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Speedqueen
I keep seeing people say this, but they only have a 3 year warranty. Samsung, siemens, and random chinese companies I’ve never seen in the US offer 20 year, on much cheaper machines.
The thing about speed queen is that they go out of their way to be repairable though.
Samsung is willing to bet they can make a profit while covering 20 years of repairs, whereas Speedqueen is only willing to bet 3. That says to me the speedqueen is less repairable or Samsung and others expect to weasel out of their warranty.
Yeah, they make them so cheap they can give you 3 machines over the life of the warranty.
But the actual price is cheaper too, do you suppose the 650USD samsung costs 200 USD to build and ship? A 250 dollar machine with a 6 year warranty would be impressive, and triple their profit margin.
You can go buy those old washing machines. They’re still out there. I got my washer and dryer used for 100 dollars each.
Nothing digital on them, all analog. Fixed a washer overflowing issue by replacing the $20 pressure level switch. Twice I’ve had to replace the heating element for the dryer, $20 bucks for those. Everything is replaceable with a flat head screwdriver and a youtube video.
Go buy those old washers and dryers.
The old order Amish are still using the 1940s Maytag wringer washers. They convert them to gas engines and run the exhaust outside.
Here in Europe we use thousand year old slaves to do ours.
Missed that, what’s the joke?
This is some bullshit. You can go to Home Depot or Lowe’s right now and get yourself a pretty decent washing machine for $600 that will last you a decade.
The only people who end up in the situation like OP are the people who buy overly cheap products or overly gimmicky products, and then wonder why they don’t work as well as the standard products. If you buy a $150 washing machine from AliExpress or buy a washing machine that requires wifi, then don’t be surprised if they stopped working not too long after you bought them.
This is my mother in law to a tee, she buys second hand washing machines on craigslist for $100 - 200 they last about a year and she buys a new one. Always complaining about “planned obsolescence”. I keep telling her “no one is selling a good used washing machine, they had problems with it and got a new one” Meanwhile she criticizes me for spending $700 on a washing machine we have had for 10 years now.
She has a saying “poor people have poor ways” which she thinks means that when your poor you work with what you have, I have told her it is an insult that means poor people are poor because of their actions and decisions.
Boots theory
My child is named after Vimes
Exactly what I was gonna say.
She has a saying “poor people have poor ways” which she thinks means that when your poor you work with what you have, I have told her it is an insult that means poor people are poor because of their actions and decisions.
I think you could maybe use less time on the Internet. Social media has a nasty habit of telling everyone that everything they hear is a code for something else; spend too long reading that junk and it’ll convince you that everyone in the world is a secret bigot.
Dogwhistles are real bestie. I think this says way more about you, than the person you’re replying to.
What was described here clearly wasn’t an instance of one though. It was two different people reading a saying two different ways.
Lol, considering I heard it all the time growing up in the 80s you might be a bit off on your assessment.
I grew up in a middle class suburb where the it was used as an insult kinda like " poor people are poor because they are stupid"
She grew up in the Ozarks and they used it more as a " we got ways to make do"
One of these days I hope to eventually own a home. When I do, I want to buy one of the industrial-ass washing machines and dryers they use in laundromat and hotels. I’m sure it will be very expensive, but I firmly believe in “buy once, cry once”. I want a laundry machine that is built to run 24/7 for 10+ years. Used at a personal pace, it should last forever.
I’d just buy a good solid brand, a hotel one might also not have the few programs/temperature you’ll need but blast everything at 60° or 90°.
Honestly buy something that is good quality but doesn’t have stupid shit, do I need my washing machine and my toaster talking to each other? No but the stripped down no frills ones are normally built to be as absolutely cheap as possible.
Monkey’s paw: It is made to run 24/7 for 10 years, but you run it every 3 days, which makes it degrade faster.
For real now, probably not like that, but found it funny. Anyone knows how the phenomenon is called?
Inkjet printer disease.
Not AliExpress, but fucking Samsung. They may appliances with all the cool smart features and they’re everywhere, but holy shit are they terrible for reliability (both per my own experience and according to repair people I’ve talked with).
Every single one of my Samsung appliances work great. Most notably my washing machine and dryer. Never had a single hickup in the ~6 years I’ve had them. A lot of the time people have issues with stuff, is because they don’t take care of their machine, and expect an appliance will run reliably for 10+ years with 0 maintenance. They don’t.
Dunno.
My samsung washing machine is now 9 years old with zero problems.
I think its mostly a bias. If manufactorer-A sells 10 apliances and manufactorer-B sells only one, its means repair people should also see 10 machines from A for every machine from B
Damn. So if you have money, you get decent products. Thanks for the great reminder.
More expensive doesn’t necessarily mean better. You could easily spend $2000 on some “smart” washing machine, but that doesn’t mean it’s better than a standard $500 washing machine. I would argue that a lot of these gimmicks actually make the products worse.
There’s some people in this thread who’ve had shocking bad luck with their appliances and think it’s normal. The only appliances I’ve ever had break in the last few decades were either already decades old or broke because I did something dumb.
My washer I bought in 2015 for a condo worked all the way to when we sold in 2024. Likely still going because it never had an issue.
New house washer purchased last year, still no issues.
My inlaws have gone through several in the last 10 years.
Biggest difference is user error. My inlaws wash a big load of towels every single day and load the washer to the lid. I load 3/4 full and don’t go through towels like crazy.
People just don’t know how to use appliances.
99/100 times user error is the answer to most stuff. Users are idiots who will not accept responsibility as long as they can say “well it’s the appliance that is built bad”.
I just had to get the fridge-freezer in my apartment replaced because the freezer started growing ice everywhere like that was its job, nothing I did helped. When the landlord came to take a look he was surprised by how old the one I had was, he looked it up and it’s been here since 1993. I’ve lived here since 2016, and it worked perfectly until a couple of months ago. While the new fridge-freezer combo (one of those that’s half fridge, half freezer on top of each other, same as the old one) is much better in many ways, it’s obvious it won’t survive for even 1/3rd of the time that the old one did. The one thing that annoys me is that my fridge magnets can’t hold themselves up on the new doors because the metal is too thin, they just slide down to the bottom edges.
Your parents washing machine also cost more because it was made better. The best price I could find for a standard washing machine in 1980 was $289. To put that into perspective, according to CPI inflation that is the equivalent of about $1,100 today. As a proportion of median individual income, that’s like $1,550 today. You can still buy a Speed Queen washer for consumers that costs $1,500 and will last a long time, but people largely don’t because the shitty one costs less than half of that.
This the argument I have with clients on a daily basis, in regards to all kinds of manufactured goods. People are astoundingly awful at understanding and visualizing inflation and the value of a dollar over time, even people who are specifically educated on this point and even work with it as part of their jobs. Everyone has some threshold beyond which they absolutely won’t countenance paying more than $X for Y, but this is always arbitrary and whenever the course of events drives the median price of whatever-it-is past that line they lose their minds.
Durable goods manufacturing is a race to the bottom because it has to be in order to overcome everyone’s moronic preconceptions about what a product “ought” to cost. This isn’t just a capitalist greed thing, although it’s certainly that, too – corners have to be cut, panels have to be made thinner, it has to contain more plastic and less metal, because otherwise it’ll never be cheap enough for 99% of the population to agree to buy it and even then they’ll all still bitch about how shoddily made it is. Year over year every manufacturer has to figure out how to make it cheaper to slide under MSRP. The manufacturers who take the opposite strategy inevitably wind up as niche players, because as much as people spout that they’d happily pay more for a better built thing, the flat out truth is they’re all full of shit and to the nearest decimal point, none of them actually will if given the opportunity.
The problem is it is rarely an easy proposition to just “pay more and get a better product” especially when it comes to home appliances.
In most big box stores every option will be shit. Companies know that there are consumers at every price point and so they have a product for every price print.
The problem is the expensive isn’t really better, it’s the same fridge with the same compressor as a cheap one except it has a wifi dongle or a tablet in the door.
Of course there are the Vikings and Thermidors and whatever but those are Velben goods that priced so high that you could get 5 to 10 of the cheap options for the price of one.
Yeah you have to do research but thankfully we also live in a time when most people have high power computers connected to the Internet on their person at all times. You can buy a cheaply made expensive wi-fi enabled “smart” appliance that costs even more than a well built “dumb” appliance and will fail incredibly fast because of all the computerized parts. You just have to do some research.
You can also buy really good machines that last forever, you just have to pay a lot more. To me it seems the guy complaining just buys the cheapest washing machine build and delivered by slave workes from Amazon
Problem is you can’t trust anything. The fancy $2k machine might just be fancy in name. You don’t know if stuff is good before it starts not being. And reviews don’t help, because they won’t test a product for 5 years to check durability before posting
The speed queen I mentioned comes with a 7 year warranty and they’re the brand used by laundromats who need them to be reliable to make money. That said, the consumer grade ones are not as solidly built as the commercial units, but that’s because nobody is going to put laundromat levels of abuse on their home washing machine.
I spent a thousand dollars replacing the cheap compressor in my fridge because I asked the repair guy to replace it with better quality than it originally came with, and he used a commercial (as opposed to residential) grade compressor that was three times the price
But aside from a short lifetime, the big problem with cheap AC motors is they’re imprecisely built and often waste more electricity as heat and noise than they put into their output shaft
Of course even with the better stuff there still “cot death” where a new product fails almost immediately (because noone tests their products), but at least those failures are under warranty, the cheap motors typically last at least a few years
I spent a thousand dollars replacing the cheap compressor in my fridge
So was it worth it? How long ago did you do it and what are the differences you’ve noticed so far?
It should work for ages, compared to the cheap compressor that came with the fridge that lasted 3 years. It’s a thousand dollar fridge new, so the repair was about the cost of replacing it, but I won’t need to replace it in another 3 years
I did this only two weeks ago, so all I really have is expectations
It’s less noisy than the previous compressor
!remindme a decade
Hope it outlasts you (200 years!!)
Hope our instances last that long
I want to start an appliance company that offers 10 year warranties with an additional 5 year replaceable parts availability promise. The designs will be simple, functionality simple with minimal quality of life improvements, and all repair manuals will be published on the website along with tutorial videos, while also banking on building a product that simply lasts longer.
I’m willing to bet that if that is what you advertise on, the longevity of the product at a minimal price, then the company should do fine.
You won’t. You’ll get annihilated by the next Chinese competitor who produces a piece of shit machine that breaks in 13 months like clockwork (and has a 12 month warranty), but sells for 1/2 or 2/3 of the price of your machine.
The average consumer is dogshit at conceptualizing the actual value of a product over its lifetime in proportion to its cost. They’ll just see that the next machine on display at Best Buy or whatever looks modern and costs less to buy up front, and then they’ll buy that one. When it breaks they’ll bitch and moan on Facebook and Nextdoor and write ranty one star reviews everywhere, and then wheel right back to Best Buy and buy another machine just like it.
At the end of the day these are commodity items. It’s reasonable for consumers to buy whatever’s cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.
The solution can’t come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can’t be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.
The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don’t often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can’t buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore… So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.
Weirdly enough, the washing machines I’ve seen here in China aren’t that cheap, like 800-1500 USD price range, and they tend to be much smaller than the US ones.
Stuff made in China for domestic use bears little to no resemblance to the stuff that Chinese factories are contracted to make for export.
So much so that two doors down from my work is a place that does a booming business whose sole purpose is to allow people in China to purchase made-in-China stuff that’s only sold in the US that they can’t get at home and ship it back to China. It sounds absolutely asinine but there’s a huge market for it and those guys are busy all day long packing stuff up and cramming into shipping containers to send right back to where it was made… but can’t be bought.
Bizarre. I wonder why they go all the way to the US instead of Vietnam or Taiwan.
Incredibly clever, businessfolk & manufacturers in China. Some will tell you “hoverboards” were essentially invented in the bars of Shenzhen.*
Are external factors preventing them from selling directly to the audience you’re describing?
Edit: *source
This was unironically Maytag, they enshitified with the rest. The Maytag man was a real thing.
Your product would be about three times the price of the cheap shit.
It might work in the current world with good advertising - Smarter Every Day (on YouTube) is part of a project to make a better, made in America, barbeque brush cleaner
There are a few companies now selling better quality stuff successfully, but I have seen no one doing so in whitegoods
Good luck getting affordable steel or aluminum for manufacturing in this economy. If you do have some investors/capital, though, I would love to apply as an engineer. I think a good selling point would be displaying them in-store with the panel open, or training distributors to open them as demonstration, showing how reliable it is and how easy they are to service.
Should’a bought a Speed Queen
I went back to my birth country and my grandmas toilet is ancient, like 100 years old and the insides are original, never replaced and they work. Meanwhile im in Canada and I’ve had to replace the mechanisms inside the water tank like twice in 3 years
My apartment is furnished with slightly older appliances for laundry. They rattle the floors. I know when the downstairs neighbor is doing laundry etc. They are so ugly and yet so reliable.
Requires wifi. Sends gigs of data back to the manufacturer everyday. But it has pretty chime.
I’m so thankful my house came with a super old washer and dryer. They work so well. I had to replace the one vent hose thing for the dryer, but that’s because my cat thought she could sit on it and it ripped out of the wall when she landed on it.
I’m not saying it is the case in your situation but sometimes very old appliances are so inefficient that it makes sense to replace them on energy savings alone, we had a fridge that I put a meter on to see what it cost us to run, it was a little over $100 more per year then the larger one I was thinking of buying So if this new one lasts 10 years or so it will have paid for itself.
Please upvote this comment so it gets visibility. I just want people to hear this.
European brands in America are not good. They are few and far between and are very difficult to repairs when and if they break.
There are a few exceptions like Bosch dishwashers which are very prevalent in America. Don’t get the others recommended in this comments thread. At the very least in America they’re hard to repair hard to get parts for and are extremely expensive you are much better off sticking with American brands.
What you want to avoid is whirlpool and Samsung. Everything else is fine hands down Whirlpool makes the worst appliances they are truly terrible and should not be purchased under any circumstance. Samsung makes the worst refrigerator worse than even whirlpool. The other appliances to Samsung makes are very mediocre although I will admit their washers and dryers are not bad.
In my opinion LG makes the best appliances in America right now because I service very very little of them. If I do up the service them it can be a little difficult to find parts for them but I still recommend them me
GE is very middle of the road and generally a good option for anything that you want to get they make appliances that are absolutely not the worst but also not necessarily the best.
Stick with the major brands don’t get one off European brands here in America they’re not worth it.
I believe this because I had an old microwave from the 80s not a single issue, bought a new one the light went after a few weeks lol
The problem with microwaves is the ones from the '80s were far less powerful than new ones
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Yeah being new home owners we didn’t know you had to clean them. Just like a bachelor guy saying “why do I need to clean the shower it gamers soapy every day!”
Got us a couple of those tablets and it cleared right up
I don’t know what it is, but those cleaning tablets will cause my machine to suds up so much that bubbles/water start pouring out of the exhaust and all over my floor. One of the first times it happened, all of the bubbles were screwing up a sensor and I couldn’t get the machine to work for a week. I thought it was broken, and was just about to buy a new one when I got the idea to try sucking everything dry with a shop vac.
Weird, that didn’t happen to us, glad you caught it and figured it out though
