New Zealand has a bit of legislation called the Consumer Guarantees Act, and it specifies something to the effect of ‘the thing should have a lifespan commensurate with the price, free of defects or faults’. It’s really great - the downside is that we pay more for things than people overseas do. I vastly prefer that we have it.

I got my samsung plasma TV repaired after 4 years of ownership because the Consumer Guarantees Act says that appliances have to last as long as a 'reasonably expected' lifetime, that repair options have to be available and that the warranty period for major defects is that 'reasonably expected' lifetime.

It's still working now, ten years post-purchase.

Would be glad to pay a bit more to ensure quality. My persistent fear when buying something is - if it fails, how do I get it serviced/replaced, or barring that - how will I dispose of it. Because dumping it feels completely unsustainable.

It's prevented me from buying to replace a lot of my stuff.

Would be interesting to know if big manufacturers then only sell their most dependable models in the NZ market, in order to avoid the costs that they can avoid in more business-friendly markets like the US.

It would be a good way to decide which products to buy. Is this (equivalent) model sold in New Zealand? If so, it's probably known by the manufacturer to be solid. If not, avoid it at all costs.

What happens is that big companies try to trick consumers (as most consumers are not aware of their legal rights). Common tactics are:

* It will cost x to fix this, as a gesture we will share the inflated repair cost with you 50/50.

* We don't make this model anymore but we have an identical model with a different serial number, we can offer you that at a "discount".

* We found the item had water damage and this is not covered in our warranty, even when we advertised these items being used in water.

* We are happy to repair the item but first we need to have the item inspected by a repair agent to see how the fault occurred. Please be aware if we find the fault is caused by you, then you agree to pay x dollar value amount even if we do not repair item (because you were at fault)

* Item spends many weeks being assessed for repair. Doesn't get repaired, sent back. Repeat.

.. and many more.

Only when you stand firm and start spouting the legal requirements do they suddenly resolve the situation VERY quickly.

I dealt with dodgy Samsung fridges and they tried to "share" the repair cost with me. I politely declined, then sent them an email citing my legal rights. Samsung then repaired the fridge promptly and no longer tried to talk with me about sharing costs of repair.

Most consumers fall for the tricks above or give up and buy a new item.

I don't think international companies care too much, they are adept selling to the masses. Those that cite the rules to get a repair are likely to be a tiny minority.

There is another aspect of the law which is less known. It is not actually Samsung or large manufacturer on the hook for consumer guarantee. It is the retailer. The retailer has to remedy the situation. If Samsung packs up operations, the retailer still needs to stand by the product it sold. This means that the retailer has an incentive to work with more reliable manufacturers and suppliers and will promptly ditch troublesome suppliers.

It's probably cheaper to insure and replace garbage Hardware.

A lot of consumers probably don't know or care so they might get away with the same products and just take the hit from the few returns. I'm in NZ and never knew about that reasonable lifetime bit. I just have a vague awareness that most appliances come with a card saying they have a 1 or 2 year warranty and beyond that, assume it's on me. There's usually some language like "in addition to your rights under the CGA" but who knows what those rights are. Also, below some price, it's just too much hassle to have figure out how returning it works and weighing the risk that I might get charged for the repair if it turns out to be due to mistreatment, not a defect.

Australia has the same thing. Amazing to have an actual law to protect consumers a bit from multinationals.

Wonder how long until our politicians take it away.

> have a lifespan commensurate with the price

> we pay more for things than people overseas do

This sounds wonderfully cyclical. "Why do I expect my washer to last an extra year? Because it cost 10% more than the one sold in America, which is expected to last a decade".

" the downside is that we pay more for things than people overseas do"

Isn't that they just force you to buy extended warranty on everything?

A warranty that's legally enforced, though. Part of the reason there are so many jokes about extended warranties is that it's very hard to make the seller actually honour them.

A practical example is the an Apple extended warranty is basically in effect on every Apple product in New Zealand. There are some things you don’t get, but if you notify them after 3 years that your phone is not not working (no drop damage or water damage though), they will replace it.

Ice makers are notoriously flimsy. Serious race to the bottom by the manufacturers. The good news is that they're easy to replace (undo a couple of bolts and unplug a cable and they usually come right out), bad news is the replacements are ridiculously expensive, like $100 each and come with all of the same design flaws the original had. There is also surprisingly little standardization which makes the replacements even more expensive as there are hundreds of mostly but not quite compatible models to stock and you have to be very careful when ordering replacements.

Most were up to a few years ago, but the big players went out of their way to make dependable ice makers--I thought.

The last two refrigerators I bought had dependable ice makers.

I just overheard an installer talking to a neighbor while installing his refrigerator.

The tech said most modern refrigerations only last 10 years at best though.

Unofortunately some manufacturers are now implementing DRM to control your use of the ice maker function.

See: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxpjy/hacker-bypasses-ges-r... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129801

10 years is actually quite good for major appliances. If you're warrantied for 3 and manage to get 10 years out if it you've exceeded the design parameters. Environmentally, replacing a broken fridge is usually the only time someone will even research something more energy efficient.

Meanwhile my Grandmother still uses her fridge from the 60s. It still has the kind of handles where you can get locked inside and almost die if you are on a very special episode of any 80's kid show.

I thought fridges should last 15-20 years at least. 3 years is a joke.

Wow. So the idea is that we want them to wear out more quickly so that they buy a new product that's more energy efficient? That strikes me as terribly wasteful. What about the impacts of a discarded appliance?

The compressor is almost certainly the most expensive part of the fridge. It's also one of 2 moving parts on fridge (the other the being the fan, which is cheap), making it the most likely to fail.

I checked some list prices, and they're a substantial price of the fridge itself. Some site said $200-$450 to replace one, another said the part itself is $100-$500 without even including labor. At those prices, I can see why people might just buy new. It's also something most people would want to hire a professional for; refrigerants are not good to inhale, and this needs to be air-tight.

I would also hope that most of them get refurbished. It's pretty hard to just "discard" a fridge. You have to call someone at the city (or GoodWill), and I presume they sell those to refurbisher. They're worth some money.

So I think in reality, it goes to a refurbisher who fixes it, then sells it to someone else who replaces and even older fridge. So the fridge that actually ends up in a landfill might be a 1960s deep freeze. The same idea as used cars.

The thing that gets me is that for commercial operations it seems to be a solved problem. They break and require maintenance like anything else but if they’re not outright broken they are super reliable where fridge ice dispensers even when they’re working suck.

Standalone ice machines in particular infuriates me as 90% of the machines on Amazon are copies of the same broken design: it rotates a plastic water container by firing a motor on one side only for a number of seconds without any sensor to stop it. As a result, if you use them heavily, it reliably develops stress fractures after a year or so.

It took me four broken machines to find a model without that exact same design flaw...

It seems a lot of the problems with these kind of products is that most customers use them quite little, and so they don't see a major fallout even for problems that'd be trivial to fix (many of the ice maker models in question has a switch to stop rotation too far in the opposite direction) and so it just gets ignored.

I have never heard about anyone having trouble with an ice maker until I read this.

My ice maker has been working fine for over 15 years. My mother's ice maker has been working fine for about 25 years.

You have old ones from before the manufacturers stopped caring. It seems like ones made in the past 5 years have gone precipitously downhill, especially the GE ones.

The Icemaker in my Frigidaire refrigerator has never worked since I bought the house, the problem is that the coils keep freezing over (the icemaker is in the refrigerator compartment so has its own freezer coil to make it cold)

I spent a weekend pulling it out, thawing everything out, and then replacing the defroster coil, thinking that would fix it. It didn't -- it worked for about a week afterwards until freezing over again.

Me neither! I got their fridge, and in my case the deicing functionality is faulty. There is a little metal tab behind the back panel that heats up an ice dam to keep the condensation flowing out, that happens to be too short by about 2cm. They skimped on 2cm of aluminum and now I will never buy anything Samsung ever again.

So in short, it seems that they can neither make a proper ice maker nor ice un-maker :-)

Hey I had that same issue with my old fridge, a guy on YouTube helped me solve it! Take a short piece of the copper ground wire from a length of Romex and wrap it around the heating element, then have it point down into the drip area. It should conduct enough heat to keep the fins from icing up. It's not ideal but it saved me from replacing the (I think) evaporator fan for a third or fourth time, plus all the ruined food. Also had to replace the mainboard on the pile of junk fridge. So glad I don't own it anymore.

When I worked delivery at a national big box home improvement store, Samsung and LG refrigerators that we brought back due to ice maker not working went to the recycle trailer and was sold for scrap once the trailer filled up.

Same. Samsung has had a bad reputation for a while. I remember having issues with their CRT monitors back in mid 2000s. I bought one of their smart TVs back in 2011 and it's had issues with the panel ever since with randomly showing purple & pink lines. Their cell phones have also been crap in my personal experience.

I've never had a good experience with a Samsung device. Their TV screens are too blue for me, their appliances fail too quickly and are not user repair friendly, their phones have too much bloat.

Admittedly, this is all down to personal experience and taste but I am decidedly anti-samsung. I've had a few decent computer monitors from them but otherwise everything I've owned from them has become e-waste with far too much rapidity for the price paid.

If you can find a good stylus, I won't need a Note anymore. The Note is the last Samsung device that I buy, but only because there is absolutely no competition. I don't even use all the fancy S-Pen software, I just use the stylus for the same functionality that every Android device has.

Moto has a stylus phone out now.

Thank you, I'll take a look at that!

I won't buy appliances anywhere other than Costco for this reason. No-questions-asked returns for 90 days on appliances, and a year on most other items. Extended warranty for several years for free if you use their credit card, too.

Yeah but good luck getting them delivered in the first place. My understanding is that Costco owns Innovel now and they are a truly terrible logistics company. Buyer beware!

What country do you live in?