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My fridge is not pretty, but it has been running for 20 years straight with the only hiccups being power outages. I really do not expect that a newer fridge wi

by RajT88 3y ago

My fridge is not pretty, but it has been running for 20 years straight with the only hiccups being power outages. I really do not expect that a newer fridge will last as long. I may try and find something in brushed aluminum off Craigslist which has been sitting in someone's garage since 2000 when this one eventually goes. I have an aunt who has had a fridge running without issues since about 1962. It is all white ceramic over stainless steel and a thing of beauty. This is the kind of product engineering modern companies seek to avoid. I seem to recall a Heinlein novel about inter-dimensional travelers who wanted to take over the world by destroying the economy. The first thing they did was found companies which made products which never wore out (razors and cars).

grogenaut 3y ago
There are still simple models. I got a whirlpool about 2 years back. All it has is a water dispenser and an ice maker on the inside. Other than that it's the same as my late 80s Frigidaire. Still seems to be mostly mechanical. It's a lot more efficient than my old fridge though and a lot bigger. The old one had issues with it's design and defrosting as well that the new one has fixed esp being a lower cold drawere model vs the old one with freezer on top. I can't block the vents on the new one and they can't freeze up, but it does use a blower. The old one could ice over the vent and I had to modify it with a extra passive heating wire to keep it from freezing up.
kd913 3y ago
They may run, but the power consumption your old fridge freezers are wasting would cover multiple brand new fridges many times over. Anything over 10 years really should be replaced. A bit like leds vs incandescent at this point time. Especially problematic given a fridge freezer runs 24/7 and is the largest contributor to your energy bills. Also isn’t this a classic example of old things that survive are likely more expensive and well made. However, the cheap stuff back then likely got replaced sooner. Probably a similar thing applies where an expensive modern fridge will last ages too.
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  The longevity and the power use are connected. Modern appliances use a very low viscosity oil in the compressor pump, and as a result use less power, but also wear faster. The old ones use a much more viscous oil which gives decades of use at the expense of higher power consumption.
  - api 3y ago
    There has to be ways to make the more efficient models more reliable. There’s just little incentive since units failing keeps the orders coming. You want the unit to last the warranty duration plus one minute.
api 3y ago
Real world control systems need to be able to scale up and down. Our financial and corporate systems only know how to scale up, middle along, or fail catastrophically. There is no mechanism in the world of capital and corporations for scaling something down gracefully if a market is mostly saturated but we still need some of something. One solution could be to side step the issue by getting really good at flexible just in time manufacturing. This lets you decouple the company from products. When someone needs a fridge, a fridge is made. The companies running the factories could be big build to order companies that could make a huge variety of things and the plans could be for sale by “fabless” appliance companies or open source. This is sort of how chip and electronic parts manufacture works. In this model making something with a really long life span is fine. You might run low on fridge orders, but that just means your factories are free to make e-bikes or server racks or heat pumps or whatever the thing with demand happens to be.
- RajT88 3y ago
  We're heading this direction. There's a number of industries which technology has enabled them to move closer (or completely into) a manufacture-on-demand model where it's economically feasible to have small production runs (sometimes of even a single unit). T-Shirts are probably the first one I am aware of which got there. But strangely enough, Guitars are moving that way. It used to be to get a signature series you had to be a pretty big artist. These days, there's players from cover bands getting signature series! You look through all the lists of signature series guitars, and quite a lot of them have been released in just the last ~12 years. PCB's are going there now too - I've read on HN itself hobbyists talking about how cheap it is to get individual custom boards printed for them for projects shipped from China. Manufacturers taking production runs of less than 100, and happy to do it. It's worth noting - production on demand doesn't provide any guarantee that the products will have good longevity. In fact, many printed-on-demand T-Shirts are pretty crap and you end up tossing them after a couple years.

by RajT88 3y ago

grogenaut 3y ago

There are still simple models. I got a whirlpool about 2 years back. All it has is a water dispenser and an ice maker on the inside. Other than that it's the same as my late 80s Frigidaire. Still seems to be mostly mechanical. It's a lot more efficient than my old fridge though and a lot bigger. The old one had issues with it's design and defrosting as well that the new one has fixed esp being a lower cold drawere model vs the old one with freezer on top. I can't block the vents on the new one and they can't freeze up, but it does use a blower. The old one could ice over the vent and I had to modify it with a extra passive heating wire to keep it from freezing up.

kd913 3y ago

They may run, but the power consumption your old fridge freezers are wasting would cover multiple brand new fridges many times over. Anything over 10 years really should be replaced. A bit like leds vs incandescent at this point time. Especially problematic given a fridge freezer runs 24/7 and is the largest contributor to your energy bills. Also isn’t this a classic example of old things that survive are likely more expensive and well made. However, the cheap stuff back then likely got replaced sooner. Probably a similar thing applies where an expensive modern fridge will last ages too.

madaxe_again 3y ago
The longevity and the power use are connected. Modern appliances use a very low viscosity oil in the compressor pump, and as a result use less power, but also wear faster. The old ones use a much more viscous oil which gives decades of use at the expense of higher power consumption.
- api 3y ago
  There has to be ways to make the more efficient models more reliable. There’s just little incentive since units failing keeps the orders coming. You want the unit to last the warranty duration plus one minute.

api 3y ago

Real world control systems need to be able to scale up and down. Our financial and corporate systems only know how to scale up, middle along, or fail catastrophically. There is no mechanism in the world of capital and corporations for scaling something down gracefully if a market is mostly saturated but we still need some of something. One solution could be to side step the issue by getting really good at flexible just in time manufacturing. This lets you decouple the company from products. When someone needs a fridge, a fridge is made. The companies running the factories could be big build to order companies that could make a huge variety of things and the plans could be for sale by “fabless” appliance companies or open source. This is sort of how chip and electronic parts manufacture works. In this model making something with a really long life span is fine. You might run low on fridge orders, but that just means your factories are free to make e-bikes or server racks or heat pumps or whatever the thing with demand happens to be.

RajT88 3y ago
We're heading this direction. There's a number of industries which technology has enabled them to move closer (or completely into) a manufacture-on-demand model where it's economically feasible to have small production runs (sometimes of even a single unit). T-Shirts are probably the first one I am aware of which got there. But strangely enough, Guitars are moving that way. It used to be to get a signature series you had to be a pretty big artist. These days, there's players from cover bands getting signature series! You look through all the lists of signature series guitars, and quite a lot of them have been released in just the last ~12 years. PCB's are going there now too - I've read on HN itself hobbyists talking about how cheap it is to get individual custom boards printed for them for projects shipped from China. Manufacturers taking production runs of less than 100, and happy to do it. It's worth noting - production on demand doesn't provide any guarantee that the products will have good longevity. In fact, many printed-on-demand T-Shirts are pretty crap and you end up tossing them after a couple years.