Our parents had household appliances that lasted decades and were repairable and maintainable.
Just hauled a 3 year old Samsung smart fridge to the dump.
They stopped making the parts to fix it after 10 months.
The dump didn't want it because it contains little that is recyclable.
Imagine this.
A fridge that can't cope with moisture, variations in temperature, vibration from doors opening & closing, the plastic cracks with the slightest thumping, and costs a fortune to buy
@Npars01@pseudonym
I hope you like your new fridge, because, with determination, you could keep it forever.
Last time my fridge failed, I disarmed it, and it was the control board (they already had those 19 years ago), obviously discontinued, and fortunately just changing 2 relays did the trick (4$ total cost) but I discovered that you can downgrade your fridge from digital to analogic !! 😲 You just replace all the electronics with a mechanical timer. 😀
@magnetic_tape@Npars01@pluralistic@pseudonym
I often wonder why isn't there a company out there to downgrade your car to an old-fashioned one, stripping it of every sensor and electronic device, making it a vehicle easy to repair and to maintain. And they would earn extra by taking a cut on reselling all the electronic junk they take out, since it is in working order. 😃
@magnetic_tape@Npars01@pluralistic@pseudonym
They could advertise the idea as "the anti-Tesla", since a Tesla, from what I gather, is just a computer on wheels designed to exploit your data without your knowledge. (And also, small detail, couldn't all this electronics allow a malignant hacker to send you and your car into a tree?)
@Npars01@pseudonym@FurryBeta my 20 year old kennmore split fridge is within 15% of the energy usage of most modern fridge’s, cost $50 or less to repair when it was acting up, is entirely analog, and still works fine.
I feel there has been a bit of a move too fast and break stuff in the appliance industry.
@Denton@Npars01@pseudonym Oh, most definitely that is the case. Just about all appliances, water heaters, hvac units will not last as long as what it replaces. In some cases, it’s the engineering: why spend more on things that will get tossed long before their end of life, due to fashion, fades, trends, etc. In others, it’s planned obsolescence, such as dropping repair parts as soon as you can