Microblog Memes

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.

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.

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.

If the only issue is the looks, could you not do something like a vinyl wrap or just plaster it with art?

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!

"And for some reason it has Wi-Fi ." will be the last line in humanity's epitaph.

They didn't buy up Bosch (to my knowledge) but maybe they're not in the us?

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.

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.

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.

This was unironically Maytag, they enshitified with the rest. The Maytag man was a real thing.

Newer machines are several times more water and energy efficient.

Still nice that they lasted long and were easier to repair.

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).

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.

Pretty sure this is true for all modern washers, ours is top load and it says leave door open when not in use.

Candy

Buy European and not cheap

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".