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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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Fuck in door ice makers. You’re adding complexity and making the whole thing less reliable and less efficient.
If the only issue is the looks, could you not do something like a vinyl wrap or just plaster it with art?
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.
“Our parents” … ?
👀
ol’ Genghis
Hey step brother… ;)
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”.
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.
Buy Electrolux or V-Zug.
Love my lux
Same. Never had problems with any of their products.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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°.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, a sample size of 2. Very scientific
the wording makes it 3 (hopefully)
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?
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.
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?
