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A broken fridge ruins lots of food, worth lots of money. A broken washing machine or dishwasher can flood your house, costing 10s of thousands of dollars. A b
by jtbayly 4y ago
A broken fridge ruins lots of food, worth lots of money.
A broken washing machine or dishwasher can flood your house, costing 10s of thousands of dollars.
A broken dryer can burn your house down.
And even if some of those aren’t common failure modes (fridge is common), it is incredibly inconvenient and expensive to be without a major appliance for (insert supply chain guesstimate number of) weeks every year or so.
- eternityforest 4y agoI've only personally seen one failure like that, a bad washer flooding a friend's house. I would imagine a heat pump dryer would be very unlikely to burn anything down. It is a really big inconvenience when they go offline, but there are still lots of brands that seem to work fine for 10 to 20 years. I'm surprised ultra high reliability isn't more of a consumer selling point. Refrigerators in particular could do it with a redundant compressor and valves, they could share the evaporator and condensing coils. It's not like fridge compressors cost that much to make. They could even use 2 small ones and run them all the time, so if 1 fails you get half power but it still works. Washers and dryers could do redundancy by selling pairs of identical combo units instead of 1 washer and 1 dryer, but I suppose people don't need to replace both at once very often.
- mindslight 4y agoAppliances probably don't need redundancy, but rather a guaranteed service person you could call that will fix the thing for a reasonable price instead of just telling you its the "control board" to try and sell you a new one. Perhaps some engineering to support easier diagnostics, and definitely to reduce the number of replacement part SKUs.