My dearest Lemmy, what is the appliance you have the most beef with?
My dearest Lemmy, what is the appliance you have the most beef with?
The appliance that elicits anger and frustrated at it's mere sight. The treacherous device that never worked right.
Maybe I'm just stupid but I have a helluva time opening cans
My oven is a piece of shit that has unreliable temperature control and manages to have hot spots even with the fan on. I bought it new and I don't think it will die any time soon. Joke is I paid a lot more than for my previous oven and it's the worst piece of shit I've ever had, a miniature countertop oven I had way back that was old as balls gave more consistent results.
Printers/Fax machines.
Firewalls in general.
I have a Samsung printer that simply hates me. Whenever I need to print something urgently it will disappear from the wifi. It shows up for a few milliseconds when restarted and disappears again. However when you have the time and energy to investigate the problem it works flawlessly.
The stove in the place I rent. Only been living here maybe 2 years... and that thing is the devil. I thought it was just me getting used to an electric stove again. Nope, that thing is just a piece of shit.
Nothing can simmer, nothing can be left unattended for more than a few minutes (at most), it can't maintain anything close to a consistent temperature, and forget boiling water before you die of old age... I use an electric kettle just so I can boil noodles in less than 40 minutes
Maybe it's my pots?... nope, I've tried. Maybe I'll get better at using it?... no, and at this point I wouldn't even want to. It's just a piece of shit. My mother-in-law is a great cook, and she was pissed when she burned smothered chicken on it... because she hasn't burned smothered chicken in probably 20+ years; she confirms the stove is garbage
Fuck that stove
Thanks for hearing my rant, I feel a little better now
Edit: I forgot to mention that the fucker is BRAND NEW too. We're literally the first people to use it. Garbage-ass, giant piece of horse shit...
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My docking station. The screen sometimes goes black for a second or two randomly. I have had this problem with all kinds of docking stations.
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My egpu dock. It works great but I have to plug it in after boot or it won't be detected.
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My samsung galaxy S22 (my last sasmung phone). The camera sometimes doesn't work presumably because a ribbon cable inside is loose.
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Everything with a built in lithium battery that isn't easy to swap. Phones, headphones, vapes, the weird gameboy thing I got offa aliexpress.
Not me, but my mother has beef with air conditioners. When I was little, I got sick (to the point of losing consciousness) due to a dirty AC in a hotel, so now she (maybe rightfully) assumes that a random given AC in a public place is filthy. We don't have one at home either - mostly because in this climate we'd only need it for a short time each year, but also because mom thinks it'd be easy to not take care of it properly and let enough filth accumulate.
My twin tub washing machine. Fucking POS doesn't spin properly, so i just give up most of the time.
Washing machines.
My washing machine 15 years ago would wash my clothes with...uhhhh...fucking water.
Now you can't buy washing machines that actually wash your clothes in water. They all spritz your clothes with a little water then jiggle around your damp clothes for a bit.
I don't live in a desert. I live in a place with access to plenty of water. I should be allowed to buy a washing machine that actually fills up with soapy water and washes my damn clothes.
I could buy a Speed Queen washer for $2,000 from a specialty store, but that's ridiculous. Why can't I just buy a washing machine that washes my clothes? They're ALL terrible now. All the washers in all the big box stores are just...bad.
Printers. There is no excuse for (consumer) printers to be as shitty as they are.
There are reasons, but none of them are excuses: If patent hell wasn't a main obstacle put in place by the large printer manufacturers, I am sure open source hardware alternative would've forced industry improvements ages ago.
It used to be printers but I switched to a Brother laser printer about five years ago and its been trouble free while having reasonable print costs. You can even force it to print on empty for a bit longer, although you shouldn't push any laser printer too far on empty as you can wreck them.
Toasters are my big gripe. Its been proven that they have massively reduced costs at the expense of longevity and toasting efficiency from what we had decades ago. I have an expensive toaster (from Sage), and I have still had to replace micro switches on the buttons. While it does a better job of even browning than a cheap toaster its still far from the level I expect.
I would buy one of those expensive Japanese toasters or a commercial toaster oven but I do not want that much counter top taken up by it. I would rather just cook my toast in a cast iron pan now, far better finish.
Both Costco and Sam's club make these ice cream makers in the wooden buckets. The motors have flimsy PET plastic gears. I get it. Strip out a replaceable gear rather than burn out the wires in a motor, easy easier repair, right? Wrong, I have a nearly identical ice cream maker that's 60 years old, the motor still works great. Metal gears, just gotta oil and maintain it regularly because it gets near salt water and gets splashed occasionally over the decades. The new ones strip out the damn gears after two batches of ice cream.
My solution ended up being to get an ice cream maker with built in refrigerant, but then I needed to get it recharged and that'll cost a much as the machine itself. Thanks a ton, breville. I'm saving up for a professional machine now.
My apartment gym has a Nordictrack treadmill that I hate nearly every aspect of. First of all, it requires you login to use any of the programs, which doesn't really work with 200 potential users. It has lost internet every single time I've used it and needs a restart, even though I use manual mode, the UI buttons are tiny and impossible to read while you're running, and don't respond correctly, and worst of all, there's no goddamn place to put your phone so you can watch Netflix.
Coffee dispenser at work. It acts up like it's a printer. Replace left cartridge. Replace right cartridge. Cleaning required. Thorough cleaning required. Unknown leak. Heating water please wait. Unknown error. Fuck that, I'll piss in a cup myself if I don't get my coffee now.
Then there's also the towel roll thing in the toilets. I swear it's stuck for longer time than it's functioning. It'd be a full time job keeping that rolling throughout the day
Samsung Fridge (don't judge me, it came with the house).
I knew it was a "when" and not and "if" it would start having issues, and it finally showed its colors last month.
Front panel buttons either refused to work at all or would cycle through every option continuously and randomly.
Want water? Sorry, only crushed ice today. Want ice? Sorry, just water today. Oh, I actually did want water (starts dispensing). PSYCH! Now I'm going to shoot ice at you and splash water everywhere.
Was about to just toss the thing and get something dumber and more reliable, but decided to roll the dice with a replacement control board from ebay. Thankfully, that worked and I'm only out $80.
My crappy electric Philips toothbrush from the internet of shit era. If you press the single button it has slightly wrong it goes into some Bluetooth pairing mode or whatever that you can't take it out of until it gives up 2 minutes later.
I bought a cheap espresso maker off Amazon. It's so cheap that nothing can be adjusted, not the pressure, the drip, the heat, nothing. Every single shot I pull from that thing tastes like burnt ass. I even invested in some nice expensive espresso beans, and no luck. The cheap machine is in fact a piece of crap. I should have known better.
My fridge's ice machine has never worked and instead just made my fridge piss itself on multiple occasions.
I wouldn't call it an appliance, but I almost always use cast iron for beef.
Hm. Whoever made microwave ovens with an impossible to clean exposed resistance for broiling in the off chance you felt like making lasagna in a shoebox should be shot into space.
Everybody below pointing out that repeated beeping noises are unacceptable is also not wrong. It's gotten to the point where half a dozen different things may be beeping in my kitchen, nobody knows which one it is and everybody is in a reverse-race to ignore them to see if someone else goes to deal with it.
I once had a dishwasher that opened the door by itself using magnets instead of nagging you like a needy cat and I miss it every day.
Most modern refrigerators. They have tons of features (ice makers, water dispensers, screens) that are unnecessary.
But what gets me really going is the shelving, specifically door shelving. Most manufacturers have moved to clear polycarbonate for the “wall” around the shelf which is specifically not recommended for shock loading. For example, the load that is applied when the door closes and the condiments slide into the retaining piece. To get a fridge with metal means upgrading to a luxury model.
And don’t get me started on the fact that door shelving overlaps with interior shelving. Go look at a 1940s Shelvador and learn how to build a proper appliance.
Frankly, most appliances bother me:
- microwaves have UI issues, but I do like Panasonic’s genius inverter line.
- stoves have too many features and electronics. A true commercial style stoves without gadgets and gewgaws to break is hard to find for home use.
- so many dishwashers simply don’t clean dishes. Modern ones (imho) get too hot
- Most washing machines are way too rough on clothes.
- what the fuck is even with dryers? If people in the UK hang their clothes to dry, you can too (tropical climates may be an exception). Thankfully heat pump dryers are becoming a thing.
Our gas stove. Unreliable AF, and has a tendency to cook unevenly. The oven also fucking sucks. Multi-thousand dollar premium PoS. I miss my resistive electric stoves.
On the other hand, the air fryer never burns things and almost never has issues.
I mean I like microwaves but it pisses me off it wants to know the date and this goes for any item that wants internet access. Time I get. Its sorta convenient to have it show it when its not doing anything else but why the F do you think you need to know the date. Im not setting you to go cook something later. Really it comes down to it refusing to work after power loss until you put in time and date. My microwave always thinks the days start on november eleventh two thousand eleven.
The hvac control panel.
The furnace and ac units are both great, but the control panel will sometimes just, idk, dissociate. I can change settings and it displays them, but they don't "take". It won't relay those changes to its bigger brethren. In order to snap it back to reality, I have to go out to the garage and flip the breaker because there's no other way to power cycle it.
There are spiders in the garage. And they are prolific with their webs, especially where I need to walk to get to the breaker panel.
So when the hvac panel glitches, it's a whole ordeal to fix it.
My front loading clothes washer. It frequently doesn't drain right. If you create a fault tree on what causes that, you can have:
- Faulty water level sensor
- Clogged water level sensor hose
- Clogged filter
- Clog around the heating element
- Broken check valve
- Faulty pump
- Clog between drum and liner
- Faulty control board
The pump can clearly be heard running when the water levels are too high, so I know the sensor, sensor hose, controls, check valve, and pump are all functioning. Sometimes, the pump runs for way longer than you'd think necessary, with only a small trickle of water coming out little bit by bit. This indicates to me that there is a clog upstream from the pump. Multiple times, I have squeezed myself back behind the washer to take the back off and access the filter (which should be accessible from the front). I've found no clog there. Ive taken out the heating element to check for clogs around it, and found nothing there. Ive shown a bright light from inside the drum to highlight any potential clogs between it and the drum, and seen nothing there. Despite all of that, the problem remains, and when I manually spin the drum with nothing inside, I can hear what sounds like stuff moving around inside.
I assume it must be ghosts or something at this point.
Printer, obviously
