Depends at energy costs. Our current freezer is 20 years old, at least. Sucks electric powers like crazy. If we had bought one five years ago we’d easily have paid off the price in less energy spending.
fridge last 30 years???
a friend just bought his 3rd in 10 years and the 2 before were no longer made micro-controller died and a shorted compressor that BLEW 2 micro’s the service dept put in to test
I think it is more of a “risk VS reward” and there is almost no “reward” for paying $200 for a NEST thermometer and how is a washer going online going to get my pants cleaner?
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Guess I’m just lucky. Whatever brand you friend buys (bought), that sounds like abysmal quality control.
Though something similar happened to me once, I needed a new washing machine (the old one was barely out of soviet times) and went for a 300 € Samsung. Hey, the price is good and it’s not a no-name brand. Long story short, it lasted for about two years. Yay. Well, at least it had a pleasant chime when it finished the wash.
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Basically every seller – and even the repair shop – told me, that current washing machines will not live the 25 years our new model will, unless we are willing to cough up 3 times the price.
The thing is, I don’t believe that the 1000 € model will live longer. Planned obsolescence FTW. A washer has no reason to be so unstable. I don’t even need 5000 options. Time, temperature and the various speeds, what else?
Exactly the problem with this whole IoT thing - features that nobody even needs, but maybe they can sell some stuff with them.
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I have a weirdly relevant link for that…
(relevant bit at 7:50 if the pre-cueing doesn’t work)
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This is also true of Russian Ural and Ukrainian Dnepr sidecar motorcycles. I own a Dnepr motorcycle, and while it breaks down frequently, it’s extremely easy to repair (and it’s fun to ride off-road 
).
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Exactly. If it has a path into its brain, it needs security updates, and there’s no way to make that profitable without ongoing fees.
Well, it was almost certainly made with skimpy insulation and a reciprocating compressor driven by an unregulated induction motor. If it had been made to the best standards, it would have a scroll compressor (invented early 1900s) and three times as much insulation (as normal prior to the 1940s) and a PFC motor controller suitable to the compressor motor frame (based on the “NASA motor controller” from the Apollo era).
But I know what you mean. In my second house I replaced the 40+ year old clothes washer and dryer and recouped the cost in water and energy savings in less than one year. I also replaced the fuel oil furnace and electric water heater with high efficiency gas-fired appliances, which paid for itself in less than five years in reduced fuel and energy. The stuff I replaced, with the exception of the furnace, was all working just fine.
I fix my appliances when they break, so I had a 35 year old gas-fired clothes dryer and a 50 year old water heater in my first house. I rebuilt the dryer to get rid of the asbestos (replaced it with fiberfrax salvaged from commercial boilers) and put in a motor controller at the same time to cut the energy costs. The water heater never broke down simply because prior owners had always kept the sacrificial anode functional, but it was only 80% efficient.
My spouse claims that any appliance you buy will work for half as long as the appliance it replaced. This has been generally true for the last 30+ years, in my experience, although if you’re handy you can fix and upgrade them yourself.
My current refrigerator, dishwasher, and microwave were all repaired by me almost immediately after the warranties expired. In the case of the fridge I’ve repaired it twice already, and it’s only 15 years old or thereabouts. I wasn’t able to make any improvements in the microwave, but I improved the other two while I was in there…
If you can afford it, buy the stuff the hard-core off-gridders say is the most reliable. The costs are higher but you get correspondingly higher quality - better energy efficiency, better repairability, longer lifespan.
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A gas-fired dryer? Now I’ve seen everything. Not that I’m trying to shit on your machine, but I literally never heard of that.
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Oh, they are very common. I have one in my basement now; it was sold as a methane-burner but I converted it to propane. I also have an electric dryer in the new upstairs laundry I built, because it wasn’t possible to get a gas line into the new upstairs bathroom.
Gas dryers are much faster than any other kind, and methane-fired ones are extremely efficient. You do have to have a flue to exhaust the combustion gases, and they are more prone to lint fires if not properly maintained (but, keep in mind any clothes dryer will eventually catch on fire if not properly maintained, electric dryers just take longer to do so. I use hard venting on clothes driers that can survive a lint fire without burning the house down, no flexy-foil and plastic for me!). If you run a lot of loads at once, it’s great to have a drier that can fully dry a load of clothes in the same amount of time it takes to wash one in the washer.
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Oh sure. I used a gas dryer for 15 years until I moved 2 years ago and had to get a stackable unit to fit the laundry space. Even more common than Medievalist’s methane/propane type, are ones that simply hook up to your household natural gas lines (the same fuel that runs your heating system and stove). The appeal is that natural gas is (usually) much cheaper than electricity. It’s incredibly common here in the Northeast US.
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The “natural gas” you get from the city pipes is methane, with small amounts of odorant added to help detect leaks.
I usually say methane instead of natural gas when I’m talking about appliances like dryers and generators and refrigerators, because these appliances will happily burn sustainable, carbon-neutral methane produced from waste, not just the climate-changing fossil methane produced by environmentally destructive methods like fracking.
I usually add a footnote or parenthetical explanation when this comes up so regular people will know that methane-burning appliances are sold as being for “natural gas”, but I forgot to do so this time. Sorry!
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You are such a do-it-all guy, that I guess I just unconciously assumed you had done something ingenious like come up with a device that captured the methane from your herd of cows or something. I didn’t stop long enough to remember what natural gas really is.
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Believe it or not I actually wanted to do that!
I wanted to put Dexters or Miniature Belted Galloways on the property and use this method to harvest methane from their manure.
My family drew the line at keeping meat cattle and shoveling manure, though 
. Spoilsports. I coulda put web connected monitoring software on the digester and been the Sh*t of Internet!
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Well…
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It was kinda fun to fiddle around with it as a hobby in the late 1980ies/early 1990ies, when stuff you needed to do it became available and affordable.
But that was when the world was young and connecting everything just because we could seemed like a good idea.
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I suspect that it’s both: when there is a perceived upside people fall over themselves in their haste to do insecure and privacy compromising things(see pretty much any use of ‘social media’, nearly anything involving a cellphone, using super shady free VPNs and HTTP proxies to get their fix of normally blocked sites at school or work, allowing flash and JavaScript by default, running dodgy cracks from warez forums, etc.) They don’t necessarily deny the risk; but if they want to do it they just don’t think about it much, or argue that it’s just How Things Are, or take a few mostly futile steps to make themselves feel that they aren’t being irresponsible. Treating the concern as an urgent reason to avoid whatever the fun thing is is considered to be fringe, paranoid, Stallman-neckbeard behavior.
When the benefits are much less interesting (or, as is not infrequent, the ‘smart’ thing isn’t actually better, even if you ignore security and privacy: it’s too expensive, or buggy, or makes common operations complicated, I r some mixture of these); then people have no incentive to ignore their concerns because they are anywhere from only mildly interested to looking for a reason to reject.
Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug; it’s hardly unexpected for it to warp risk perception.
Like X10 and all of that? Weird how all that stuff went out of fashion and is back again. There were even home robots like the Heathkit HERO, and now home robotics are being introduced as something futuristic.
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Yeah, stuff like that… At the time, there still were several DIY electronics magazines around. Etch your own circuit boards, solder this, solder that… Home automation was a regular feature.
