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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: Domestic appliance conspiracy theory
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-18-2016 12:06 AM
Last November my wife and I moved house, and in the process doing so bought a new washer, drier, fridge and dishwasher in a Thanksgiving sale at one of the big home improvement store chains. She was able to negotiate a hefty discount on top of the sale prices for buying all four appliances in one transaction, too. I thought this was too good to be true. And sure enough...
About a month later, the drier failed - motor control board burnt out. The guy who came out to look at it under warranty didn't even have to open it up. When I described the symptom he told me that this board had failed, they did so in this model "all the time" and that he'd have to order a replacement. It was over three weeks before it arrived and was fitted, with us having to hang our clothes up to dry in the closet all the while. Not fun.
On Tuesday morning, the dishwasher decided to take Donald Trump's advice, and go [insert verb here] itself (and yes, it was made in Mexico). We left a cycle going overnight, and in the morning, there was a pool of rancid, slimy water in the sump at the bottom, and pressing the start button for three seconds to tell it to empty only gave me a buzz from a solenoid trying to make the pump run, but failing. Same thing again: repair guy came this morning, listened to me describe the symptom, diagnosed a failed drain pump without feeling the need to investigate any further, because they are well known for failing on this model, and I guess we'll be washing up the old fashioned way for at least the next week (also not fun: we have a one-month old baby, whose bottles and related paraphernalia generate a lot of washing up).
So, my conspiracy theory is this. If a manufacturer has a model of reasonably big ticket domestic appliance that they know has a faulty part of a known design flaw, but still needs to shift several thousand of them, do they do a deal with one or more big home improvement retailers to get rid of them in sales and special offers, factoring in to the math that, say, 15% of them are likely to fail under warranty and need a service call? Maybe we've just had an unlucky coincidence in that two of these things have broken down (all we need now is for the clothes washer and the fridge to go out, to make it a grand slam). But the fact that on both occasions, it was clearly a widespread problem that the service tech had encountered many times before, plants a seed of suspicion in my mind.
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Dustin Mitchell
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1865
From: Mondovi, WI, USA
Registered: Mar 2000
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posted 03-18-2016 08:43 AM
That goes for a lot of things, Frank, not just appliances. The summer after I graduated from high school (more than a couple of years ago now...) I worked at a canning factory. We canned green beans, and I worked in the canning house (very hot and noisy, not an ideal job for July!). Anyway, the beans would come in from the building where they were sorted for size and the bad ones were picked out, then, in the canning house they were cooked and either cut into your normal cut green beans or sliced lengthwise to make French cut beans. Once they were in the cans and sealed they went on to the warehouse where they were labeled and placed on pallets.
I was curious what brand of beans we were canning (it wasn't obvious from the name of the company) so I asked one day. It was explained to me that we canned several brands, usually in the same day from the same trailer load of beans. When the warehouse was supposed to switch from putting one brands label (say a store brand) to another brand on the can, the supervisor in the canning house would use a can of spray paint to mark one of the cans in red.
I almost always buy store brand goods now. Occasionally I will notice a difference between the store brand and name brand of a certain product, and if it's important enough I'll buy the name brand instead, but that doesn't happen often.
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Tony Bandiera Jr
Film God
Posts: 3067
From: Moreland Idaho
Registered: Apr 2004
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posted 03-18-2016 03:39 PM
Leo, this is one time when you need to name names...which brand of appliances? Some are notorious for issues, others not so much.
As for dishwashers....make sure you google search "dishwasher fires" there were several brands made by Whirlpool that suffered from frequent control board burnouts (sometimes severe enough to damage more than the appliance.) The problem was hopefully solved...it seemed that most were made from 2004-2010 or so..
Oh, and all of the new "Energy Star" dishwashers, as Joe would say, suck ass. They take 2-3 times longer and don't get the dishes clean as well as the older ones. I just picked up an older GE tall tub model at the thrift store for $20 in very good condition. It is a circa 2005-2007 by my best guess. It is not an Energy Star model so I expect it will do a decent job.
I have a Samsung front load washer going on six years old with no real problems (only thing was a drain pump that failed, most likely because it froze in the moving truck when I moved up here, cracking the impeller magnet..but that was a $60 DIY fix, part was easy to get and install). My sister has used LG for washer, dryer and fridge with no issues.
It all depends on brand, but as others have pointed out, many brands are really made by one manufacturer and rebranded. (I am pretty sure that Samsung and LG are made by the same Korean manufacturer.)
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 03-18-2016 04:04 PM
When we got married (in 2000) we bought a Maytag refrigerator. It's been repaired 4 times, each time being a problem that made it just stop cooling. After losing a fridge-full of stuff for the 3rd time, we bought a small fridge that we now keep in the garage in case the big one craps out.
The icemaker on the big fridge still works, but the water dispenser will not currently dispense any water. We're holding off getting that fixed until something else quits.
About 6 years ago we bought a Whirlpool washer/dryer. After about 3 years the washer started being really noisy whenever it would spin. I thought it was just a bearing going out or something, probably simple. But rather than calling the repair guy in, we visited the store where we got it, and described the symptoms. He said it indeed sounded like the bearings in the motor were going, but you can't replace just the bearings, you have to replace "the whole assembly" and he said given the machine was 3 years old, it'd make more sense to buy a new one than fix the old one, since it would only be a couple hundred bucks difference. I said, "You mean washing machines only last 3 years now?" He said they can last 3 or 10 or 15 years, but "when they go, they go." But he also said we should keep using it until it just quits -- which could be tomorrow or two years from now. So we decided to go that route. Now, it's three years later, and the thing is still working fine, except it's still really noisy during the spin cycle.
There's only the two of us in the house -- I hate to think how quick the washer would have gone down if we had several kids and were doing laundry every day.
On the brighter side, there was a KitchenAid dishwasher already in the house when we moved in almost 16 years ago, and it's still working like a champ, as is the equally-old Hotpoint water heater. I have no idea how old either one of them really are.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-18-2016 04:12 PM
Tony - I'm reluctant to name names (either the store or the appliance brands) because I've speculated about the possibility that both may have known that these things had known reliability issues, but sold them regardless. I've got absolutely no hard evidence for this - just smelling a rat, because both breakdowns were due to a part failing that the repair tech had seen fail many times before and told me was a well known problem with that particular model.
However, were I to name names, I wouldn't be surprised if a nasty lawyer's letter were to follow. The megacorps all have software bots trawling the net for anything negative said about them, alerting their lawyers if they find anything, and that's not a risk I want to take.
quote: Mike Blakesley
On the brighter side, there was a KitchenAid dishwasher already in the house when we moved in almost 16 years ago, and it's still working like a champ, as is the equally-old Hotpoint water heater. I have no idea how old either one of them really are.
My mother moved into her current house in 2000. It had previously been a rental, and a Zanussi washing machine and a Hoover dishwasher were left there when the landlord sold the house to her. They were clearly nowhere near new at that point - I would guess of early 1990s vintage, and well over two decades old now. Both machines are still going strong (or at least they were, when I was over in England last December).
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