing in this economy. If you do have some investors/capital, though, I would love to apply as an engineer. I think a good selling point would be displaying them in-store with the panel open, or training distributors to open them as demonstration, showing how reliable it is and how easy they are to service.
Your product would be about three times the price of the cheap shit.
It might work in the current world with good advertising - Smarter Every Day (on YouTube) is part of a project to make a better, made in America, barbeque
brushcleanerThere are a few companies now selling better quality stuff successfully, but I have seen no one doing so in whitegoods
Buy European: Miele, Rex Electrolux, Beko (Turkish, don't get into that), Smeg, Candy, AEG, etc...
Don't want to jinx it, but my Electrolux washer-dryier is 7 years old and still like new, despite being relatively cheap and despite combined machines being more problematic.
Buy European and not cheap
Our super cheap Candy (Washer and a drier) has been going for 5 years now without issue 🤷 Though i'd buy a different brand if i had to again and wasn't pressed for money, I am definitely surprised how well it's doing.
I had a very different experience with the brand (washing machine actively trying to kill me, for exemple)
Maybe there's a difference between the different factories making them ?
that could be, or maybe I got lucky. In any case, I'm not complaining. i remember it was like 750 bucks for both machines, and with other brands it would have been 800-1200 for a single machine
Reddit nitpickers have moved over
They make acceptable and pretty toasters and similar appliances, but avoid this brand like a plague for fridges
It's such an unfortunate name. They really need to rebrand.
I heard the guy who founded the company was a real smeghead
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.
Interesting, I heard plenty of horror stories about their fridges being low quality.
My Euromaid is a decade old. Had to replace a $30 part after 5 years, but no other issues.
My Bosch washing machine is eight years old and works fine.
Haier bought it in 2018
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?
or LG, who are currently the leaders in reliability.
Everytime this kind of topic comes up, it's always Miele that gets mentioned.
for sure!
You can get a rough estimate of how much of those reliability figures are down to absolute scattershot luck of the draw, because Roper's (Whirlpool) only laundry machines on the market are literally rebadges of the only Amana machines (also Whirlpool) with no mechanical changes whatsoever, but they score "better." Squinting at that image, it appears Amana is possibly #20.
Also, the Kenmore bar is complete bullshit since Kenmore/Sears never manufactured a single appliance at any point in history. Every Kenmore model is actually a rebadge of some other manufacturer's product (handy lookup chart located here) so the build methodology can vary wildly from model to model. So the fact that these are not separated out into their actual brands given how trivial this is to do indicates to me once again that Consumer Reports does not actually have any idea what the hell they're doing.
Even if you want to group things just by their nameplate since that's what the consumer will see, fine. But those examples in particular need to have a big fat asterisk next to them and an explanation of what's actually going on behind the scenes.
It's possible that consumer's perception of reliability is affected by warranty and how well/quick repairs are made, which might be a point of difference. There's also possibly binning of parts going on, with higher reliability batches going into one brand over the other.
I have a Miele vacuum, what a beast (light and sturdy and powerful), never regretted buying it, way over a decade old maybe 15 years.
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.
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.
Boots theory
My child is named after Vimes
Exactly what I was gonna say.
I think you could maybe use less time on the Internet. Social media has a nasty habit of telling everyone that everything they hear is a code for something else; spend too long reading that junk and it’ll convince you that everyone in the world is a secret bigot.
Dogwhistles are real bestie. I think this says way more about you, than the person you're replying to.
What was described here clearly wasn't an instance of one though. It was two different people reading a saying two different ways.
Lol, considering I heard it all the time growing up in the 80s you might be a bit off on your assessment.
I grew up in a middle class suburb where the it was used as an insult kinda like " poor people are poor because they are stupid"
She grew up in the Ozarks and they used it more as a " we got ways to make do"
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?
Inkjet printer disease.
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°.
It will also use much more energy and water, because they're built to wash extremely quickly, efficiency be damned.
This isn't true at all. Laundromats have to pay for water and electricity, that eats into their profits.
Water and electricity is cheap compared to other cost (location, wages). It is more profitable to have more customers per machine per day.
Honestly buy something that is good quality but doesn't have stupid shit, do I need my washing machine and my toaster talking to each other? No but the stripped down no frills ones are normally built to be as absolutely cheap as possible.
Damn. So if you have money, you get decent products. Thanks for the great reminder.
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.
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).
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
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.
There’s some people in this thread who’ve had shocking bad luck with their appliances and think it’s normal. The only appliances I’ve ever had break in the last few decades were either already decades old or broke because I did something dumb.
Mine does pretty music when done!
I have a video on my phone of a guy playing the tune on guitar to prank his wife/girlfriend!
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.
A good dryer senses the moisture and adjusts the heat so it dosnt shrink your clothes and you dont have to take them out damp and hang them anyway, throws in a few reverse spins so clothes dry more evenly, and some other stuff Im sure.
But generally are built like shit.
It really depends, Ive stayed at hostels where the machines run 3+x a day and sometimes some machines will be 5+ years old. There doesnt seem to be any rhyme or reason as far as brand or usage pattern, though I've never seen an old combination unit.
Survivorship bias is a heck of a drug.
There's no comparison between an old Maytag washer and dryer and a new/current Maytag washer and dryer. This is a case where survivorship bias does not apply, imo. Appliances were built more durable back in the day. There are plenty of older appliances working just fine today while some stuff under 5 years is already getting scrapped because it's too expensive to fix and/or parts aren't even available. It's total nonsense
Your penultimate statement is an absolutely textbook example of survivorship bias.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2025/03/01/do_household_appliances_really_not_last_as_long_as_they_used_to_1093575.html
The average lifespan of a washer has declined a little but the frequency of use during that lifespan has increased measurably.
I'm seeing 20+year old machines taking the same work load as newer machines a fraction of their age and they're still going just fine while some of the new ones are breaking for no reason outside shitty electronics and/or plastic garbage components. I guess it is survivorship bias. Whatever the case i still can't take anyone seriously when they claim modern appliances are better than the older stuff. Reliability is a key feature of an appliance but also serviceability in the long term and neither of those are features of modern appliances (at least prole-grade appliances like i work on)
The appliances from 30 years ago that fell apart early aren’t here to tell their tale.
A shame because they're still fixable all these years later while the new shit is going obsolete before your very eyes
You really are having a struggle with the concept of survivorship bias aren’t you?
Yes
Don't buy American washers, I think only speed queen still bothers with quality.
Also don't get a Samsung one from what I hear. Apparently LG is okay.
Actually yes. Samsung makes pretty bad appliances although their washers and dryers in my opinion are fine.
But, in a surprise turn of events LG makes really good appliance across the board. I recommend them to my clients.
LG appliances are disposable. The South Korean companies want you on the new appliance replacement schedule as your cell phone.
Anecdotally, I loathe my LG and am trying to figure out what to replace it with.
I have replaced the drain pump on it 5 times, because they did a terrible job designing the strainer basket, and the impeller is very fragile. It only takes a few strands of long hair to reach 3/4" past the strainer basket to tangle and break the impeller.
It's also an all in one, but the dryer functionality was clearly designed as a bolt on afterthought. There's no lint filter so inevitably lint builds up and choked off airflow. Then the air temp gets hot enough to melt the front boot.
When we first got the unit, our 40psi water pressure ruptured two internal hoses because lg couldn't be bothered to use fiber reinforced hoses. Dealing with potential water damage so lg could save a few cents is not worth it.
I will actively avoid LG going forward.
Get a washer from a brand that has made washers for more than a decade.
If you’re paying for an LG I’d say get a speed queen top loader and enjoy not having to worry about your washer again,
Which one did you get? All I've heard are good things from LGs current washer/ dryers
WM3477HW
I love the all in one concept, but this machine has made me reluctant to get one again.
There's a GE all in one with heat pump drying that I think would be the functionality I want, but the machine is huge.
Ah I see, I feel like lot has changed since that model (nervously looking at my LG). Just remember that current heat pump dryers still have issues with lint clogging the coils dispite the filters and coil cleaning systems.
I have heard Samsung is bad so often on the internet, but my personal experience is different. I've used a Samsung washing machine for almost 10 years now and it still works and looks like the day I bought it. It's very easy to use, has a large front loader door, is quiet and power efficient (as far as that's even possible with a washing machine). Never regretted it.
My brother also has a Samsung washer and dryer, because he loved how large the door was on my washing machine, so he bought one as well. It has served him fine for about 5 years now.
But hey, maybe I'm just lucky with the one I've got.
Before this one I had a Beko washer and dryer. I was unemployed at the time and didn't have a lot of money, so I wanted a cheap model. The salesman in the store said it was bad (this was a long time ago, when they still had salesmen) and would break within a couple of years. But they did upsell an extended warranty for 5 years, which my mom paid for so I could afford to get the washer and dryer. Those units had served me very well for over 15 years. I did have to repair them a couple of times, but nothing major and some normal wear items. I sold those when I bought the Samsung as an upgrade. I switched to natural air drying instead of a dryer for environmental reasons, so I didn't buy a new dryer.
I was lucky enough to get a speed queen washer dryer set on sale because it was a floor model. We've only had one issue with it, a water pump that was making a bunch of noise but was still functioning fine, they ended up swapping it out under warranty anyways.
Maytag has one good model too.
If that’s the one with the bottom agitator instead of the tower agitator that washer is assssssssssssssss
I had it and my clothes never came out clean. It was supposed to agitate them to roll but it just twisted everything into a knot. Clothes would come out with dry center bits, like water didn’t make it to them AND it took forever.
It is not, it has a tower agitator and works great.
Goood goood good.
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.
Pretty sure this is true for all modern washers, ours is top load and it says leave door open when not in use.
Mine (Miele) actually says to close the door completely to reduce the possibility of small children or pets entering. We ignore that bit though.
Mine says not to close it to avoid mold and shit
That's dumb design.
It's annoying, but it's a trade-off for front-loaders being better at cleaning.
Show us your non-dumb way to keep the water in without making the door watertight, then.
Spend a little more and get yourself a speed queen top loader and never replace it again.
But also … my Maytag (same brand as my parents that came with the house that was built in 82) high efficiency front loader has been reliable af too.
Just don’t get a washer from a brand that is just a tech brand that now makes washers.
Everyone always talks about speed queens and I always have to chime in. The cost isn't worth it. As shitty and consumerist as it sounds, it has been far cheaper to replace every few years than buy a speed queen. For one SQ washer I could buy 3 of my Samsung washers, and for one SQ dryer I could buy 4 of my Samsung ones. I got both my washer and dryer used. The washer was bad within the first year and replaced with a near new referb and it has been good for 5 years. The dryer is still working After the 6 years I have had it. They cost me a fraction of the SQ price even with the extra washer purchase and still work. Even if they both broke every other year and got replaced, my 10 year cost is still less than buying a SQ. The price just isn't worth it.
I guess you assign no value to the waste of using 3 to 4 times the number of machines
I had to buy 4 little plastic things for $15 every few years to keep my 25yo machine working. Last time I got like 50 of them for $25. I can keep her running for the rest of my life.
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.
If the only issue is the looks, could you not do something like a vinyl wrap or just plaster it with art?
Fuck in door ice makers. You're adding complexity and making the whole thing less reliable and less efficient.
The fridge is the appliance that consumes most power. A modern fridge, with a high energy saving rating will pay itself in a couple of years.
I've repaired a few dryers, the new ones have the same aluminium drum like you would expect but for some godforsaken reason they're allowed to mount that drum in place on a plastic ring. The dial components and thermostats used to safely operate the heating elements are also much smaller, which is problematic given that gives them less capacitance for high voltage and heat causing them to fail easier.
But worst of all is that when they fail, not if but when, you can't just take the dial off and file the corrosion off the metal contacts, you have to order an entirely new board completely if they offer it at all. You can't just open the top and front panel with a few screws to take the drum out and do repairs, you have to unscrew every panel in order and detatch them from the additional internal chassis, and you're gonna need like 7 fucking arms to put the damn thing back together.
If I were in charge, these sort of blatant obsolences would be punishable with extradition and federal prison.
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.
It's not like the reasons new ones are more efficient is inherent to the reasons they're more fragile though. You know how you can tell? Because machines at laundromats are just as efficient and don't break all the time!
I owned a laundromat. They are not efficient and cost a mint. The focus is on "wash fast, next customer please."
For front loaders you should leave the door cracked at least. Also clean under that rubber seal once in a while...
this, plus what's important to not to use too much detergent and not just use them on 40°C the whole time, because thats a really good temperature for an incubator. Give them a 95°C load once in a while, that kills off whatever is trying to smell in there.
Don't forget the wifi not connecting or staying connected, keeping it from getting updates for reasons mortals aren't supposed to know.
Why should a washing machine need updates to begin with?
Always online model of laundry DRM. When the servers shut down then the washing machine stops working.
Also, washing machines tend to eat up one sock. Now there's going to be a micro transaction to get the sock back.
[email protected]
So that manufacturers can patch up remote exploits, duh!
Why in God's name would you connect it to WiFi?
Most of this can be achieved in other ways (like a smart plug measuring the current draw and a simple monthly reminder), but non-techies want turnkey solutions.
I can't see any reason to have WiFi on your dryer, though.
All the things that you mentioned are already possible and have been since a decade or before.
There's an estimate and a timer and the machine let's you know when its done. This is a 2014 model to say the age.
This is also something that is already automated and the machine does itself and can do manually if you ask.
You can add extra Rinse cycles for specific clothes and have custom programs too.
The controls being an inconvenience I can give you that. But, barring that its not stone age you would think it to be.
Fully automatic machines without WiFi work fine and don't need any software updates to begin with.
Love how you took the time for a point-for-point rebuttal while ignoring that I already acknowledged all of that:
I read your smart-plug bit. But, even that's not necessary to achieve most of it since its built-in modern day washing machines.
I made that comment to highlight to others and for information purpose like yours was as a reply to "why would it connect to WiFi?" .
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.
Which country is this? I think both American and European (or at least Norwegian) washers use standard plugs (although American dryers do not), so I'm just curious which areas use something custom for that.
A regular plug should be able to supply a washer with power, but dryers are a different story in countries using 110V power.
I bought a new washing machine last year that has no WiFi, if you don't want to you don't have to buy shit like that
I remember a guy actually monitoring how much data his washing machine used and it was like 6 gigs a month. Is it mining bit coin???
And it has to be the horrible, congested and overused 2.4 GHz band.
They would need to double the costs to accommodate both 2.4GHz and 5Ghz bands if they choose the latter for backwards compatibility with electronics.
…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?
The manufacturer would have had to have already installed a radio for either of the two. Another downside would be having to have a gateway device for either.
Philips hue uses Zigbee (the hub they give you is a Zigbee gateway). I’m also into the Aqara ecosystem which uses the two as well.
Yeah being new home owners we didn't know you had to clean them. Just like a bachelor guy saying "why do I need to clean the shower it gamers soapy every day!"
Got us a couple of those tablets and it cleared right up
I don't know what it is, but those cleaning tablets will cause my machine to suds up so much that bubbles/water start pouring out of the exhaust and all over my floor. One of the first times it happened, all of the bubbles were screwing up a sensor and I couldn't get the machine to work for a week. I thought it was broken, and was just about to buy a new one when I got the idea to try sucking everything dry with a shop vac.
Weird, that didn't happen to us, glad you caught it and figured it out though
Why are appliances shit nowadays >:( i bought a house with 20-30 year old appliances that work fine, but decided to start upgrading so I bought a new washer and dryer. The new machines dont work nearly as well and I know they're not going to last even 10 years. We're already having issues with them 4 months later.
And also planned obsolescence
Partly it's survivorship bias.
20 years back my family got a new house.
The wisdom then was same as now, they don't build em like they used to. Within 5 years the stove stopped working and a year later the air conditioning went out. However the rest of the original stuff is still going and the replacements have lasted fine too and now are the prime examples of what people will point to to say things lasted longer back then.
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
At least it's Wi-Fi connected.
I need my FBI guy to know that I have clean clothes for work in the morning.
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.
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".
I believe this because I had an old microwave from the 80s not a single issue, bought a new one the light went after a few weeks lol
The problem with microwaves is the ones from the '80s were far less powerful than new ones
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.
My washer/dryer unit stopped working properly after less than 5 years. Out of warranty. I was damned if I was going to toss it or pay the equivalent to fix. So, I researched, found the problem, purchased the part and fixed it myself. I'm a 58 yo woman who is so sick and tired of the games corporations play to part us with our money.
"Our parents" ... ?
👀
Hey step brother.... ;)
ol' Genghis
Buy Electrolux or V-Zug.
Love my lux
Same. Never had problems with any of their products.
We have a Miele we bought 13 years ago and which has far outlived the projected amount of washing cycles. I had to replace the water splitter, but apart from that it's still running fine. I heard that more recent Miele machines don't last as long, though.
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.
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.
Got a "entry point" Miele about 9 years ago. Same experience as you. If they have started compromising on quality I don't know where to go.. Asko is now Gorenje and produced in China, and have not pulled out of Russia.
Electrolux, V-Zug
I have mixed experience with Electrolux. Tho' it has excelent representation in Norway. V-Zug looks really interesting, but only sold in Switzerland and Germany... Perhaps Denmark.
I personally used the same washing machine from the time I was 13 until I was 36.
Been through some dryers though, and the old washer gave out a few years ago. I probably could have repaired it but I couldn’t find the time.
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.
Luck of the draw.
We're suffering from design issues. People want refrigerators with the freezer on the bottom and washers that open in the front.
Then companies want to make you connect to the internet so they can put an app on your cell phone and sell your data to every bidder.
Then, adding insult to injury unless you buy the top of the line they skimp. (And even then sometimes, looking at you Samsung refrigerators) That mid-range dishwasher no longer has a mascerator in the sump and the walls and the swing arms are all made out of plastic with no bearings. They're not putting good seals and isolation around the logic boards.
You can buy good long-lasting stuff if you're careful. But man are you going to pay.
When people look at a $3000 - $4,000 laundry set vs a $1200 set They start to ponder if it washes clothes does it matter.
I just had to get the fridge-freezer in my apartment replaced because the freezer started growing ice everywhere like that was its job, nothing I did helped. When the landlord came to take a look he was surprised by how old the one I had was, he looked it up and it's been here since 1993. I've lived here since 2016, and it worked perfectly until a couple of months ago. While the new fridge-freezer combo (one of those that's half fridge, half freezer on top of each other, same as the old one) is much better in many ways, it's obvious it won't survive for even 1/3rd of the time that the old one did. The one thing that annoys me is that my fridge magnets can't hold themselves up on the new doors because the metal is too thin, they just slide down to the bottom edges.
This has literally been me over the last 3 years. Started making decent money so figured we would replace our old faithful washer and dryer, mostly due to growing family and needing bigger capacity. Fuck Samsung. Washer shit out 2 months outside warranty, and would have cost the price of the washer to fix it. The 'auto balancing system' is fucking bullshit. I don't care if my washer bounces around because the load is unbalanced. My parents' washer could be as unbalanced as shit and didn't matter because the whole bin had supports to the frame of the washer. Was it loud if it was an unbalanced load? Fuck yeah. But you could simply rebalance yourself, and continue if you really wanted to. Not necessary though. It would finish washing if it had power, and no force could stop it.
Requires wifi. Sends gigs of data back to the manufacturer everyday. But it has pretty chime.
Should’a bought a Speed Queen
I'm so thankful my house came with a super old washer and dryer. They work so well. I had to replace the one vent hose thing for the dryer, but that's because my cat thought she could sit on it and it ripped out of the wall when she landed on it.
I'm not saying it is the case in your situation but sometimes very old appliances are so inefficient that it makes sense to replace them on energy savings alone, we had a fridge that I put a meter on to see what it cost us to run, it was a little over $100 more per year then the larger one I was thinking of buying So if this new one lasts 10 years or so it will have paid for itself.
Your appliances and devices will all be enshittified and you will be happy.
I receive them with joy.
My apartment expects me to pay to use their machines, but they don't fucking clean them. Most of the time, my clothes come out looking and smelling worse than when they went in!
Speedqueen
I keep seeing people say this, but they only have a 3 year warranty. Samsung, siemens, and random chinese companies I've never seen in the US offer 20 year, on much cheaper machines.
The thing about speed queen is that they go out of their way to be repairable though.
Samsung is willing to bet they can make a profit while covering 20 years of repairs, whereas Speedqueen is only willing to bet 3. That says to me the speedqueen is less repairable or Samsung and others expect to weasel out of their warranty.
Yeah, they make them so cheap they can give you 3 machines over the life of the warranty.
But the actual price is cheaper too, do you suppose the 650USD samsung costs 200 USD to build and ship? A 250 dollar machine with a 6 year warranty would be impressive, and triple their profit margin.
Front loaders suck for moisture retention. They need more care between cycles to prevent build up.
They can. The newer ones have mandatory 'drum clean' cycle every 20 washes or so that runs hot with no detergent and helps to kill and blast out any potential accumulating grime/mould.
So far so good with ours (midrange Samsung front loader). Not expecting it to match the record of of last one, which was an LG and ran for 20 years, but so far it's been great.
I hate that my washing machine has electronic buttons rather than mechanical rotating interrupters.
I have a ten year old Samsung washer. It started leaking badly a couple years ago. I opened it up and replaced one small rubber tube for $5. If I had to pay someone $500 to fix it, I'd have been better off buying a whole new appliance. I won't be surprised if this is the only repair I have to do for many more years.
I suspect this is actually what's changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it's only a little more than fixing their old one. And when they replace, they tend to think of the old brand as bad, and look for a new brand.
So everyone has negative stories about their appliances across just about every brand, except Speed Queen because those are so expensive, you'll actually pay a repair person to fix it instead of replacing it. It's like how some sports car brands are notoriously high maintenance, but what Ferrari owner cares about maintenance costs?
Decades ago the relative cost of a washer or dryer was much higher compared to repair labor. You'd pay the Maytag man to come fix your dryer if it had a problem.
The guy on an assembly line who places a particular assembly in place and connects the tubes/bolts can perform that task on hundreds of machines in a day. The guy who has to drive to each person's house to replace the exact same part can do maybe 2 a day, assuming he has the right part on hand, and assuming that it's easy to diagnose which part has failed.
Sure, but I don't think the price balance was historically close to today. Appliances may have been, relatively speaking, a much bigger investment to the point where paying a repair technician for a service call was usually the better option. Today, not so much.
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.
Wow, a sample size of 2. Very scientific
the wording makes it 3 (hopefully)
This is a myth
Please upvote this comment so it gets visibility. I just want people to hear this.
European brands in America are not good. They are few and far between and are very difficult to repairs when and if they break.
There are a few exceptions like Bosch dishwashers which are very prevalent in America. Don't get the others recommended in this comments thread. At the very least in America they're hard to repair hard to get parts for and are extremely expensive you are much better off sticking with American brands.
What you want to avoid is whirlpool and Samsung. Everything else is fine hands down Whirlpool makes the worst appliances they are truly terrible and should not be purchased under any circumstance. Samsung makes the worst refrigerator worse than even whirlpool. The other appliances to Samsung makes are very mediocre although I will admit their washers and dryers are not bad.
In my opinion LG makes the best appliances in America right now because I service very very little of them. If I do up the service them it can be a little difficult to find parts for them but I still recommend them me
GE is very middle of the road and generally a good option for anything that you want to get they make appliances that are absolutely not the worst but also not necessarily the best.
Stick with the major brands don't get one off European brands here in America they're not worth it.