Less energy efficient
Worse airflow, Uneven cooling -> food spoils quicker
May contain CFC's
Fuck old fridges
unzips
what?
Wrong room, Mr Vance
I know someone with a 50s fridge, the inside is a giant lazy susan, very cool and unique. But yeah we did some back-of-envelope math, and it uses about 20x as much energy as my modern fridge.
The worse energy efficiency is annoying, but the added cost of electricity is absolutely nothing compared to the cost of buying a new fridge every 5 years.
The uneven airflow/cooling is manageable, since it's usually fairly minor.
As for the CFCs, that only matters if it leaks, and the fridge wouldn't have lasted 50 years if it leaked.
As for the CFCs, that only matters if it leaks, and the fridge wouldn't have lasted 50 years if it leaked.
"It hasn't leaked yet so it won't leak" is a hell of a take.
If the 20x is correct, you may be talking about the difference between $50/year and $1,000/year to operate it, so after five years you could buy quite a nice new fridge with the savings.
I live in a really cold climate with electric baseboard heating (it's dumb. I didn't build the place I rent) so an inefficient fridge or freezer just takes money out of my heating bill and puts it into my keep-food-from-rotting bill
I mean yeah if money is literally the only factor. Some people worry what would happen if every household chucks a fucking fridge in the landfill every 5 years.
And then there's LG which is very concerned about people not throwing an entire fridge into the landfill in as short a time frame as possible
I do have a modern fridge that keeps going and going. Old fridges do have an issue, too: they are much less energy efficient and have a massive impact on your electricity bill.
I have a modern fridge which is about 15 years old now. Simple digital control, multi zone temperature control, no radiator on the back, stainless steel. It was very expensive at the time but it keeps going and hasn't required any maintenance other than occasionally cleaning the inside.
The fridge I had before this one was a cheap Beko and lasted less than two years.
If there's no radiator on the back then where does the heat go?
A lot of modern fridges channel the heat out the front of the bottom. I think it's so you can fit it into tighter spaces.
The back, top, bottom and sides all get hot. So you're right in that it's radiating the heat, it just does use the typical radiator on the rear.
What's the advantage? It sounds like you'd need significant air clearance all around (including in back) instead of just the back?
Most of the ones like that vent the heat primarily through an area that can be effectively cleaned and has significantly better airflow. So the back radiator is larger but it's effectively never cleaned and the air exchange volume is the gap between the back of the fridge and the wall.
Venting out the bottom allows exchange with the rest of the room, but does require more work to ensure the air actually flows. Additionally, you can clean the vent with a vacuum, and it's a lot more likely that will actually happen than someone pulls the fridge forward and wipes the coils with a damp but not wet cloth.
I would imagine not having to clean the radiators.
Those things are a bitch to clean, and they get disgusting quick
Survivorship bias
Far from it. As a technician there are way more service calls on newer appliances and much shorter life cycles for them. Certain fairly universal parts are clearly being made at a lower standard now as well. For instance, a very common repair is gas oven ignitors. Many different manufacturers use the exact same style of hot surface ignitors. The ones i see these days burn out in ½ the time or less than they ever used to, even though the design of them hasn't changed one iota.
There is a clear and obvious lack of quality in today's appliances. An old Maytag washer could last 25 years with minimal repairs/maintenance. A newer Maytag doing the same work over the same duration would be lucky to get ½ that mileage before it got shit-canned, though it's likely it would happen even sooner than that. The comparison in design is night and day. The old one was simple, field-tested design made for reliability and relative ease of service...the other is a hodgepodge of electronics and sensors connected by Angel-Hair spaghetti-thin wiring that will have something break in less than 10 years with regular use, and likely less than 5 with heavy use. Sure, a few of the old Maytag's didn't go the distance and a few of the newer ones managed to squeak out more mileage than expected...but anyone with real experience with those 2 machines would take the old one over the new one every single time. It's almost unfair to compare an old Maytag washer to a new one because the most important metric is reliability and there's simply no comparison there.
Do people genuinely think modern tech is that durable/reliable?
I'd consider spaghetti-diameter wires pretty thick
If you say so. We never used to have to replace a wiring harness on a washer, but I'm not a wire expert so i suppose i could be wrong
It doesn't matter how old it is - any fridge needs refilling
Tell your friends to stop buying from Samsung
Jokes on you, I bought my fridge from LG.
Unrelated, but does anyone know how to stop my A/C from beeping out morse code adverts for McAfee?
My girlfriend has a Samsung fridge, going strong for around 12 years now. It's absolutely fine.
All brands are going to have duds and winners, that's just the way it is.
video from an american technician comparing fridges and giving tips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n76TXuDcok his channel is great in general for americans who want to buy appliances
Enshittification is a turd that touches everything on the way down to the shareholder value lands.
Buuuut this is the kind of thing that survivorship bias was made for. Were things made to last 60 years ago? Not so sure about that, material quality and engineering have come a long way, though so has systematic greed.
For all the stories there are of old appliances weathering the storm of age, you don't hear about the ones that don't. Likewise, we now have more styles, makes, and manufacturers, which makes more room for cheap flashy stuff to hear about when it breaks unexpectedly after a couple years.
I've had both fridges that lasted 20 years, and ones that lasted 2, sometimes its probably just the luck of who they had running the assembly line that day
It was also that old appliances were expensive at the time.
If you buy a fridge for 3000€ today, it will also last you a very long time.
Except the 3,000 £ Fridge is just the 600£ fridge with Wifi, a tablet, a camera and AI. No higher quality materials
That's not necessarily true.
Also, expensice appliances still last. It's just that back in the day expensive was the only option.
My theory is you should only buy basic, barebones appliances. They don't try to do anything fancy and just default to what's been proven to work. Just get a fridge that does cold and nothing else.
I have an airfryer with two knobs: time and temperature. It's all I need and I love it for that. The best feature: no beeps, only satisfying mechanical timer noises and a simple "pling" when it's done
I have a microwave like that, not even a display, just two twisty knobs without any beeps. And it was only like 55 euros :)
That's what i tell my customers. The best advice is to keep it simple. Even then there's still loads of awful choices out there
Tell your friends to actually do a bit of research on expensive purchases. I've helped three relatives replace their fridges with relatively cheap models and five years in they're still running
My mom bought a new house and is moving in, in a couple weeks. I went over to get internet installed a couple weeks ago and noticed the new fridge was making an awful buzzing sound.
Parents had a fridge from the 70s that lived until 2006. Gone through 6 fridges since
What the fuck is going on
It's planned obsolesence. They make more money by marketing high tech/luxury stuff and having it break on purpose in a defined amount of time.
I got some Carhartt "worker" jeans, advertized as nice jeans for manual laborers.
I work from home in my home office. The crotch tore in less than 6 months of hard... sitting.
Expensive shit they want you to buy over and over again because they think you're an idiot. I learned to sew, learned to darn my nice wool socks that tore predictably in 6 months, repair and maintain my motorcycle, repair my plumbing, because fuck all this enshittification.
My new MO is to buy your shit once, and either i will say your brand is great or keep wearing my torn/repaired carhartt jeans and keep reminding people never to buy them unless they want to learn how to sew. Fuck these greedy pieces of shit.
our parents but a new LG one recently, and there has been complaints in the reviews that it keeps defrosting or its not cold enough or it dies down the line.
The fridge was designed to survive the third world war.
With their phased out refrigerants that you can't find anymore and when you call someone to recharge it, they can't and youre stuck with a fridge that no longer works.
My gran had a pantry instead of a fridge. Checkmate technocrats.
Mmmm, day-old liquid ice cream... 🤤
I have a decades old fridge that literally freezes my veggie drawer every two weeks. I‘m so close to throwing it out.
Old things go out of spec more often but in a gradual way, new just breaks once the 0's and 1's don't flow as expected
It's a sad fact of society that there are no great rock ballads about refrigerators.
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