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Never again will I buy anything Samsung. They have steadfastly refused to fix my fridge's ice maker even though they have admitted it's a design fault, and ret
by rangerelf 5y ago
Never again will I buy anything Samsung.
They have steadfastly refused to fix my fridge's ice maker even though they have admitted it's a design fault, and retailers will not take it back as faulty because the ice maker is not considered vital to the functioning of the refrigerator in general.
- jandrese 5y agoIce makers are notoriously flimsy. Serious race to the bottom by the manufacturers. The good news is that they're easy to replace (undo a couple of bolts and unplug a cable and they usually come right out), bad news is the replacements are ridiculously expensive, like $100 each and come with all of the same design flaws the original had. There is also surprisingly little standardization which makes the replacements even more expensive as there are hundreds of mostly but not quite compatible models to stock and you have to be very careful when ordering replacements.
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoI have never heard about anyone having trouble with an ice maker until I read this. My ice maker has been working fine for over 15 years. My mother's ice maker has been working fine for about 25 years.
- jandrese 5y agoYou have old ones from before the manufacturers stopped caring. It seems like ones made in the past 5 years have gone precipitously downhill, especially the GE ones.
- Johnny555 5y agoThe Icemaker in my Frigidaire refrigerator has never worked since I bought the house, the problem is that the coils keep freezing over (the icemaker is in the refrigerator compartment so has its own freezer coil to make it cold) I spent a weekend pulling it out, thawing everything out, and then replacing the defroster coil, thinking that would fix it. It didn't -- it worked for about a week afterwards until freezing over again.
- Spivak 5y agoThe thing that gets me is that for commercial operations it seems to be a solved problem. They break and require maintenance like anything else but if they’re not outright broken they are super reliable where fridge ice dispensers even when they’re working suck.
- vidarh 5y agoStandalone ice machines in particular infuriates me as 90% of the machines on Amazon are copies of the same broken design: it rotates a plastic water container by firing a motor on one side only for a number of seconds without any sensor to stop it. As a result, if you use them heavily, it reliably develops stress fractures after a year or so. It took me four broken machines to find a model without that exact same design flaw... It seems a lot of the problems with these kind of products is that most customers use them quite little, and so they don't see a major fallout even for problems that'd be trivial to fix (many of the ice maker models in question has a switch to stop rotation too far in the opposite direction) and so it just gets ignored.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoMost were up to a few years ago, but the big players went out of their way to make dependable ice makers--I thought. The last two refrigerators I bought had dependable ice makers. I just overheard an installer talking to a neighbor while installing his refrigerator. The tech said most modern refrigerations only last 10 years at best though.
- paranoidrobot 5y agoUnofortunately some manufacturers are now implementing DRM to control your use of the ice maker function. See: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxpjy/hacker-bypasses-ges-ridiculous-refrigerator-drm https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxpjy/hacker-bypasses-ges-r... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129801
- yardie 5y ago10 years is actually quite good for major appliances. If you're warrantied for 3 and manage to get 10 years out if it you've exceeded the design parameters. Environmentally, replacing a broken fridge is usually the only time someone will even research something more energy efficient.
- jandrese 5y agoMeanwhile my Grandmother still uses her fridge from the 60s. It still has the kind of handles where you can get locked inside and almost die if you are on a very special episode of any 80's kid show.
- hcurtiss 5y agoWow. So the idea is that we want them to wear out more quickly so that they buy a new product that's more energy efficient? That strikes me as terribly wasteful. What about the impacts of a discarded appliance?
- curryst 5y agoThe compressor is almost certainly the most expensive part of the fridge. It's also one of 2 moving parts on fridge (the other the being the fan, which is cheap), making it the most likely to fail. I checked some list prices, and they're a substantial price of the fridge itself. Some site said $200-$450 to replace one, another said the part itself is $100-$500 without even including labor. At those prices, I can see why people might just buy new. It's also something most people would want to hire a professional for; refrigerants are not good to inhale, and this needs to be air-tight. I would also hope that most of them get refurbished. It's pretty hard to just "discard" a fridge. You have to call someone at the city (or GoodWill), and I presume they sell those to refurbisher. They're worth some money. So I think in reality, it goes to a refurbisher who fixes it, then sells it to someone else who replaces and even older fridge. So the fridge that actually ends up in a landfill might be a 1960s deep freeze. The same idea as used cars.
- ceejayoz 5y agoI won't buy appliances anywhere other than Costco for this reason. No-questions-asked returns for 90 days on appliances, and a year on most other items. Extended warranty for several years for free if you use their credit card, too.
- myaccounthaha 5y agoYeah but good luck getting them delivered in the first place. My understanding is that Costco owns Innovel now and they are a truly terrible logistics company. Buyer beware!
- foobarian 5y agoMe neither! I got their fridge, and in my case the deicing functionality is faulty. There is a little metal tab behind the back panel that heats up an ice dam to keep the condensation flowing out, that happens to be too short by about 2cm. They skimped on 2cm of aluminum and now I will never buy anything Samsung ever again. So in short, it seems that they can neither make a proper ice maker nor ice un-maker :-)
- myaccounthaha 5y agoHey I had that same issue with my old fridge, a guy on YouTube helped me solve it! Take a short piece of the copper ground wire from a length of Romex and wrap it around the heating element, then have it point down into the drip area. It should conduct enough heat to keep the fins from icing up. It's not ideal but it saved me from replacing the (I think) evaporator fan for a third or fourth time, plus all the ruined food. Also had to replace the mainboard on the pile of junk fridge. So glad I don't own it anymore.
- rascul 5y agoWhen I worked delivery at a national big box home improvement store, Samsung and LG refrigerators that we brought back due to ice maker not working went to the recycle trailer and was sold for scrap once the trailer filled up.
- lostlogin 5y agoNew Zealand has a bit of legislation called the Consumer Guarantees Act, and it specifies something to the effect of ‘the thing should have a lifespan commensurate with the price, free of defects or faults’. It’s really great - the downside is that we pay more for things than people overseas do. I vastly prefer that we have it.
- andrewon 5y ago" the downside is that we pay more for things than people overseas do" Isn't that they just force you to buy extended warranty on everything?
- lmm 5y agoA warranty that's legally enforced, though. Part of the reason there are so many jokes about extended warranties is that it's very hard to make the seller actually honour them.
- lostlogin 5y agoA practical example is the an Apple extended warranty is basically in effect on every Apple product in New Zealand. There are some things you don’t get, but if you notify them after 3 years that your phone is not not working (no drop damage or water damage though), they will replace it.
- brokenmachine 5y agoAustralia has the same thing. Amazing to have an actual law to protect consumers a bit from multinationals. Wonder how long until our politicians take it away.
- 29083011397778 5y ago> have a lifespan commensurate with the price > we pay more for things than people overseas do This sounds wonderfully cyclical. "Why do I expect my washer to last an extra year? Because it cost 10% more than the one sold in America, which is expected to last a decade".
- 5y ago
- hellbannedguy 5y agoWhat country do you live in?
- robohoe 5y agoSame. Samsung has had a bad reputation for a while. I remember having issues with their CRT monitors back in mid 2000s. I bought one of their smart TVs back in 2011 and it's had issues with the panel ever since with randomly showing purple & pink lines. Their cell phones have also been crap in my personal experience.
- BizarroLand 5y agoI've never had a good experience with a Samsung device. Their TV screens are too blue for me, their appliances fail too quickly and are not user repair friendly, their phones have too much bloat. Admittedly, this is all down to personal experience and taste but I am decidedly anti-samsung. I've had a few decent computer monitors from them but otherwise everything I've owned from them has become e-waste with far too much rapidity for the price paid.
- dotancohen 5y agoIf you can find a good stylus, I won't need a Note anymore. The Note is the last Samsung device that I buy, but only because there is absolutely no competition. I don't even use all the fancy S-Pen software, I just use the stylus for the same functionality that every Android device has.
- BizarroLand 5y agoMoto has a stylus phone out now.
- dotancohen 5y agoThank you, I'll take a look at that!