Electrical Appliance Brands You Would Never Buy Again

[floobydust]

My Hoover vacuum cleaner fell over and shattered, plastic pieces everywhere. The handle is broken now.

"Hoover was part of the Whirlpool Corporation, but was sold in 2006 to Techtronic Industries, a Chinese multinational, for $107 million. Hoover Europe/UK split from Hoover US in 1993, and was acquired by Techtronic Industries, a company based in Hong Kong."
"...  Today, the Hoover Europe brand, as part of the portfolio of brands owned by Candy Group."
"On 28 September 2018, it was announced that the Chinese multinational Haier had acquired the Hoover Candy group."
Haier has 7 brands: Haier, Casarte, Leader, GE Appliances, Fisher & Paykel, Aqua and Candy.

Anyhow, getting parts for it turned out to be a clusterF as the part numbers, manuals etc got tossed with all the brand name shuffling.  Even bags are hard to find for it.
The chinese are scooping up old brand names and doling out low quality products under them, in the race to the bottom I guess.

[Veteran68]

I don't know if Sony still makes anything good but I have a Trinitron XBR TV that is exceptional, I think many people would be blown away that it's not HD. It has very good sound too with speakers that hang off the sides and a small subwoofer on top. I have a couple of small Sony CRT studio monitors that are also excellent, they will do 1080p on 9" and 15" CRTs.

IMO they were king of CRTs. Their Trinitron and Wega TVs were the best tubes I ever had. Their SXRD rear-projection LCD was also awesome -- I had a 65" I paid $5500 for with the matching stand that was amazing in its day. Its only major drawback was its huge bulk (although still smaller than rear-projection CRTs). It still worked great 10 years later when I handed it down to my daughter, who eventually sold it to someone else when she got a flat panel. It's probably still working today, wherever it is. I still have a 46" Sony Bravia LCD that's about 8 years old. It's been a good one, but I'm loving our last two Samsung 4K models.

[james_s]

The chinese are scooping up old brand names and doling out low quality products under them, in the race to the bottom I guess.

I remember seeing a lot of that starting around 20 years ago. Well regarded 70s HiFi names like Dual showing up on cheap crappy car stereo head units and older names like Crosley on junky AM/FM radios.

[shakalnokturn]

IMO they were king of CRTs. Their Trinitron and Wega TVs were the best tubes I ever had. Their SXRD rear-projection LCD was also awesome -- I had a 65" I paid $5500 for with the matching stand that was amazing in its day. Its only major drawback was its huge bulk (although still smaller than rear-projection CRTs). It still worked great 10 years later when I handed it down to my daughter, who eventually sold it to someone else when she got a flat panel. It's probably still working today, wherever it is. I still have a 46" Sony Bravia LCD that's about 8 years old. It's been a good one, but I'm loving our last two Samsung 4K models.

Sony did make some great TV's, most of them were good actually, the FE2 chassis however was a real pile of crap, up to standard with what most other TV manufacturers were building at the time, by then the CRT TV was declining.
Sony also made a few fantastic hifi products.

[vk6zgo]

IMO they were king of CRTs. Their Trinitron and Wega TVs were the best tubes I ever had. Their SXRD rear-projection LCD was also awesome -- I had a 65" I paid $5500 for with the matching stand that was amazing in its day. Its only major drawback was its huge bulk (although still smaller than rear-projection CRTs). It still worked great 10 years later when I handed it down to my daughter, who eventually sold it to someone else when she got a flat panel. It's probably still working today, wherever it is. I still have a 46" Sony Bravia LCD that's about 8 years old. It's been a good one, but I'm loving our last two Samsung 4K models.

Sony did make some great TV's, most of them were good actually, the FE2 chassis however was a real pile of crap, up to standard with what most other TV manufacturers were building at the time, by then the CRT TV was declining.
Sony also made a few fantastic hifi products.

And, for many years "top of the line" TV Broadcast Studio equipment.
Of course, a lot of these cost from as much as a small car, to as much as a small house!

[VK3DRB]

I would like to see an appliance reliability review website, where brands and their products are reviewed for reliability and spare parts cost after the warranty runs out.

By the way, Sony Trinitron picture tubes were sharp, but did not last as long as some other quality Japanese brands like NEC. For some strange reason, the green cathode gun used to deplete first in the Trinitrons in Australia, ie: the screens went purple. I could hypothesise that was because we watched a lot of cricket for hours or days on end, where the screen was mostly green grass. It was more like white is made up of 59% green, 30% red and 11% blue, so the green gun goes first, but why the Trinitrons were more susceptible than other picture tube types for the green gun to deplete first baffles me. Each RGB drive circuit, and each cathode inside the picture tube was identical.

Most marketing hype is , but AWA Thorn gets a gong for marketing their new picture tube in the 1980's as having "Shot Vision". In Australian vernacular, shot means it is stuffed .

[Electro Detective]

No issues or returns on Aldi tools or electronics EVER over the years (fingers crossed)
but fwiw I am an occasional user manual reader.

I'm no fan of Belkin wireless router products, unless they've lifted their game in the last few years.
Easy to set up and use, but tend to die just after the warranty period has died..

DLink stuff became my 'go to' after that, no issues 

All whitegoods MIC are a coin toss, no matter what reputable badge is slapped on

i.e. make sure it has a L O N G warranty
and don't lose the receipt 

 

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

"Realistic" (Radio Shack) was very bad. Another brand I hate is Citroën, the worst cars ever (IMHO!).

[coppice]

A lot of people's impressions of brands have more to do with the local distribution company than the actual brand - delivering the product in perfect order, dealing with warranty issues well, doing out of warranty repairs at reasonable cost, etc. Therefore people in different countries can have very different impressions of exactly the same product.

[jfiresto]

... By the way, Sony Trinitron picture tubes were sharp, but did not last as long as some other quality Japanese brands like NEC. For some strange reason, the green cathode gun used to deplete first in the Trinitrons in Australia, ie: the screens went purple. I could hypothesise that was because we watched a lot of cricket for hours or days on end....

I bought a demo 32-inch Trinitron that went purple shortly after I got it. Every time I had looked at it in the store, it had been showing music videos. This was some years before video and film makers became infatuated with blue and orange.

[Veteran68]

DLink stuff became my 'go to' after that, no issues 

And this proves my point about how different people can have vastly different experiences with the same brand.

Every single DLink product I have owned -- with literally no exception -- have failed on me. I've been through switches, NICs, routers, and something else (an IP camera I think) that have all failed in a very short time (days to months, maybe a year at the longest). I finally stopped submitting warranty claims because I knew it would just happen again. I will never spend another penny on a DLink product.

I feel exactly the same way about Seagate hard drives. Although many swear by them, every Seagate I ever had failed prematurely. I've been buying components and building computers since the early '90s, including well over a hundred hard drives, and I learned that lesson the hard way.

Anything can fail, but some brands have a much higher likelihood than others, and that describes both DLink and Seagate for me.

[VK3DRB]

...DLink stuff became my 'go to' after that, no issues. 

All whitegoods MIC are a coin toss, no matter what reputable badge is slapped on...

Maybe it is a coin toss as you say, but I had a DLink ADSL2/router once. Had to reboot it at least twice a day. Also the parallel printer spooler only worked once, then ceased. After one year of hell with this product, I ground it up into little pieces, put the lot in a zip lock back and mailed it to the CEO of DLink Australia with a comment on what I thought of his DLink product. The router had serious firmware issues. The warranty was worthless, as was DLink's support and help desk.

Unfortunately I had brought it from monkeys, who refused to take it back under warranty. The reviews are at least entertaining... https://www.productreview.com.au/listings/computer-parts-land.

[Electro Detective]

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..'

the Trashiba Toshiba laptop quality and badged USB sticks aren't that flash either 


Re DLink, I've always hit them with a full reset and then the latest firmware, be they new or used, maybe a bit of luck too?
and if new I buy from Officeworks or anywhere that does exchanges AND refunds, without any sales counter monkey BS. 

TP-Link stuff either doesn't work out of the box for me, or too much stuffing about 

New IT gear that doesn't work straight up, or exhibits 'plug and PRAY' intermittent operation,
is someone else's wage earning problem to work out, not the customers..

i.e. I take the FAIL shyte back after exploring EVERY possible avenue first,
rather than waste any more time surfing the web for a solution, workaround, 'hack', play fill the CONTACT US form game,
especially on a new product I doubt manufacturing bosses, designers and staff bothered to take home for a weekend, to try their duds for themselves.

Perhaps they are a bit kinky    and get off on dealing with recalls, irate customers and losing money   

 

[NiHaoMike]

At one point, Cisco was more or less the best brand of network hardware out there, then came the infamous blue boxes that weren't really any better than much cheaper products from other manufacturers. I've had one break down at 2 years with bad caps and 3 of my friends have had similar problems with theirs. Then, many years after that, I came across a dual band router that would go unstable if the 5GHz is enabled, defeating the point of having it.

HP laptops have also been poor quality. In college, I had to fix one for a friend, then years later at work, I found out that even the enterprise grade HPs break down all the time.

Agilent scopes were also infamous for breaking down around that time, in particular the 13GHz ones. So many broke down at work that even the Agilent service tech couldn't get enough spares to replace them all. (Also remember that Dave had his review unit break down?) I'm pretty sure the Keysight scopes are more reliable, but how much more?

[coppice]

I've seen a lot less Seagate hard drives die, versus WD, Hitachi, IBM offerings,

They've all gone through phases of producing low failure products and high failure products. Overall I'd guess Seagate has been the worst, but I might be biased by their super hot running drives in the 90s.

[MyHeadHz]

The concept of a brand is all but irrelevant these days, they are just a name slapped on something built by whatever company owns the IP or was contracted by the company that does. The item you buy today may have no relation to the one someone buys next year beyond having the same name on it. It's not really useful to think in terms of brand anymore.

Schrödinger's appliance: one cannot both be able to purchase a product, and know if its quality will last.

To be fair, there is the odd product that actually improves over time.  But more often than not the quality goes down.  I stopped recommending appliances years ago for that reason.  Even if I recommended one to avoid, it would imply that other brands would be better, which is not necessarily the case.

[Veteran68]

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..'

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.

[bob91343]

I bought a brand new Eureka vacuum cleaner and it didn't do much.  I returned it for warranty service and the guy said it was fine.  I took it home and it still didn't do much.

So I bought a different brand.  The Eureka sits in my garage, still practically brand new.  I will never see that $100 again.

The Hoover brand seems to work a lot better.  I have a Kenmore that works okay too.

I don't buy new stuff unless there is a good reason.

[AndyC_772]

A couple of months ago our washing machine died. (Miele, 13 years old).

I did a lot of research into which make and/or model might be the best replacement in terms of reliability and serviceability, and the conclusion was that *every* brand, with one exception, was now making crap machines with sealed drums that mean the bearings cannot be replaced and something as simple as a trapped sock can leave the machine uneconomical to repair.

That exception was Miele, who apparently do still buid machines to last even though spares are expensive and difficult to come by unless you pay to have the machine repaired by one of their own authorised technicians. That's still a really disappointing state of affairs, but they're by no means unique in this.

In the end I narrowed down the choice of new machine by simply dividing the cost of each candidate by the length of its warranty, to give a figure for the cost/year of being guaranteed a working machine.

I ended up with a new Miele, £900 with a 10 year warranty = £90/yr and a fair chance that it won't break in that time and have to be scrapped.

[Black Phoenix]

My experience mirrors theirs exactly.

Same were on my side:

I've been had most failures with Samsung and Seagate drives, some with Western Digital and basically none with Hitachi/Toshiba.

Regarding laptops - Acer and HP was the brands were I saw more failures and problems with construction, but probably because their price at least in Portugal was very competitive, so it was basically the ones that I had to fix most of the times. Toshiba not so much, and they were the easiest to access something inside. Just pop the screws on the bottom a full access to the motherboard, same as the Sony Vaio. I use Asus since I started to own laptops myself.

From my Asus M51TR with 4GB (2x2GB) and a RM-70 that I later upgrade to a ZM-82 and 8GB (2x4GB) and a SSD+HDD in the CD-RW bay until it died from a unknown problem with 9 years to the current Zenbook UX303UA I only have good stuff to say about them.

Although I still want to one day have the chance to use a Lenovo ThinkPad (In Portugal they are extremely expensive, here in China not really and the one that I see more around).

[jfiresto]

... That exception was Miele, who apparently do still buid machines to last even though spares are expensive and difficult to come by unless you pay to have the machine repaired by one of their own authorised technicians....

That was the opinion, a few years back, of a local, independent appliance parts and repair company. They advised me to spend the extra money and buy a German Miele rather than one built in Poland, if I wanted the traditional Miele quality.

[coppice]

... That exception was Miele, who apparently do still buid machines to last even though spares are expensive and difficult to come by unless you pay to have the machine repaired by one of their own authorised technicians....

That was the opinion, a few years back, of a local, independent appliance parts and repair company. They advised me to spend the extra money and buy a German Miele rather than one built in Poland, if I wanted the traditional Miele quality.

I think the real difference is the model you chose. A few years back Miele started making some lower priced machines that look more like machines from other makers, and felt like they were built more like machines from other makers. They seem to have backed away from this. I guess it was hurting their name more than it was creating new sales.

[james_s]

... By the way, Sony Trinitron picture tubes were sharp, but did not last as long as some other quality Japanese brands like NEC. For some strange reason, the green cathode gun used to deplete first in the Trinitrons in Australia, ie: the screens went purple. I could hypothesise that was because we watched a lot of cricket for hours or days on end....

I bought a demo 32-inch Trinitron that went purple shortly after I got it. Every time I had looked at it in the store, it had been showing music videos. This was some years before video and film makers became infatuated with blue and orange.

There were a few runs of larger Trinitron tubes that were notorious for wearing out early, IIRC the 32" was one of them. I'm not sure why, maybe they didn't adequately beef up the cathode design for the larger tube. I remember seeing a lot of those with weak guns in the early 2000's. I would also never buy a store demo CRT, plasma or OLED set as the demos are always run with the contrast cranked way up to make the picture pop under the bright store lighting. Combined with the long hours they typically run, a TV can get the equivalent of years of typical domestic use in just a few months in the showroom.

[james_s]

"Realistic" (Radio Shack) was very bad. Another brand I hate is Citroën, the worst cars ever (IMHO!).

Realistic was a store brand that was stuck on all sorts of different stuff, it was never a manufacture. Most of the scanners were made by GRE or Uniden, I think some of the audio gear was Pioneer but not all of it. The stuff varied widely in quality, some of it was very good, some was junk. I still have a few high end Realistic scanners that are about as good as analog scanner radios get.

[E-Design]

Duracell brand batteries - these days, they have a high chance of leaking.
(not an appliance, but worth a mention)