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Only available in harvest yellow, burnt sienna, olive, and white. Upgrade yours with some simulated wood grain accents to match your station wagon for a reasonable price. Don’t leave it outside in your vacant lot where kids might play inside. Be nice to the Sears appliance department salesperson. They really want a promotion to the vacuum cleaner department so they can buy their kid a high-fidelity 8-track cassette this Christmas.
I’d keep waxing nostalgic but it will never buff to a nice sheen these days. My parents got a toaster as a wedding gift and it was still in daily use when I went off to college. Appliances nowadays are junk.
How much of that is also survivorship bias. Why is it that if appliances were better back then people ended up buying new ones? Most people tend to only buy new appliances and furniture if the old one breaks regardless if there’s a new model. At least that has been my experience with the vast majority of people I’ve known at more than an acquaintance level. Most people aren’t privileged enough to be able to afford new stuff just cause.
And it will use as much energy as everything else in the house combined.
I wonder how true that is. Does it come down to effective insulation? I also thought the old refrigerants were more efficient but really bad for the environment. The only other factor is motor/pump.
Compressors are variable and much more efficient. More efficient and variable speed fan motors along with more efficient blade design. Insulation now is drastically better than glass wool of the past. Electronics are able to be integrated in order to provide more fine grain control and overall design has been improved just due to efficiency standards being placed on a bright yellow sticker. In the past design and component choices never really considered efficiency, while efficiency doesn’t always win out it’s a weighted factor and influences the overall engineering and design in ways that just didn’t happen before efficiency regulations came about.
Nice, it’s super interesting how far we’ve progressed.
Insulation tech is better, yes, but also the insulation of a 40 year old fridge is by now totally fucked.
Please explain how fridge insulation degrades with age.
I would assume it’s made of something chemically stable and protected from the environment by the fridge casing.
The doors, rubbers, etc definitely degrade very fast. The walls probably not so fast, but the casing also gets beaten up.
Here’s a good article. From 1970-s to 2014 power use of refrigerators decreased by 4 times. My modern European fridge only uses 270Wh per year, which is even further decrease.
You really do not want to still use a fridge from 1970-s.
I think you meant 270kWH instead of 270WH.
Yes, my bad.
Nooo, thats a couple of mW, no way. Maybe its a typo and you neant daily with a bit more than 10W power, even that is fairly low. The last time I measured ours it was about 30W average… (also europe, about 10yo)
But is it AI?
Survivorship bias
Its not fully the fault of tech companies, yeah there is some planned obselecence. But there won’t be anymore “I will outlive you” appliances cause the more mechanical it gets the more cheaper and easier it is to repair and they also tends to have less individual components.
I don’t think any of those new smartish watches even from the best of Swizz makers could last like it did 100years ago.
“And I will eat your children”
Yeah, growing up we had a harvest gold Frigidaire from the 1970s. It didn’t leave us, we left it.
(Don’t miss the gallons of ice water in the freezer that had to be defrosted every few months.)
I guess one could make the claim that an automatic defrost system is a luxury, lol
I’ll rip you a new ozone hole
A fridge is a fridge, the basic mechanical working principle of it didn’t change over the past 40 years. But people have a lot more expectations put into what a fridge should be able to do nowadays, and electronics or complex mechanism such as the ice maker is generally the first to break on a modern fridge.
The moral of the story is, don’t buy a fridge with an icemaker or have a tablet attached to it, and you should be fine.
Survivorship bias
Contemporary appliances actually do fail more often, and earlier, than their predecessors. They have added a bunch of extraneous things to what was a very simple, stalwart, design. These additions have drastically increased the complexity of their designs and created many fold more points of failure than there used to be. It isn’t so much that the manufacturing is sloppier, or that the materials aren’t as good, though in some ways that is a contributor, just not the main one.
If you by a recently manufactured fridge like the following, you will get a fridge that will last decades if you do the minimum to keep it in good condition. However if you buy one that has an in door ice machine, lcd touch screen, complex lay out that requires the basic mechanical devices, to keep the fridge cool, to have a bunch of extra tubing, wiring, connections, etc. it is much more likely to fail because of all the extra points of failure you added.
Real answer is planned obsolescence.
All of those systems can be maintained and serve for long. Electronics is not the culprit - it can serve for decades easily. Also, most people don’t need their fridge or whatever to be extra fancy.
But the producer really wants for their product to die - this forces you to buy another unit, which increases their revenue.
Not only do they want the product to die, they also make it really hard to repair. Not offering spare parts, except through official repair centers which charge so much you might as well buy a new unit. Not providing any kind of documentation or schematics. Using chips with custom firmware you can’t download anywhere, so even if you were to replace the hardware, without the software it’s useless. Locking off communication/programming ports behind passwords and custom programming software.
This is why right to repair is so important. It isn’t just phones, it’s all consumer electronics. With proper care, maintenance and repair, a lot of devices could easily double their lifespan. This reduces e-waste and saves consumers money, it’s like a win for everyone except for the people trying to sell you new shit.
Exactly!
Right to repair is essential, and it’s crazy we allowed the situation to get where it currently is in the first place
Time to protect what was taken away.
Also a dash of survivorship bias
This is only partially true. Yes we do engineer things to fail at a certain point, but that’s only because back in the day we naively assumed that we could engineer things not to fail at all.
Yes a stator of an electric engine will probably not fail for 100 years, but the seals will - yes the statically stressed metal part will hold until it crumbles to rust, but the dynamically stressed plastic part won’t - yes the silicon in an IC-Chip is protected from corrosion, but the connector pins aren’t.
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s always a part that will fail before another, there’s no way to economicaly engineer around that, today we simply have the data to statistically define a failure point.
A fridge usually has a 10 year warranty. This isn’t even the end of life point. After 10 years it’s most likely that 80-90% of devices will still work. This means that if your device survived 10 years it will most likely work for another 5-10 years.And then 10 years in you should be able to change the part that’s broken and keep the fridge operational.
People say that like the replacement parts are just a mystical thing that spawns out of thin air once they need them.
Most parts that break are injection molded plastic. Injection molding is what differentiates manufacturing and home made garbage. Something home made will never look and function as good as something injection molded by a manufacturer. And the reason for that is cost. To say injection molding is expensive is an understatement. The machines, the tools, the expertise and the material is something that a private individual could never afford and has barely any profit margin for manufacturers. On top of that there’s storage and distribution.
So if a manufacturer has to produce extra pieces of each part that might break, store and keep track of them for 10+ years for models that are no longer produced, then the customer better be ready to cover those costs with their initial purchase or have the replacement part be ridiculously priced.
We accuse companies to want their cake and eat it too, but the we do the same thing. We want products to be cheap but also reliable or look good but be repairable. We can’t have all.\There are plenty of devices that are cheap AND repairable - looking at a ~15-year old Brother HL-2140 printer by my right hand that still has all key parts readily available (not that I ever needed to change anything other than drum and toner, but parts are there)
The secret to cheap repairability is actually quite simple - make a good, no-fuss model and sell it for long. This will remove the necessity to print specific parts in small batches for older models, and by the time the model actually gets retired, there’s so much spare parts you barely need to produce anything at all.
Granted, this doesn’t work that well with ever-evolving stuff like computers (although it does to a certain extent), but most other tech is just fine a decade or more in.
That fridge, in that color occupied a similarly wood paneled kitchen for me growing up. I got a little sweaty when I saw the picture, wondered who’s been in my old house.
Moreso, the fridge will stop working in two years cause that is when their subscription cloud service to access your fridge will be updated with firmware that is no longer compatible.
Also the required app will no longer be supported
My fridge doesn’t have a TPM chip and won’t upgrade to FridgeOS 11.
