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This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things…

July 28, 2019 By johntmay

I’ve been a homeowner for forty years. In those forty years I’ve had two catastrophic failures with a refrigerator/freezer; one last week and the other a year and a half ago.  The first failure occurred when the freezer door fell off as I opened it.  The hinges had simply given up and tore off the body of the appliance.  That led to a complete kitchen remodel and all new appliances.  Last week, during the heat wave, I noticed my beer was not as cold as I would like but I just got home from a long day on the job, it was late and I had to work the next morning. Besides, what I thought was a temp gauge on the door read “37 Degrees”.  The following morning, with the gauge still reading 37 degrees, I opened the door to disaster.  A quick check with an infrared thermometer told me the refrigerator was 65 degrees and the freezer was 45 degrees.  I know a little about food safety, enough to know that anything over 41 degrees for more than three or four hours is dangerous for foods that require refrigeration.  We tossed out the entire contents.

After a long argument with the manufacturer, once we learned that the appliance was not repairable by the local seller (too complicated), we had a technician come out three days later to replace virtually all the mechanical cooling parts of the appliance.  He said he was repairing about six a day.  The bill came to $700, but that went to the manufacturer.   I know live knowing that in five to six years, this new appliance will not be worth repairing when it bites the dust, and it will wind up with the others, in a land fill.

In the UK, Mary Creagh is an MP who is behind a movement to make changes to this and go back to the days when things like this were built to last, instead of designed to break down because this creates profit for the companies.

Is there anyone our congress behind similar legislation?

One suggestion I can offer is to make the manufacturers responsible for the complete recycling of their products once they have reached their usefulness.  If it breaks and the cost of repair outweighs the price of a new unit, the manufacturer ought to be fully responsible for completely recycling their product with none of it going into a landfill.  I’m sure there are a lot of things to consider here, so let’s start a conversation.  Yes, we should do the same with cell phones, computers, the whole lot.

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Comments

  1. SomervilleTom says

    July 29, 2019 at 2:34 pm

    It is indeed a real issue that troubles me as well. I fear it is another “generational” issue — the expectation that “hard goods” will last more than few years seems seems to have disappeared from our culture.

    Last year, my wife and I had to replace the refrigerator in the downstairs apartment because it failed. It was not more than six years old. I did some research at that time and found several pieces like this 2010 CBS news report — the average life of a new refrigerator was only 13 years in 2010 (and less now, I’m sure).

    This 2018 Washington Post piece offers an interesting spin (emphasis mine):

    When you are standing over the corpse of an appliance that died too young, it’s tempting to long for simpler days. But then, simpler isn’t the same as better. Replacement cycles may have shortened, but we can afford to replace our appliances sooner, because prices have fallen so dramatically. In 1979, a basic 17-cubic-foot Kenmore refrigerator cost $469 — or in today’s dollars, $1,735, which would have taken an average worker about 76 hours of labor to earn. It came with an ice maker, automatic defrost and some shelves. The nearest equivalent today has an extra cubic foot of storage, offers humidity-controlled crisper drawers and costs about a third as much to run. At $529, it represents under 20 hours of work at the average wage.

    Of course, as you observe, that cost comparison ignores the environmental impact of trashing the refrigerator carcasses every ten years, as opposed to the thirty+ years that I took for granted.

    FWIW, I notice the same thing about fluorescent tubes. I expect the tubes to last years, and ballast to last decades. At 16, I helped my father install fixtures in the basement of our new house (1967). The original ballasts were still working fine when my mother sold that house in 2004. I don’t know how many tubes they replaced, but whenever I was there over the years they all worked.

    I had that in mind when I installed fluorescent fixtures in the basement of the two-family my wife and I bought in 2012. Because of environmental regulations, these came with electronic (rather than oil-filled) ballasts, and used energy-efficient T-8 tubes instead of the T-12 tubes of my parent’s house. It has been a total disaster. The tubes fail every six months. I’ve already replaced three of eight ballasts, and given up on the others. Only two fixtures still have both tubes working, and about half don’t work at all. These are absolute rubbish. So much for “made in America”. I’ll be replacing them with LED equivalents.

    I think your proposal is as good as any I’ve heard. One way or another, if we want things that last we have to find ways to rewards suppliers who provide them and punish suppliers who do not.

    It appears to me that we’ve used the staggering advances in engineering and technology to become VERY good at manufacturing goods that fail (and therefore need to be replaced) within hours of their warranty expiration.

    One of the things I wonder is whether we can force every supplier to provide current data about the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) of each product. The data tracking is no longer difficult (the manufacturers already have it), and the technology to publish that data is straightforward.

    I’d like to be able to scan a barcode and see actual data about the lifetime of that product.

  2. centralmassdad says

    July 29, 2019 at 3:45 pm

    I’m not sure if it is generational; I recall my parents grumbling about his dishwasher for the same reason in the 80s. I do know that your proposal was advocated by various of the more “moderate” environmental groups (i.e, NRDC not Greenpeace) in the late 80s and early 90s, but was a non-starter because of opposition from organized labor.

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