- cross-posted to:
- singlepurpose@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- singlepurpose@lemmy.world
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There is a nonprofit org called Open Source Ecology that is aiming to create what they call the “Global Village Construction Set”, a collection of basic industrial machines required for modern living, designed in a way where everything can be built DIY by a single community (Including modular generators). I imagine that they have a plans for home appliances, I think as of now they’re still working on construction equipment.
That’s so cool. Yeah I’ve been thinking a great design strategy would be to build exclusively out of commonly accessible parts. Like, even repurpouse car parts if they’re more accessible, or use arduinos as the microcontrollers.
The thing about, say, a washing machine is there’s not a ton else that has a hefty spider/shaft/tub combo like that. The forces involved in spinning a few kilos of clothes isn’t trivial. I’ve been harbouring thoughts of open source appliances for a while.
What I kind of feel might be viable are modular, generic controller boards for dryers/washing machines/dish washers.
Love the concept but doesn’t seem to have many plans.
It does seem to have fizzled out a bit, sadly. They need to collaborate with other established groups doing similar things, IMO.
I think this is the way you have to do it. Open hardware designs. If you make a product that’s so reliable that it never breaks, it’s a product where you never get repeat business. If it’s a super simple thing that doesn’t need or get new features, you can never sell someone an upgrade. That’s great for the consumer, but not great for the appliance maker. So, there’s always an incentive for them to enshittify.
There’s a huge demand from consumers for that. Just not from investors.
There’s a huge demand from consumers for that.
Is that actually true, though?
Very likely. Why not?
Because consumers have shown to prefer features over reliability:
French Door refrigerators are the most popular and most complex design.
Built in ice makers are popular but also complex and prone to failure due to physics.
They still sell very basic refrigerators and washer/dryers. But these don’t sell as well as more feature rich models.
In my albeit anecdotal experience, these ‘very basic’ appliances suffer their own variant of faults. They take no modern design cues; they are more prone to reliability issues from bargain bin components; or they somehow cost only slightly less than their fancy feature rich counterparts.
Just because I don’t want off-white equipment in my kitchen, I shouldn’t have to buy an ‘AI’ oven. But the companies want to know when and what I’m cooking so when I go to the grocery in the middle of dinner prep, the AI price labels can adjust a bit higher because they know I need an ingredient right now for a meal I’ve already started making.
The variant of fault these normal appliances have aren’t truly a fault. It’s intentionally made to be less appealing, less reliable, and more expensive than it should be, so when we’re looking at a white oven in the store for $800, we’ll opt instead for the $1,000 Alexa powered stainless steel double range that’s sitting right next to it.
Oh and if you’re in a spot and need to finance your new appliance, sorry but our financing isn’t available for the budget tier.
This comment kind of went off the rails, didn’t it.
My recent experience buying such is that it is very very hard to find basic but quality models. If you’ve had a water dispenser or ice maker once, you realize how awful they are. They take up massive amounts of fridge and freezer space and need expensive filters every 3 months and break as soon as the short warranty is over. But if you want double door and bottom freezer you pretty much have to buy the crap extras as well.
People would likely want products with new features and reliability.
But what we actually have on the market is products with new features that are mostly unreliable, and slightly cheaper products with less features that are similarly or more unreliable. Our products are clearly regressing in quality even if the existence of luxury features or designs are rising.
We are in a hostile relationship economically where almost every manufacturer is engaging in planned obsolescence (instead of using resources appropriately and making the products we want which also last).
Corporations want us to keep buying - they are hyper-focused on perpetuating that reality.
I don’t think complex design is the opposite of “just” it’s more that the refrigerator is just a kitchen refrigerator that doesn’t have weird proprietary temperature management system, and easily accessible replacement parts. It’s not also a built in tablet for example
But are there simple fridges that don’t look like rental apt fridges? If there was a nice simple fridge with a big bottom freezer, in stainless, I bet it’d sell. Tho water dispensers and ice makers are damn convenient when they do work.
Yes. Cars especially right now.
There’s a huge one-time demand from consumers. But, if it’s an amazing device that never needs repairs (or that can easily be repaired by the consumer) and it has no bells and whistles, that’s a problem: there’s no repeat business.
Who cares?
The people running the business, presumably. Generally people don’t want to go out of business because they can’t find any customers.
Once you’ve supplied everyone with it, figure out how to keep a buffer stock and move onto the next product. By the time you’ve sold every viable customer a washing machine, vacuum cleaner, fridge, freezer, mixer, cooker, dryer (whatever) they’d be fine, new stock still needs to be sold eventually so keep a trickle coming. Replacement parts etc.
Biggest issue is it’s going to be expensive - will people pay?
That sounds like a difficult way to run a business.
It’s how businesses were run for literally hundreds of years.
Not true at all. Businesses didn’t move onto the next product, they specialized, making the exact same thing year after year. Because manufacturing tolerances weren’t great, things would need repairs and replacement, so there was repeat business. Nobody kept a buffer stock and moved onto the next product.
But does it have AI?
My washing machine and dryer likes to throw about AI. The model came out around or just before the current LLM craze started, and I’m guessing they wanted to capitalise on the buzzword.
AI in the case of my washing machine means that it keeps track of the time and day of week, and what washing programmes I tend to run within a certain timeframe. It then suggests that programme when you turn it on. For the dryer, AI means “suggest the programme matching what the washer just washed.”
Lately the washer has taken to flash “AI Cycle Complete” on its stupid little screen whenever it completes a wash, even if I keyed in every single setting myself. Such AI.
Lately the washer has taken to flash “AI Cycle Complete”
Lately? Does that mean your washer is getting some kind of regular firmware updates? Why? In case “laundry” changes?
Nothing has Ai. Everything that does refuses to explain what their use of that term means. It’s like buying the name brand cereal over the generic because someone slapped an “asbestos free” sticker on it.
Investors need not be shareholders, to be fair.
“No enshitification” is the new top tier marketing strategy.
Although intense marketing is a sign of enshittification 🤔 Perhaps looking at the ownership structures would almost be a better startegy. AFAIK enshittification predominantely affects publicly traded corpos.
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these exist, see speed queen
the cost is going to be higher, though, because “smart” widgets can offset their initial costs through the projeted sale of the data harvested over the life of the widget
most people being ignorant to this and to the inevitable issues with corporate-built “smart” widget infrastructure, the cheapest option will generally be the most popular
my inner doctorow says that the twiddlers did this on purpose to undermine competition, especially considering the attempts to keep those widgets from being liberated
ding ding ding
there can be no (valid) competition against capitalistic cronyism.
I think the price difference has more to do with scale than it does data. The main reason good, simple products can’t be cheaper is because the small companies who make them can’t put in the same gigantic bulk orders of raw materials, nor do they have the specialized manufacturing processes or assembly lines.
The data is damn near an afterthought. Putting a touchscreen on a fridge is a great way to pretend a piece of shit is a premium product. If they can scrape your data too, then for sure they’ll go for it, but the main reason the screen is on there is because most people are still buying that shit.
The same thing is happening with cars. Good luck trying to get a new unconnected vehicle, and good luck to the company who plans to sell them.
This kind of anti-enshittification marketing is starting to gain traction I think.
A big part of Valve’s launch was saying stuff like “of course you can run whatever you want on it, it’s yours!”
thats just the first step of enshittification!
Unshittyify and Reshittify. Back and forth forever ))<> ((
I think you’re being down voted because of Valve being used as the example and they have been seen as the exception to the rule.
Your point, though, is valid.
So if that happens install a different distro.
Until private equity gets their grubby paws on the company.
Make that shit a self-funded slow growing cooperative.
Or at the very least steward ownership
It’s the Linux philosophy in appliances. I’m down.
I want to produce boxed recipes under a product line named “Jamaican”
- Jamaican a pie
- Jamaican mac and cheese
- Jamaican chicken with mushroom gravy
I also wanna make a perfume line named “Eureka,” following the same general idea but with awfully generic scent names
- Eureka flowers
- Eureka citrus
- Eureka chicken with mushroom gravy
What Jamaican?
There’s tradeoffs - simplicity, repairability, efficiency.
Take washers, for example. I was looking at Speed Queen washers to replace mine. On paper they are great, more durable. But it turns out that while they have physical knobs and switches, newer models still hide a circuit board inside, so the gap between commercial and consumer models is shrinking (and not in the direction we want.)
The Speed Queen washers also have nearly half the capacity of off the shelf consumer washers, and use twice the amount of water and electricity. I did the math, and at the current utility and washer prices I’d break even replacing the washer every 5 years.
Furthermore, the local appliance repair shop that I trust told me it could take them weeks to get replacement parts for Speed Queen. For a laundromat that’s not a huge deal when it’s one washer out of twenty, for a single machine home it’s a problem.
Yes, I do wish that consumer appliances were more reliable. But barring that, the next best thing is easily and quickly repairable, and on that matter there’s brands that are qualitatively and quantitatively better in that regard than others.
I also want to point out that for some products (such as smart phones) there’s an additional trade-off between repairability and quality:
When you have screws in your phone instead of having everything glued together, that means you have additional moving parts and probably gaps between the parts, where water can enter and cause corrosion. If everything is glued together, it’s not repairable but it’s also less likely that it needs to be repaired because there’s fewer problems to begin with.
I just want everything with a heating element to use a heat pump instead. Electric heating elements are so horribly inefficient and wasteful in comparison.
I have a ventless heat pump combo washer/dryer. It takes up half the space that two machines would, plugs into a regular 110V outlet, gets HOT (way hotter than I expected a heat pump has any right to achieve), drains all its drying water into the drain, vents none of my indoor air outside, doesn’t require changing laundry from one machine to the other. Practically and mechanically it seems brilliant and I can’t imagine why I would ever buy a traditional machine ever again. Except…
It’s chock full of horrible apps and shit that I’ll never use. It’s way too “smart”, and those “smarts” are not there for my benefit. After a month or two it finally gave up trying to pester me to connect it to a network and install the app, which I’ll never, ever do. It’s never going to see an update or new firmware if I can help it, but I’m afraid that if/when it ever breaks, I’ll have no choice. I know it’s going to do things like eventually refuse to work until the computer has been “updated” to be “compatible” with new parts. And it’s not even just that it’s going to be expensive. It’s that I don’t trust it, and I don’t trust it to remain functional in the future, even if there are parts, that they won’t let me install the parts, or will require me to agree to play by their “rules” before I can.
Right to repair needs to be a thing, and people need to be able to break the ridiculous amount of both legal and practical control these manufacturers have over their devices after they’ve left the factory. We cannot and should not trust the manufacturers to support it. We need to allow independent repair.
Heat pumps require a line to the outdoors, which may not be possible to create for existing use cases.
Also, if I recall, hot water heaters that use heat pumps can’t actually get hot enough to completely heat the water and rely on electricity a bit. Therefore, I’m not sure everything with a heating element (ie. stovetop, oven, espresso machine, etc.) would work for that.
Edit: for those downvoting, please link me where I can buy a heat pump oven and stovetop. Would really like to install one.
Incorrect, no connection to outdoors is required for these appliances. In the case of the ventless combo, it literally hooks up to nothing other than the standard washing machine hookup. 1 normal 15 amp power outlet, 1 hot water hose, 1 cold water hose, 1 drain hose. No dryer vents, no other tubes or hoses, no drilling or cutting, no changes at all required. It is literally a drop-in replacement for any washer, but it also dries, with a heat pump, powered from the same circuit the washer uses and the same drain the washer uses.
Also, let me blow your mind a little bit: theoretically, the cold water main running to your house contains enough heat energy to completely heat your house all winter on its own. It is cold to us, but thermodynamically it’s a goldmine and you have an extremely generous supply of it. Water represents an enormous reservoir of heat, and you can play some really fun games with latent heat of evaporation and condensation (which is exactly how heat pumps work in the first place). Dehumidifiers add as much or more heat to a room than a space heater does, using a fraction of the electrical power. That’s the power of the heat contained in water. I’m not saying that a heat pump dryer is doing this with your water supply, simply pointing out that once water is in play, it becomes way more of a complex issue than performance figures on paper actually represent.
Obviously, clean drinkable water is also a scarce resource, so using it directly for any form of heating would be wasteful in its own way, but the point is that it would be technically possible. Including water in the discussion adds a lot of really interesting possibilities to the way we manage heat and energy, and we will eventually need to start understanding how much heat we literally throw away down the drain and how wasteful that actually is. And in the process we’ll learn to save some money and maybe even make our lives a bit more convenient.
Are you Alec from Tech. Connections?
Unfortunately not, but I am proud to be compared to him.
I can definitely read your comment in his voice, particularly the “also, let me blow your mind a little bit” part.
Heat pumps absolutely do not need to connect indoors and outdoors, every fridge and freezer is just a heat pump connected to a box.
Ive had a ventless heat pump clothes dryer, about 5 years ago, maybe 6. Technically it made the room it was in slightly colder while it ran, but that heat from my house was just concentrated inside the box and then allowed to escape back into my house.
I also think there have been advances in heat pump technology either with the refrigerant used to transfer the heat or with cascading systems that run multiple loops with different heat capacity so that one loop takes room temp water to “warm” temps and a secondary loop takes the “warm” water to hot.
I think they mean appliances that don’t necessarily heat an area but heat is a function of their purpose.
In the example given, a combo washer dryer, it is not necessary to have a link to the outside it merely uses the ambient air as it’s source of heat, The same is also common among heat pump water heaters.
I thought electric heaters were 100% efficient? All the electricity you put into it becomes heat yeah?
Yea but heat pumps have a coefficient of performance of greater than 1 cause you’re moving heat instead of generating it.
Yeah my heat pump is something like 2000% efficient. It can cheat because it doesn’t convert electricity into heat, it uses electricity to move heat from the outside to the inside (or vice versa).
So, 1 kwh electric energy to an electric heater produces 1 kwh of heating energy.
So to give you an idea how a heatpump would do: looking at my heat pump’s data registers right now, it says it used 3.6 kwh electric energy in the last hour to produce 12.7 kwh heating energy (air to water).
What brand is it? I want a heat pump dryer, but I don’t like “smart” stuff.
For maintainability heat pump dryers are shit though. You can’t take the heat pump condenser out and thus you cannot properly clean it 😐. If you get lint stuck in there it starts reeking. The old condensers you could just take out and rinse.
GE Profile PFQ97HSPVDS. Not a sponsor, and not even a recommendation. It feels icky even admitting it. The only reason I am mentioning it at all is because I did manage to get it to (eventually) stop aggravating me about installing the app and connecting it to wifi and now it just works without annoyance as it should have from day one, and I recognize the possibility of having access to that feature alone may be valuable to someone. I can’t guarantee the one you buy now will even act the same way, as these things can be and are updated without notice.
I found some third-party home assistant stuff for GE smart home products on github if that’s important to you, but I haven’t even tested it for this as it still involves the appliance phoning home and everything is still gatekept through GE’s website and like I said I refuse to ever let this thing touch any form of internet connection or wireless.
Got it! I saw a Samsung one the other week, so that’s why I was curious. I still want a heatpump dryer, just a better one that doesn’t beg for clicks.
A total absense of tech would be bad for a washing machine. With a really simple conductivity sensor (basically just two electrodes on the sides of a plastic pipe) and an opacity sensor (an IR LED and an LDR on opposite sides of a clear pipe), you can measure how much stuff is dissolved in water and how much insoluable stuff is suspended. That then means that you can keep circulating the soapy water until it stops getting dirtier, then keep rinsing it out until it stops getting cleaner, which then means you can have the cycle times adjust themselves to how soiled the load is, instead of just making them as long as the worst case scenario might require and wasting energy, water, and time on an average load.
My husband loves building elecronics. And there’s a lot of cool low-tech tech. I feel like basic circuit board stuff should be allowed, as it can be easy to repair if you know how. Just have the schematics available.
The problem for me is when it needs an Internet connection for remote access on top of a lot of flimsy parts that wear out too quickly.
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as it can be easy to repair if you know how
i think this is a typical “just install linux” situation. While to you it might seem simple, you’re vastly overestimating most people’s affinity to tech.
It really reminds me of this meme:
Right to repair isn’t about everyone knowing how to do it, but providing the accessibility and potential for repairs, compared to purposely obfuscated tech which is at the mercy of corporate overlords. Yes, a lot of people won’t know how to repair it, but if they want to repair it without paying a professional, they still have the ability to research and learn how to do it themselves.
Also, love this one! I should get a framed version.
No, I get it. But everything is hard to fix until you know how to do it.
To me, This is about owning things you or someone else can repair with readily available parts. The problem now is remote bricking of purchases by the manufacturer through the internet. And things so cheaply made, the parts either don’t exist or the too much of it broke. Or having to pay subscriptions for the privilege to use the things you bought.
It’s just that if you have a electronics nerd friend or curiosity, there’s a lot of basic electronics that can be repaired with incredibly cheap parts.
For example, if your microwave completely dies, it’s probably a common $0.10 fuse. It’s not on the circuit board but it’s technically part of the electronics. You have to be careful to not touch the capacitors. But watch a video and you’ve brought something dead back to life.
If you don’t trust yourself, call that friend that loves that kind of stuff, share a pizza and avoid buying a new microwave that spies on you.
I think ive never seen a washing machine that doesnt do a pre-determined amount of cycles. That exists? And I thought I had a rather sophisticated washing machine.
I think the way it normally would work would be to do the existing steps for a bit longer if necessary or stop them early if possible, but the washing machine I’ve got at the moment sometimes gets its timer all the way to one minute and then adds an extra ten and starts rinsing again. In theory, that should be less likely to happen if you’re separating the washing by soiling levels like the manual says, but some of my family don’t believe the manual.
Ah ok. I havent really read much of mines manual. But i did notice that the timer is often wrong, it seems to go slower than actual time. Would make sense if it is measuring something in the water and just putting an estimated timeon the display. I thought it was just a bad clock…
And easier to repair, too.
A GE washing or drying machine from 30 years ago has easily removable panels, about 4 to 6 screws each and large easily identifiable parts, but one from a couple of years ago requires the top to be propped up or secured and the panels removed in a specific order such that you can them remove the internal plastic panels through which wires need to be dismounted around the drum with like 8 or more screws each of varying sizes and when it comes time to put it back together I hope you’ve got more than three arms because fuck you thats why.
Maybe not only just work for 15+ years. But allow parts to be purchased and easy manuals to read for at home repairs.
It’s now required by law in Europe that spare parts needs to be available for at least 10 years.
That’s been a law in the US for cars for ages.
This specifically makes me so much more likely to buy a product.
seriously, being able to fix the washer/dryer ourselves has saved us so much money
I’d go even further and say, release documentation that shows how to DIY new parts from scrap you got laying around or can find in construction debris and junkyards.
Hell yes
There’s a supermarket in Canada, that has a brand like that. It’s bright yellow and black and only has the product name in bold writing on it.
Loblaw’s and their subsidiaries. The brand is literally called No Name (Sans Nom). It always gave me a chuckle when I lived in Canada.
Obligatory fuck the Loblaws, but the No Name thing is a neat concept and certainly very recognizable.
and sometimes it’s actually good value!
I still don’t buy it because fuck Loblaws, though
Great marketing from a terrible company
Fuck Loblaws.
50/50 chance it sells at a premium compared to other models, making the entire idea useless
Source: Like every project that pretended to do this with their respective market
Why the hell is a light phone more expensive than a mid to high range model smartphone. I’d rather just buy that and swap the ROM if I want to remove google.
Economies of scale and not capturing data as part of your profit model
Yeah I know my sample size is pretty useless, but this was just a dumb excuse to complain about light phone because even SMB manufacturing cost wise, it should be almost comically cheap to produce.
There are lots of other hardware accessories in the same range that cost much less to buy as a consumer, that are produced by more expensive vendors.
Yeah but what is the volume they are selling and are they profiting from user data both of those things have a significant impact on price.
