Something that most people fail to do on their tools and appliances is maintenance. My house is full of cheap appliances that are pushing ten years of life and running great, but they require work. Filters need to be changed on dishwashers and laundry machines, people never check these often enough. For example, most people I know don’t own an air compressor, which means they never fully clean out all the motor killing dust. Computers, vacuum filters, air purifiers, fridge compressors, all these items need to be blasted with air, way more than you can get from a little can of air like IT people love to use.
Get the proper tools to maintain your things, and even the cheap stuff will last a while.
just a reminder that survivorship bias is a huge thing. There have been shitty products from back then too. Many. We just don’t see them now, because only the few good products have survived. The same happens today.
Its not all planned obsolescence and not all obsolescence is bad. Imagine having a 40 year old fridge that doesn’t cool shit and burn 3 times the energy.
2 tips for good quality products now: end capitalism and spend money on the right products (not just convenience) and the right people to repair them.
and the right people to repair them.
Also, the right to repair them.
7 to 10 is beyond generous by today’s standard.
Well it’s called a startup because you start it up mfer
7 to 10? Gtfo. Half this shit breaks the first year. Good idea though.
Then is under warranty good for you
Nobody wants to mail shit to the manufacturer and wait 6-8 weeks for a replacement piece of garbage.
Great idea! Do cars next. They should be a helluva lot cheaper than they are (and work better).
Cars work far better now then they used to. Don’t be daft. Do we also want to go back to paying auto workers 2.90 an hour? That’s one big thing that would drop the cost of a vehicle down. How about paying all the workers that extract and make the steel and other materials 1 to 2 an hour. That would certainly help.
Car reliability is incredible now vs older cars. It’s kind of amazing what they’ve done. But the plastic exteriors suck. Saturn’s concept of dyed plastic instead of painted makes more sense, but I don’t think they do that anymore.
Yeah I remember in the '80s how few 1960s cars were left around. Now we’re in 2026 and we have parking lots full of early 2000s cars with no reliability issues.
Yeah those cars won’t pass a safety test. One of the reasons why cars have gotten more expensive is because of safety regulations and lower fuel consumption demands. Even if you take out all the gadgets it won’t be as cheap as cars in the past.
You know what? I’m willing to take that risk.
TAKE OUT ALL THE GADGETS.
There’s a new electric truck coming from a new company called Slate later this year with that concept. Removing everything they can, even has hand crank windows.
Including antispin, rear view camera and heating? A friend of mine once got into veteran cars, and she needed a different one to drive during winter.
Tbf, I hate rear cameras (much prefer decent sightlines); have had modern cars without heat before, I have jackets, and I delivered pizza in it for a living no less; and we don’t really get much snow where I live. I’d be fine.
In fact, IIRC, the gadget of “reverse camera”, and therefore a screen, is mandatory for all new cars in the EU.
Yeah, but visibility out of contemporary cars is complete shit nowadays, so it makes sense supplementary tech needs to cover the myriad blindspots. You can put a kindergarten in front of one of today’s high-bonnet trucks and not know anyone’s there. And that’s in front of the vehicle.
Even if that’s not the legislation in the US, it’s the fact of the matter here as well. No new car comes without a stupid screen in the dash
I’m tired of corporate greed expanding because of a corporations or governments “concern” for my safety. I want freedom and opportunity, not protection. I get what you are saying though.
Safety is one thing. Crumple zones, seat belt designs… ALL of this is laudable, but it sure as heck isn’t where the costs are inflating so much.
It’s linear increase in size with exponential increase in cost, always-on telemetry, and thousands of little “value-ads” that have absolutely NOTHING to do with getting you from point A to point B.
You can do this with some older cars but you have to put them together yourself. Kit Cars are replicas that after you make yourself, I’m pretty sure you can get road legal.
No, you don’t want a car like those old ones. Changing/filing points and distributor cap every 6 months, spark plugs and wires every year. All for a car that was scrap at 100,000 miles no matter what you did.
That’s exactly why I would want a car like that. I can maintain/repair going forward. Why pay over sixty grand for a vehicle that will still be crap at a hundred thousand miles at the end of the day. All so I can parallel park a bit easier? Parallel parking is easy, just takes a bit of practice.
All so I can parallel park a bit easier? Parallel parking is easy, just takes a bit of practice.
Yes, the only difference between old cars and new ones is parallel parking automation. Literally the only reason anyone would want one.
I don’t think you’re being very sincere. That was one example. I’m not writing a treatise, I’m quipping on the internet. Not all technology should be automatically incorporated just because it exists. Good edgy, comment though. Helpful. If only I could be so sarcastically dismissive I could maybe start a blog or get more followers on my old “MySpace” page. /s
God no. I had a 1967 mustang. Had to fix it every time I drove it, it drank gas like a gasoholic, everything was manual but in terms of life and cost, it was the most expense for the fewest miles and not reliable. Like even if it had been newly manufactured to the same specs it would not be reliable or safe or even fun to drive.
My brother, meanwhile, had a Corolla he kept for 300k miles without much maintenance.
I am still in my 2014 Honda, and expect to be able to use it for 10 more years. Now do I think the 2024 better than the 2014? Not really, most of what I want was already in this one, but modern cars are so much better built than vintage cars were.
I always say this when a question like this comes up:
Find a repair person for what you’re looking to buy and ask them which brands and models last the longest and are easiest to get parts for and repair in your country. They are the people that actually know the answer.
Good quality shit still exists, you just need to pay for it, and if you remember the Terry Pratchett boots story, you’ll know paying more up front is going to save you money in the long run
Yeah people don’t realize that appliances were a LOT more expensive back then too, especially as a proportion of income. A washer dryer set in 1959 cost $380, at a time when the median household income was only $5,400. That means to buy a washer dryer set, they would have to spend 7% of their pre-tax income. Currently, the cheapest washer dryer set will set you back $1300, and the median household income is $83,000, so it’s about 1.5% of the annual household income. If you’re willing to pay what people were proportionally willing to pay in 1959, you can still buy a washer dryer set that will last a lifetime. Most people just aren’t.
If you’re willing to pay what people were proportionally willing to pay in 1959, you can still buy a washer dryer set that will last a lifetime
If only that was true. It isn’t.
The rest is spot on.
It actually is true. Sure the most expensive Maytag is basically the same as the least expensive one with extra computers on it, but if you look at brands like Speed Queen they’re built to last with simple repairable parts. If you haven’t been to a Laundromat, you’ve probably never heard of them, but they are the Queen of laundromat equipment. Why? Because Laundromats lose money when their shit isn’t working and they need rugged equipment that will work for a long time and that they’re able to do maintenance on. When looking at household goods where it seems like you can’t buy good stuff at any price anymore, look at what the pros are using. They will get what they need and someone will be making it for them.
It absolutely is. Buy a Speed Queen.
GNU Terry Pratchett
A man is not dead while his name is still spoken
😭
Even the expensiver stuff is garbage now.
You have to look in a different direction.
High end residential is more features and bullshit. It’s fragile.
You want commercial/industrial like a speed queen. Ugly as shit. No AI. No Wifi. Not even an LCD. Just an analog dial.
Yeah my next washer dryer set will be speed queen because I am sick of buying cheaply built computerized shit and it’s possible it’s the last one I’ll ever buy.
Th problem with that is most people don’t repair anymore as it’s often cheaper to replace.
And if it’s good quality without breaking down, why would the repair person ever work on it?
I got my wife’s broken 4K monitor repaired for the grand cost of £3.50 a few weeks ago.
They were in the market for replacing it anyway because it’s ten years old, but when it wouldn’t turn on it that pushed their decision. Kinda pissed me off, because I was going to get it when the replacement arrived. So I figured it was already fucked, so it wouldn’t hurt to see if it could be repaired.
My boss at work trained as an electrician in the Army, so we opened it, where he immediately clocked a capacitor that was slightly expanded. A multimeter reading confirmed it, so I ordered a replacement. 8p, but I had to buy a pack of five. Add the postage and it came to £3.50.
The repair took 10 minutes, and now I’m the proud owner of a 28" 4K AOC.
That’s great, and learning to repair things yourself can be a great way to keep products running. But most people lack those skills or have acquaintances who’ll do it basically for free.
And to be fair, an awful lot of products these days aren’t built to be repaired anyway.
I was lucky with this monitor.
I’ve done similar to a part on my dryer’s control board, and a GPU’s vram. In both cases, there was no diagnostic needed because the part showed some kind of physical damage. You would be surprised how often things can be fixed for 1% the cost of replacing.
You got it correct there. If it’s junk, open it up, and take a look. It might be obvious. Given the rising cost of stuff like GPUs, this could become more relevant.
I had a mouse chew through the ignition wire on the ignitor on my propane furnace, which blew the board out. It cost me like 400 to do it myself after a repair guy just charged 100 to diagnose it then help3ed me over text swapping everything out. Could have been 2000 for an official repair company and way more for a new one.
Oh that’s a good one. I had a coal stove that had an idle timer (mechanical clock) to keep the fire going when the thermostat wasn’t calling for heat. It stopped working and the factory said they don’t make them anymore, but I could special order a thirty party replacement for $250. I replaced it with an Arduino, a relay shield and a 20 line program for < $10. If I was more electrically inclined, I could have powered it from the stove’s power. Instead, there is a USB cord sticking out the back =]
You sound a lot more electrically inclined than I, if I had help it would be easy enough.
I could stand to have a look at my washer/drier. The washer works perfectly well, but the drier does nothing at all. It runs, but doesn’t dry. It came with the house and they’re usually expensive to run, so I’ve never really worried about it. But I live in England, where rain is our default mode, so it’s a pain to have washing up on racks in the house all the time.
Driers are simple machines. I suspect a dead heating element. It’s probably visually broken.
Does it get hot at all? The heating element is just a coil of metal that can break. They can break easily if you put clothes in it that are too wet (like dripping). Once it breaks, it severs the current, so no heat. There should also be a fuse right next to it. These are all simple continuity checks if you have a meter.
Partly because they’ll know which ones they see least and/or have an easiest time with, but also that the perfect unbreakable machine doesn’t exist; accidents & “acts of god” (as in the insurance term) happen even to the best built appliances. E.g. there’re not many control boards that will survive a lightning strike.
Finally they will know other repair people and will talk shop with them from time to time, not least of all because they also need to buy appliances, and they know this same rule.
Much better than the plastic garbage no one would ever consider fixing. No appliance lasts forever but many may be serviceable.
I dont really think “brands” are very meaningful.
Yeah they’re all owned by a couple companies.
That’s why I got a Chiq TV. The local guy said they’re reliable and he can get parts.
Would go out of business in two years.
Capitalism isn’t suited towards quality, only towards selling
It would go out of business if they bank on infinite growth like most capitalists. If they plan to spend the first 5 years focusing 90% on manufacturing, the next 5 years are 40% manufacturing and 60% on servicing and parts, then 20% on manufacturing and 80% on servicing and parts, you can get over the startup hump and and settle into a sustainable business model. It’s just not going to churn out endless profit to undeserving capitalists, year after year. But what it will do is provide stable, predictable income for a medium sized workforce while adapting to demand by reducing output. Sure the Labor component can be undercut by competitors at lower prices, but if done right, the parts market can still be yours. Anybody who is savvy enough to buy one of these products would also be savvy enough to pay full price for an OEM replacement sprocket instead of half that price for a dodgy chinesium sprocket.
If I knew I could get a washing machine that was garunteed to last 15 years and be repairable, I wouldn’t mind spending a couple hundred bucks on parts and/or labor every few years.
If you want a washer that will last for decades, look for an old wringer-washer. Super simple and basic. Easily repairable. They are known for lasting 30+ years.
Just be wary of the rollers in the wringer as you feed those wet heavy clothes. Many, many a housewife got their fingers broken or mangled washing underwear. And for heaven’s sake, don’t get your tit in the wringer…
Why would you need repair parts every year on a machine that’s guaranteed to last 15 years?
I disagree.
The company would need to start differently, to settle the rules on how it would run it’s activities.
First thing would be to set itself as a non-profit and a co-op.
Even machinery purpose built to last requires maintenance, repair and parts to do so. A company focusing itself on producing quality appliances, with proper warranty (3 years minimal), repairable, upgradeable and with plenty of optional accessories, could be viable.
Resorting to 3D printing to make parts in small scale/on order would remove a big part of the inventory management problem.
Spoken like a true American… Yet the rest of the world doesn’t give 2 cents about what you do over there. This kind of long lasting appliances would be a huge hit.
That’s only if it had investors that they had to appease. If it was just one person putting up their money or a small group of being funding what they believed in, then it would work great. You only gonna make enough money to pay your expenses and provide your crew with a proper living at that point.
Except they’re terribly inefficient and use shit like freon
Also, a number of them will still fail quickly. Survivorship bias.
Or you’ll create something that is genuinely better with good longevity and then discover you’ll have next to no sales growth since once somebody buys it, they never need to replace it.
Hmmm, a state run industry in communist east Berlin that failed in 1990. It’s almost as if their business hit a wall when they couldn’t expand their market through exports. Surely there couldn’t have been any world changing events happening in that town in the latter days of 1989 that might have played a larger role in the demise of a state run business.
You know if I created a buisness myself and had no shareholders demanding quarterly profit increases, that would be okay.
If it made 1 million in profit after 10 years and then needed to be shuttered that’s fine by me.
I imagine this would make an individual quite wealthy for their lifetime. We just think it’s unviable because we’ve been tricked into believing that a buisness must grow forever to be successful
I definitely agree, it just makes it a more precarious position to be in.
And they’ll cost $3500
I read a book from the 80s (may have been Engines of Creation) where they talked about forever machines. Materials science and design advanced to the point where appliances and vehicles would last for centuries.
I wonder if such machines would suffer from the same efficiency issues of the 100 year light bulb.
By all measures except longevity it is a terrible light bulb
They have lightbulbs and wiring for them that have existed from the dawn of lightbulbs, still in use.
You can already buy appliances like that.
These are the top rated brands by Consumer Reports. The top rated brand by reliability? Their site…doesn’t seem to list prices. That’s never a good sign…But a search of Google shopping indicates that their fridges start at $7000 and up. Quality brands exist. They just cost 3-10 times the cheaper brands.
My rule is if the company has ever made a TV or Cell Phone I will NEVER buy their kitchen appliance.
i feel like this rule accomplishes nothing. Do you just hate LG?
It works for Samsung… So, rule is definitely accomplishing something.
I was a subscriber to Consumer Reports for years and trusted them implicitly because they seemed so thorough and rigorous. Then they did reviews on a subject with which I am intimately familiar (it was computer related), and I was shocked at how badly they fumbled just about everything. I’ve also seen some really dubious ratings on high ticket items like cars that I knew were not great, so I take their ratings with grain of salt anymore.
The fact that Whirlpool is even on this list makes it a joke to me. I will say I’ve had a Miele dishwasher in the past and it was fucking awesome, and have heard great things about a lot of Bosch appliances. But LG and Whirlpool frequently put out trash appliances.
The fact that they seem to fail to comprehend that LG and Signature Kitchen Suite are both made by LG in the same factory, and that Fisher & Paykel and “Cafe” (actually GE) are both owned and made by Haier, and that Thermador and Bosch are also the same company with several of their products being rebadges of each other does not fill me with confidence.
At the very least if they insist on breaking those sub-brands out separately they ought to make at least some mention at the bottom of the chart that they’re actually the same entity.
I rented a house for a while with Miele appliances in it (dishwasher, double oven, steam oven, microwave, and hob), they were amazing. They felt well built, never had an issue (I only lived there for five years though) and had features I would never dream of using, the oven had a sabbath mode or something that you could set up to turn on and cook your food for you a day in advance or something crazy like that.
After moving to my current house I looked into them, they are way too expensive for my blood.
Yeah, CR has been waving a red flag since the day I discovered them. Their testing methodology is meh and the fact that they (afaik, it’s been decades now) don’t purchase the items they test, but instead request them from the manufacturer, means they are not impartial, thus they cannot be trusted.
I’ve always regarded them as drawing parallel lines to things like the BBB. Sure they put on a decent public image and people put trust in them, but… why? What do they actually do? Specially, what do they do for you? You’re basically purchasing a magazine that is 100% ads. Even if you are already interested in an item in that edition, it’s still literally an ad that you will be reading. A biased ad. That you fucking paid to read. That is bonkers, and yet apparently there is still enough people who willingly buy ads for the company to continue existing.
Seems like there could be a crowdsourced version of Consumer Reports. A standardized battery of tests for each product category, and different youtubers could test products according to the test and produce (ideally reproducible) reports for each product. Not sure how the standardized tests would be created or maintained, or how the whole thing would be funded. But it would be cool to have some common, non-commercialized benchmarks that do what Consumer Reports does, but with better transparency and less opportunity to fudge.
Project Farm on YouTube is an alternative I’ve been happy to have discovered
They’re trying to avoid the pitfalls of popularity.
Whats the source of that ranking?
The second is a mass market brand though.
I find it very suspicious, LG (like Samsung) is famous for unreliable fridges. And Miele sell rebranded Liebherr fridges, which come with 10 year warranty… I wonder what their methodology is (not enough to research but I would if buying an appliance).
My rule is if the company has ever made a TV or Cell Phone I will NEVER buy their kitchen appliance.
That’s ok.
I had a Samsung dishwasher in my previous house. Had to replace the pump twice in the 3 years I lived there. Utter garbage. Didn’t clean very well either.
Having a Liebherr fridge as a fan of big cranes sounds so ideal.
I have a Liebherr fridge that’s 20 years old, got it second hand and just works like expexted. The plastic elements start breaking piece by piece (a freezer drawer, a door shelf, the lamp cover), but i still consider it trustworthy and would buy again.
They are a bit pricey, but the 10 year warranty gives peace of mind. Quite efficient and silent too, but I think that’s normal for any modern fridge.
I’m told that the cheapeast LG refrigerators with the freezer on top two door are some of the more reliable. The fancy LG fridges have notoriously unreliable linear compressors? that are even MORE unreliable in the USA because we use a different refrigerant than what they were even designed for and they weren’t good before that change.
Thanks to a rather high profile class action lawsuit, LG no longer uses linear compressors in their refrigerators. At least in the US.
Your appliance will cost 4-10x more. There’s no magic to it. Appliances were like opera. Made for the rich
And consume 10x the energy, be made of lead, and dont forget survivorship bias!
Do the appliances the rich currently buy follow this rule or do they just get fancier low durability goods
There’s a whole world of super high-end appliances you’ve never even heard of because you’re not worth marketing to.
Yeah but I’m wondering if they’re meaningfully more durable or repairable versus if they’re just happy to eat the massive bills to fix or replace them when shit happens
They are. Usually for commercial purposes, if your business depends on your fridge working, you will get a reliable fridge.
However as of today, you don’t need to spend 10k on an appliance to have a good one. Miele, BSH and Liebherr all have good appliances, long warranties, they sell replacement parts and manuals for DIY.
Probably
Could be worth buying something fancy if it’s easy or cheap to fix and would actually last a lifetime
But I have a feeling they’re just expensive and fancy and not actually gonna last much longer unless it’s commercial grade
I’ve had plenty of regular appliances last well past their warranties so I’m skeptical the super fancy stuff I’ve never heard of it is much different in terms of lifetime unless it’s commercial grade
The commercial-grade appliances at different kitchens where I have worked have needed repair calls, sometimes frequently with dish machines.
It depends. If you are a show off that only cares about aesthetics, then you’re paying for looks, not quality.
In my experience, a great dishwasher is worth the money. I had a Miele that was absolutely silent. Not whisper quiet. Silent.
A good, high quality, refrigerator is also worth it. You don’t know your fridge is shit until you have one that keeps your food fresh, and doesn’t freeze or wilt your produce.
If you are not a baker, or someone who uses the oven on a regular basis, then in my opinion any low tech electric stove will do the trick. Induction top if you like precise temp controls. Getting an oven right is very difficult and normally where you see the well deserved price jump.
I upgraded my simple low tech 10y old Bosch oven by purchasing a top of the line Bosch one (also about 10y old) for 50 Euro and selling my old one for 30.
Now I have an oven that heats up to 300C, has pyrolisis for self - cleaning and has a built in microwave.
I love buying pre-owned stuff.
Heads up on pyrolytic self cleaning, I’ve learned since buying mine that it’s commonly referred to as “self destruct mode” by oven designers as it is not uncommon for it to damage electronic parts, seals and the front glass of the oven, produces carbon monoxide which it will dump into your house and firefighters recommend against using it as sometimes it just goes up in flames.
Most of the time it’s perfectly safe, but has the potential to go wrong just about any time.
I love buying pre-owned stuff.
There is a lot pre-owned stuff not worth spending money on because it’s basically already worn-out. There is also a ton of pre-owned stuff that will last for years more, where the original owner didn’t need it anymore for whatever reason. If you know what to buy, second hand is amazing value. I love getting that value too, but it does take some understanding or knowledge.
The only frustrating thing about my Miele dishwasher was that I couldn’t tell if it was on or not. I loved that thing.
Yeah, I actually like the sound of my dishwasher running… It’s very quiet, but it just sounds like “clean” if that makes sense
They have people take care of their needs. They dont need to worry about it.
So you’re saying we need a start up that sells people.
I think we have tried that before…
Sure, but we’re also going to put the location data from your cellphone on the blockchain
id pay a huge premium for appliances guaranteed to last 40 years.
Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I once heard that, apart from planned obsolescence, there are parts in modern appliances that wear out faster because the parts provide some other benefit. For example, if there are plastic parts like certain gears, they may be quieter than equivalent metal parts.
There’s a plastic gear in KitchenAid mixers that is designed to fail before a more catastrophic failure, it’s easily replaced yet still some people will get a sturdier one and then end up burning out their motor 😂
You would be surprised at the things that can be repaired if you are smart, have some skills, and determination to do so.
Sadly, very few people are willing to learn new things or skills.
Metal geared power transmission can be designed with shear pins for a simple and cheap failure mode. Plastic is trash. Want quiet? Then use a gear profile other than straight.
deleted by creator
I AM HEARING YOU OUT TAKE MY MONEY
.jpg){kind=link}