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Electrical Appliance Brands You Would Never Buy Again
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bob91343:
I agree that extended warranties are a poor investment.  The same is true of an automobile lease.

Rechargeable batteries aren't good for me, as I don't have enough use for them to get a statistical advantage.  NiCd cells die all too soon.  Any battery operated device always seems to run out when I need it.  And the conservation of energy applies; the wasted energy from all the recharging will add up.

Having said that, perhaps the least efficient battery is the AAA.  It's mostly case and label; the innards aren't much and the cost is about the same as the AA cell.  Alkaline is better than carbon-zinc, which is also called heavy duty.  I wonder where I can buy light duty cells.

Cells do leak.  However, I try to make a point of looking every now and then, and not leaving batteries in stuff I don't use much.  I have spent a lot of time burnishing battery contacts that have corroded.

I have had problems with US brands of cars and won't buy them any more.  The Germans and Japanese have left the Americans in the dust for too long.  While today's cars may be a different story, I am still smarting from the crap foisted upon me in years gone by.
MyHeadHz:

--- Quote from: Veteran68 on January 12, 2020, 06:29:19 am ---
--- Quote from: Electro Detective on January 12, 2020, 02:56:52 am ---
I've seen a lot less Seagate hard drives die, versus WD, Hitachi, IBM offerings,

and the WORST of the lot have been Toshiba hard drives, always an early/earlier/earliest demise,
beginning with accumulating mystery bad sectors and delays, coupled to the tune  'knock knock knocking on hard drive hell's door..'

--- End quote ---
Once again, opposite experience for me!  :)

The most reliable drives, by far, have been Hitachi/HGST and Toshiba for me. Hitachi sold the rights to manufacture to Toshiba. Once IBM spun off the "Deathstar" line to Hitachi, quality went way up. And Toshiba has maintained it. I ran a 16x500GB NAS for years without a failure running Hitachi drives. Later I upgraded to 1TB drives. I'm now looking across the office at my 8-bay QNAP NAS running 3TB Toshibas. And they're not even NAS drives, they're 7200 RPM desktop drives. 24/7 operation and that NAS gets beat to hell every day. It streams media throughout my house and backs up all the computers. According to the QNAP stats I just pulled, they're up to 4.5 years of power on hours now. Rock solid all the way.

As I mentioned before, I've bought, installed, and run well into the hundreds of hard drives. Seagate by far the worst, Hitachi/Toshiba the best, and WD a good second place.

The company BackBlaze, a cloud-based backup service similar (but better IMO) to Carbonite, today has well over 100K drives in their datacenter. At that volume they can no longer source consumer drives in the quantities and capacities they need, but just a few years ago they bought off-shelf consumer drives, even resorting to shucking external USB drives when drive shortages hit. On their blog they post drive stats/reliability studies they've done. Here's a graph from 2015 showing their failure rates:



My experience mirrors theirs exactly.

--- End quote ---

That data is quite old.  That was during their peak of drive failures after they were having issues from the tsunami in Thailand.  Yeah, they lowered their standards and let some drives out that shouldn't have been sold like that, but that was a long time ago.  The vast majority of those drives have long since been phased out because of obsolescence.  The Seagate drives are now much more reliable now.  It is worth noting that Western Digital is replacing much of their branded drives with HGST technology, which traditionally has the highest reliability.  Whether this will mean WD branded drives will become more reliable with the new tech or if they will just lower the HGST high water mark to that of WD standards remains to be seen.  The following is all Backblaze HDD data that has been released so far.

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html


edit: It is also worth noting that HDD's follow a horseshoe curve for failure.  There are high rates of failure in the beginning, then a long period of low rates of failure, then they start climbing again because of EOL failures (if they aren't obsolete first).  So they all need to be replaced eventually anyway.
andy2000:

--- Quote from: VK3DRB on January 08, 2020, 05:11:58 am ---
Let me start:

Whirlpool.


--- End quote ---

I'll second that!.  My Whirlpool dishwasher is a top end model and in 10 years has needed a new fill valve and a new main motor/pump.  It also has a poorly designed detergent dispenser that often doesn't open.  Even when it does open, it's located in a position where the detergent door hits the rack so it can only open partially.  Quite often, some, or all of the detergent gets stuck in the dispenser.  It's almost a requirement to open the door early in the cycle so the detergent dispenser door can open fully.  It takes about 5 hours to do a wash, so it's extremely annoying when you have to redo it because the detergent got stuck. 
tom66:

--- Quote from: bob91343 on January 14, 2020, 06:15:41 am ---Rechargeable batteries aren't good for me, as I don't have enough use for them to get a statistical advantage.  NiCd cells die all too soon.  Any battery operated device always seems to run out when I need it.  And the conservation of energy applies; the wasted energy from all the recharging will add up.
--- End quote ---

Err... what?  I'm sure it costs a bit more energy to produce an entirely new battery and ship it half-way across the planet, oh and not forgetting the disposal of the old cell, but sure, the few Wh that a NiMH cell wastes during charging is important.
Brutte:

--- Quote from: SilverSolder on January 13, 2020, 06:45:32 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on January 13, 2020, 06:32:21 pm ---
--- Quote from: Brutte on January 13, 2020, 04:15:50 pm ---
--- Quote from: AndyC_772 on January 12, 2020, 07:56:32 am ---A couple of months ago our washing machine died. (Miele, 13 years old).
(..)

--- End quote ---
So you made an assumption that durability == warranty length.(..)

--- End quote ---
He clearly only considered 10 years to be a lower bound for the product's life, set by the warranty.(..)

--- End quote ---
The repairmen tell me most modern appliances simply aren't built to be repaired (..)

--- End quote ---

Yes, this is also my observation - we get closer and closer to the:

--- Code: ---durability == warranty length
--- End code ---
and there is no repair cost involved.

Now, if a company does not receive a feedback from the field about bearing failures, a natural consequence is that next version of their washing machine gets a thinner bearing. Of course this process does not take weeks but rather generations (10-20 years) in appliance business.

To be clear, unlike "Brands You Would Never Buy Again" negative opinions in here, my remark is not a rant. I am interested in the equations that govern the "mechanics of appliance industry" from one side and "consumer choices" from the other. The fact that Joe bought fridge made by W company for X$, which failed after Y years and estimated repair was Z$ is a mere consequence of the above "pair of equations". With his choice Joe created a demand for such XYZ product and this was the only reason why W designed and manufactured it. And because Z is so high for this particular fridge and Y is so short then Joe has just forced some repair shops to go bankrupt, but that was Joe's will.

There is nothing bad with that - it is called reality. And it seems to me it is not that difficult to understand why the (industry+consumer) pair is evolving in this direction.
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