I bought a french door fridge specifically because the design makes it so that my dog can't get the door open. I figure the energy leaking from the door design is far less than the energy and food loss of the door being left open all day while I'm at work because my adorable idiot wanted a snack.

That sucks but how does that relate to my comment?

My fridge stopped working correctly, only the freezer part would actually cool. I called the local service company. Tech came when I wasn't home, told my partner "compressor's broken, though shit" , took 60€ and left.

My combination washer dryer has stopped drying. From what I gather it seems like a compressor gas leak, guess what? Too expensive to fix, so I would have to throw away several tens of kilos of machine just because of a fart's worth of gas.

I have a Neato robot vacuum which I've kept clean and repaired for years, only for fucking Vorwerk, may they go bankrupt tomorrow, to shut down its servers, so now it's dumb as a rock and next to useless.

It's not your mother's fault for assuming a malfunctioning appliance must be replaced.

Back in the day you called a repairman.

That guy's time is worth probably $30/hour, so if you want to use up his 8 hour day you'd better be willing to pay $240, plus parts, plus the gas money of driving his truck to your home, plus the cost of keeping those parts on hand and the truck available.

Or if it's something he knows is only a half day job, then he can book something else so that he only really needs to charge you $120.

Now that a lot of these appliances are like $500, it's pretty hard to justify the cost of professional repair.

50 years ago, when the price of an appliance was something like 50 hours of a repairman's hourly wage, it made a lot of sense for most issues to be fixed by a professional. Now that these appliances are worth like 15-20 worker hours, it's much harder to justify.

The problem is that they're not designed to be repairable

Also, appliances were way more expensive – both to purchase and (thanks to wasteful energy etc. usage) to operate. Bens Appliances and Junk has a good video on this that I imagine a lot of people are drawing on in this thread.

You were lucky it wasn't the $250 circuit board that failed, which charged $50 for shipping.

I hopped on an appliance parts website and ordered her a new lid switch for $15. One YouTube video later and her washer worked like new.

1. many youtube videos are scams/clickbait though and/or present un-true or outdated information

2. even if i have the spare part and the replacement part (i probably ordered the wrong one, how the heck am i supposed to know whether Knita CX-2035 is compatible with my Radover DishWasher i13s, the manual says i need Knita CX-2034 but they don't produce them anymore, but the Knita website says that CX-2035 is the "successor part"), i assume i either lack a screwdriver or a voltage meter or a fucking welding machine to weld the oven open and shut again. And if i manage to weld it shut correctly, i will forever live in anxiety about accidentally having used toxic chemicals inside the oven which now continue to evaporate each time that i heat it up, slowly poisoning my food and me which will only become clear decades later when i start developing mysterious diseases which might have their origin in me using aluminum wires when i should have used stainless chromated copper wires.

The WTF here is not necessarily that some component on the circuit board failed, but that the manufacturer charges $400-$1000 for it with a straight face and gets away with it when they undoubtedly have that board made in China for about $4 per unit.

Also there was a time where companies actually cared. They would send the engineers for the next model out with service techs servicing current models to help them find the common failure points and help make things more servicable.

Thanks to better manufacturing techniques, engineering analysis, and the fine humans in management, we have gotten really good at barely building a machine that lasts just long enough to be out of warranty.

Everything breaks eventually. Entropy always increases.

Same, I used to wonder why the looney tunes characters always treated steak as this big delicious thing when my experience with it was disgusting dried shoe leather that required 3 cans of coke to get down.

Canada

We tried to repair our washing machine but the fuckers designed it in such a way that the drum and bearing or something of the sort are inseparabale and thus you cannot just replace rhe bearing which was fucked in ours but you have to get the whole assembly. So instead of a probably 50-100€ worth of parts the repair would be in the 200-300€ range and at that point it made no sense spending that much money on a 6 year old machine.

Yeah this is a huge thing with vehicles. I like my Japanese cars and typically have had either Toyota or Honda. Neither was problem-free by any stretch, but at the same time the ENGINES tended to be very reliable with routine maintenance (belt/oil/etc changes) and the other stuff parts were always available and generally not too expensive.

My car's did spend a decent amount of time in the shop, but at 360,000km the engine in my old Camry was still running like a champ even if it burned a little bit of oil and certain parts of the body were becoming more bondo than metal. When small things failed, I'd grab a new one from the hardware store or in some cases the wrecker. I was - with assistance - able to do basic general repairs like belts, brakes, and a clutch in my relatives' garage. We did fuck up the timing slightly once but the engine just stalled out without any permanent damage (whew). I'll also add that a lot of people who drove the more "efficient" foreign cars tended to treat them nicely whereas versus domestics or sporty vehicles. The mindset of the owner matters too.

These days... fuck. I can't even easily change the stereo out on my current car - and that's now over a decade old - because it's tied into the side/rear camera system, front display, and a bunch of other shit. I think there's like one head unit that will still handle that stuff but it's hard to get and even then there's no guarantee. Domestic stuff is even worse, with certain trucks unable to source key parts within months of the warranty ending. There's one model where the ECU failed regularly and the supply of replacements dried up, others in shortages due to "supply chain" issues etc, and a whole run of GMC vehicles from between '21 and '24 with connecting rod issues (6.2L v8) that have a major backlog in parts even for in-warranty repairs.

My wife's car... well it's an EV which - while it's great not to be buying gas at these prices, the company absolutely is not building these to be convenient to service, and we're lucky if the local dealer could do the more complex stuff it battery work much less a 3rd party mechanic (or me). I'm actually looking at some of the Chinese models which can have safer batteries that are built to be more easily swapped out, and China being what it is somebody will probably be able to make replacement parts for decades.

Of course, the practice of repair was different when the appliance costed relatively a lot more.

E.g. a TV was more likely to be repaired, but also costed about 10x as much relatively speaking.

So if it would have cost you 25% of the price of a TV to get it repaired, you would have got it repaired. If it's just as easy to repair now, then the repair would still be over twice the price of just buying new.

New ones can be fixed as well. Most people don't take the time to do it. They aren't that hard to repair.

You've clearly never tried to fix anything at least within the last decade.

When things are glued and there are no exposed screws, this means that you can't replace parts and it means that in order to get inside to see what broke, you need to break it open very carefully. This means that in most cases, they break beyond repair and force you to buy a new one.

If you can break it open carefully, because everything is glued in (or in some cases just punched in during manufacture), you can't replace anything because there's nothing you can mount the new part to.

Phones are not appliances; they're electronic devices and are much more complicated BUT should be repairable, as they used to be back in the 90s.

And have you seen the inside of a device that's glued in? It is definitely NOT water tight. The glue is hard and cracks, and the purpose of the glue is not for IP, but to just keep the part in place and save 2c on each screw.

But I digress... Check out IFixit. Hopefully after going through some points on what the benefits are for right to repair, you'll change your stance on this.

Nah it would. But it would also cost 10 times as much as the disposable appliances.