1. modern fridges are more complicated, thus more things can break
2. The manufacturer wants it to break after about 5 years so you buy a new one (planned obsolescence)
3. Old fridges did indeed break as much as the ones today... and the ones we see now are just the survivors (Survivor bias)
- The manufacturer doesn't so much want it to break, but rather, they expend no effort avoiding short lifespans, even where trivial. With enough components the chances then of including one or an interaction of two that happen to last not much beyond your guarantee grows rapidly.
- smaller/lighter/simpler or in some other way less durable components are cheaper (due to lower waste), or possibly more efficient (due to less unnecessary mass to move/cool/heat/whatever), so there's a tradeoff that leads to more easily visible and testable attributes being prioritized even if the tradeoff wouldn't be worth it were everything transparent and all customers completely informed.
- throwaway items actually are more efficient, because small savings accrue from not worrying about longevity, and repair has costs and wastes of its own (i.e. the premise is misleading)
- some combination of all of the above.
Personally, I suspect the difference between planned obsolescence and unplanned is in practice nil - you need quite the dysfunctional organisation (and possibly planned dysfunction ;-) ) to get everyone involved to so completely disregard longevity.
Imagine a situation: Investors say: give me investment returns! People in charge say: give me profits! People making decisions say: profits or quality! People conducting day-to-day operations say: worry about regulations first, then profits, then quality! People doing the work say: this quality is poor, but I need my job and don't want to rock the boat!
Maybe it's just anecdotal evidence, but that's generally been my experience over the past 10 to 15 years of doing things
There's certainly many more but those are some of the most common ones he runs into.
In my electronics/audio experience, the market twist the design toward shittier components that provide acceptable function with a few marketing buzzwords (HD audio, 24 bit audio) that will make people buy something; where their old gear was clearly superior in terms of quality. It's a reflex to think economies of scale provide improvements and progress.
Is there no market for a refrigerator produced with high-quality components? or does higher-quality component price outpace the gained longevity?
What about so-called "commercial grade" appliances — surely they should have a longer lifespan?
Commercial is different. I'd guess things like serviceability and a local repair network to be the most important qualities there. And although mean time between services are important, commercial also disregards stuff like noise.
No, old gear was definitely constructed better. I've repaired many appliances over the years and stuff from the 60's was built to last with a noticeable degradation in quality over the 70's and the 80's, since the 90's it's pretty much a constant. There is absolutely no way that a household appliance made after 1975 lasts for 60 years.
I suppose at some point there were business people who noticed that planned obsolescence creates repeat purchases, and that pricing is an arbitrary thing so they can sell the same hyper-optimized crap on different price tiers and people mostly won't notice - but I think the main driving force wasn't malice, just the usual thing that happens in the market economy.
In this way, I see the period of 1960s - 1990s as a time of discovering new ways to cheap out on materials and construction. After all, optimizing for manufacturing costs takes time and lots of smarts. Barely working crap doesn't happen by default (conversely, and this reminds me of the discussions around Juicero teardown, the initial design of any working appliance will likely be heavily overengineered).
And this is not a mere frugality argument. The economics more or less reflects environmental impact as well. There is a point where discarding a perfectly functioning but inefficient appliance for a newer is the environmental choice.
Our house was built in the 1970s, with 8 foot ceilings. Also, in the kitchen area for the fridge, the standard thing was to put a cabinet above the fridge; so we are limited in height. Newer homes have 9 foot or higher ceilings, and recently, new fridges has grown a bit taller. Tall enough, so that while one might fit into our space, it wouldn't have enough clearance around the top to provide proper air circulation for the unit.
So our choices have been limited by what the market wants:
1. Remove the cabinets (which would be really expensive for the small remodelling effort on top of the cost of a new fridge).
2. Get an ugly new fridge (some of the over-unders will fit, but they tend to be much smaller than we want, and have other features missing - though they do tend to be much cheaper).
3. Move to a new house (not a reasonable option at this time).
4. Purchase an older fridge that'll fit.
So right now, we're "nursing" our current side-by-side along; it still runs ok and keeps things cold, but the ice maker no longer works, nor does the water on the door. We've considered getting those fixed, but it would likely cost several hundred dollars, and the fridge is closing in on 20 years old anyway.
One other option we're considering is going with a commercial unit; unfortunately, from what we've researched, such units are not sized properly at all for a consumer kitchen (too deep, too tall, too narrow, or too wide).
So our only real option is #4 - unless we want to spend a big chunk of change in one manner or another.
And although I admit I've hated AEG for their crappy fridge, it's probably not AEG's fault. It was installed by an independent installer, and it seems he royally fucked up. Although I think we did have an AEG mechanic take a look at the fridge, and he didn't fix the problems. So AEG isn't entirely blameless.
Still, they're supposed to be good, even if our fridge was basically wasted.
In the end, though, it was really my wife who made the decision. She apparently doesn't hold irrational grudges against manufacturers like I do.
The difference between a 3 year and 20 year fridge is usually only a few dollars (maybe 10), and has nothing to do with efficiency.
Case in point: The outer shell of new chest freezers are made of substantially thinner sheet metal and paint. This causes them to dent rapidly, and, in moist climates, rust through. It also reduces shipping and manufacturing costs, since it cuts the weight by a few pounds.
Do you have a source for this? It may well be true, but to my ear it sounds like one of those "everybody knows..." conspiracy theories.
We have a small fridge in our small kitchen which will need replacing soon as the door has gone rusty underneath and the seal is beginning to go.
It used to be a standard size of fridge but they're all wider and deeper now (maybe to allow thicker walls for better efficiency - the internal dimensions are often no bigger) and we can't find a name brand model to fit in the space, only cheap budget brands. So it's good to know that a cheap fridge can be just as good.
Meanwhile, our other name brand white goods have needed replacing after 2-3 years each. It's impossible to find anything with a decent warranty. Strange to remember that my parents' fridge, cooker, washer, drier when I was a teenager were all older than me.
OTOH i don't sell fridges, so that's all just thinking aloud :)
I'm totally no expert, but any or all of that sounds more plausible than shipping cost issues; I did some quick googling and rough guesstimation (40ft container fits 67 cubic meters, so say 33000$ of goods, at around 1000$ to ship from shanghai to rotterdam), and I guess it's no more than a 3% surcharge; possibly less if you consider I bet I didn't find the best deals. It's not nothing, but neither is it particularly shocking (and you might save on trucking costs because you can pick the port and that port is likely particularly well connected).
This is not only about electrical stuff, but also, say, simple mechanical kitchen tools: they break easily today. Like a cheese grater. The one my mom has is 50 years old and almost as good as new. Stained a bit, maybe, but works perfectly. She got it from her mom as a present. It's sheet metal, relatively cheap stuff, but still decent enough quality made to last long. They tried to make it simple, durable, and affordable.
Today, you can choose between cheap things from plastic, which will break soon, or fancy polished shiny stainless solid steel with bells and whistles, which are really expensive and which may last a wee bit longer than their plastic siblings, but these things are still made to look good, not to last long. You can bet there are small plastic pins hidden somewhere that break off soon, probably due to some unnecessary bell or whistle. This is the pain of today's products.
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Isn't it possible that the complexity that makes something energy efficient also causes it break sooner?
However if making something more energy efficient causes it to break more often, you have to expand the scope to include the energy costs of manufacturing a replacement copy. Even if the marginal costs of manufacturing an appliance are so low repairs no longer make sense, I still doubt that e.g. more efficient washing machine that you have to replace 3 times over 10 years uses, in total, more energy than one less efficient washing machine that doesn't break for 10 years.
If anything, managing the additional complexity by skimping on the engineering work is what causes the failures--that is, engineering a more complex device with the same or smaller engineering effort.
The ideal situation when engineering a new device is that every part of it is likely to break simultaneously, the day after the warranty runs out. If that happens, you know that your device was made as cheaply as possible, but no cheaper, and that you will never need to repair such a device, because buying a new one will always be cheaper.
Repairs are only an issue when different parts are likely to break at different times.
Huh? I have owned the same stainless steel cheese grater for probably at least a decade, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. It is also just sheet metal after all. It's totally beyond me how you think you're going to break a "shiny stainless solid steel..." grater like this [1].
The point grandparent was making is that the "deluxe" models often use the visible metal parts to provide the appearance of durability, when the internals are identical between models. It applies more to refrigerator doors than to box graters. That stainless steel fridge is going to have the same crappy plastic blower fan as one with a painted door, but may sell at a higher price, because it looks more durable to anyone who doesn't own a screwdriver.
The usual implication is that that the manufacturer didn't cut that specific corner, so there may be other corners that were not cut. It's like replacing the hood ornament of your VW beetle with one made from solid gold. It will then be the only part that doesn't rust all the way through.
1990 €110 (500kWh)
2000 €77 (350kWh)
2010 €46 (210kWh)
2015 €32 (145kWh)
1 (Dutch): http://www.greenem.nl/wat-kost-een-koel-vriescombinatie-per-...
This makes "do the cheapest thing possible" a surprisingly good proxy for "do the most energy efficient thing".
Of course, if you know something about the manufacturing chain, you can use that knowledge to do something better, but that is usually taking second order effects into account.
Taking cars as an example: buying a $100,000 Model S Tesla instead of a $35K gas guzzler to save $10K on gas is probably bad for the environment, if you only look at the marginal effect of that one car (and ignore subsidizing Tesla R&D, etc).
If the Tesla is only $35K, then you saved $10K of gas and the Tesla manufacturing process had a much lower energy footprint, so it is probably a huge win.
That would be if markets were efficient :).
As it is, the costs of goods are still dominated by middle men - people who have nothing to do with neither manufacturing nor selling the thing to the end customer. Prices today aren't good signals, because they're pretty arbitrary - shaped by supply/demand in long term, yes, but in short term directed by various business tricks (like market segmentation, brand value, contracts, etc.).
Your Tesla example actually shows it pretty well - in order to quantify its environment impact, you need to know at least that a) Tesla is electric, b) where your energy comes from.
Price would be a good proxy for a lot of things, if it wasn't so messed up by various parties trying to profit at each level of the supply chain.
I doubt keeping a 60 year old fridge running is the cheapest option.