That might be true in terms of CO2 and energy efficiency, although the only sources i've found on the topic gave very opposite results. But no study that i know of accounts for pollution (waste water and polluted surroundings of extraction sites, refinement sites, assembly sites, and "recycling" sites) so i'm tempted to argue that anything we don't manufacture is better for the environment than better efficiency.

> The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade.

I strongly disagree with this interpretation. First, because industry routinely employs bad parts and bad design on purpose (planned obsolescence, eg. televisions placing heat-sensitive capacitors near heat sources). But also because an individual part failing is in my view OK as long as this part is standard and easy to source.

There are some environmental/logistic concerns if you want to repair old devices given the gazillion incompatible spare parts they each use. But if they all used standard parts, we could and should have repair shops run as a free public service to avoid throwing stuff away. This in itself would do more for the environment than any "green new deal" would ever do.

    P(no parts fail within the first two years) = 
        1 - P(<y>)^((number of parts) * (number of days))

I'm skeptical about your first assertion -- think of the effect of a power surge. I don't agree with your second assertion at all, from my experience of cheap devices that fail not long after their warranty expires.

And yet you failed to account for the embodied energy in building the product and the fact that maintaining any appliance or equipment requires repairs. So there is quite a bit to disagree with.

It is much more wasteful to build a product with no methods of repair, noting that a large number of components will statistically fail due to variability of tolerances or usage patterns.

A 50 yr product requires maintenance, replaceable parts and access to documentation. All of these are lacking in our modern consumer environment. You can blame this on complexity, or designs towards sleekness or what not but the truth is that product failure after a short amount of time (planned obsolescence) creates a reoccurring customer base, and the ability to pass off cheaper parts that don't need to be able to handle removal (glue vs. screws, etc.).

It's not necessary to achieve zero failures, but it creates incentives for manufactures to use higher quality parts.

I am supportive of setting minimum lifespans for certain classes of products and to expwct manufacturers to be liable for that performance.

the factory that built that refrigerator heat pump from the 70' is unlikely to still be making it.

as of today it would be already a big improvement if the was a law saying: "if a part is no longer produced or sold by the IP owner then it is legal to recreate and sell clones of that part"

Yes but why? Why do we have 400 different models of heat pump for every fridge out there? I can understand that once every decade or so a new tech comes out that's worthy of developing parts from. But even then the new parts could be retrofitted into existing designs.

> "if a part is no longer produced or sold by the IP owner then it is legal to recreate and sell clones of that part"

That would be a huge improvement. What would be an even better improvement would be to abolish so-called IP entirely and to mandate actual durability for all parts sold. Think about lightbulbs: the parts/socket are standard (no IP involved), every factory can produce them, and yet we still have crazy bad durability.

I am very skeptical: Washing machine has two functions: Spinning and heating water. heating is 99% efficient, and electric motors are like 95% efficient - where is the improvement coming from? Is is smart features? What do they do, instead of spinning left it spins right?

What about an oven or a kettle, there is no possible improvement, and I bet the shoddily made ones are actualyl less efficient and worse insulated.

The most water-efficient models in our ratings use an average of 10 gallons of water, 75 percent less than older models.

https://www.consumerreports.org/washing-machines/best-eco-fr...

For example even if my phone charger were to get twice as efficient, it’s drawing very little power, given that it spends most of its time unplugged: it uses a fraction of a watt. That means that I would have to use it for an extremely long time to get near to the amount of energy used to manufacture a new one.

This doesn’t take into account the savings in drinkable water which has most likely been through an energy-intensive process as well.

If you have collective washing machines as a public service running 24/7, the tradeoff may be worth it, but as a general rule it's certainly not the case. Extracting and refining materials for industrial processes consumes millions and millions of m³ of water and a lot of energy.

Our perception as consumers is skewed because the price we pay for electricity/water makes it economically more affordable to us to get newer devices, but from a resource usage perspective, that's certainly not a good deal for the planet. If we paid water/electricity the price that big industries do, we wouldn't even think getting a new device was a reasonable choice.

Did we discover new phisics of washing? Do we have any reason to believe further improvement is possible?

This is a physical process, you can't have infinite improvement - there is a certain minimum amount of water required to dissolve detergent, and it can be easilly calculated.

They don't do much, does anyone have a real explanation without any handwaving?

The new machines are better. I'm not an expert, but I think the biggest differences are: sensors to stop adding water when it isn't necessary, a really powerful spinner in the washer that dries the clothes better, powerful spinner in the dryer. Btw, my washing machine is top load, fwiw.

Oh, and to answer a different question: why didn't we have this stuff years ago? I think, no one cared enough to do it.

The old top loader basically filled up a big tub with hot water and sloshed it around a bit.

Modern front loaders just incrementally add the amount of water needed as determined by weight. Presumably wouldn’t have worked nearly as well with the available detergents of 50 years ago.

Secondly, while I never used a top loader, from everything I've read, they are worse in every dimention, so the comparison seems inappropriate - you are introducing extra variables.

Also I am not clear why 'incrementally adding water' was not possible previously, People built a 'smart' toaster 70 years ago, that could sence how cooked your bread is, and it was purely mechanical:

https://www.theverge.com/22801890/sunbeam-radiant-control-to...

Added: And toasters still do a crap job of figuring out done-ness.

A possible future improvement could be delayed start that communicates with time of use metering or something, although this would have to be implemented in such a way that the software itself wouldn't turn the machine into a piece of junk in 3 short years (eg libre software).

I suspect there are also many sensor-based improvements that could give machines more intelligent processing, but anyone who has repaired appliances knows that BOM cost rules all. So those would seemingly rely on less time-based manifest-destiny "innovation" and more on designing machines with more value in the first place.

Certainly there not necessarily anything wrong with open source controller software but it’s no Panacea either.

And what surveillance? My heating system isn’t networked at all.

By surveillance I'm referring to what would pass for "remote notifications" of system status (after the possible bad sensor was detected). The IoTrash solution would be to backhaul your system's data to a surveillance cloud, require you to sign up for email spam, install a bespoke app that would spam you with useless notifications, faux-consent to a ridiculous anti-privacy contract, etc. Whereas in the libre world, user-focused incentives are allowed to define functionality and that notification could be a simple single email.

Making the point in general, in order for complex software to not be some terrible black box, it needs to expose its internal state to users who want to see it. Libre software tends to do that (as many users are developers), while non-libre software tends to lock all that up and thus severely limits reliability xor complexity.

Individuals are of course welcome to hack together what they want using Arduinos or whatever.

Again I very deliberately do not have a smart thermostat or other network connections to my heating so no surveillance is going on. I do have network-connected temperature sensor but it’s purely passive.

I too critically rely on heating. As system complexity increases with things like outside temperature sensors, I would much rather have visibility into their workings than not. In the middle of the night, that could be the difference between a quick ten minute diagnose and override, or waiting some hours for an emergency service call.

I had a similar failure with my hot water boiler, where an older solid state control failed such that when the circulator would kick on the burner would shut off. This allowed it to limp along heating, until a day when it was too cold out and I realized it wasn't keeping up.

re: libre software, my point isn't really about being able to audit the code, but rather about having a cross-device software-maintainer-maintained codebase that users choose to use.

FWIW another, probably better, way to mitigate this particular external temperature sensor failure mode would be a second larger control loop. When the indoor temperature is more than a few degrees below the setpoint (not as a result of a scheduled change), the furnace should be less-efficiently creating a larger amount of heat to get back up to the setpoint quicker. Which is funnily enough how people think most thermostats work when they ineffectively turn it up higher to get things warmer faster.

Though to be honest I agree with your point. A lot of the low hanging fruit for massive gains in efficiency are gone. It's like cars, going from 10 mpg to 20 mpg is a huge difference. Going from 50 mpg to 60 mpg is a much smaller difference.

But then the washer is stealing heat from your house? That seems questionable?

Seems like the right way to solve the problem is to provide hot water inlet, and that should provide it is whatever most efficient way you can?

(The water is either collected in a container or goes down a drain)

For modern top loading washers, the final temperature of the water is restricted by limiting the hot water let in, they don't have a heater.

I recently bought a new washing machine. It is twice as efficient as the old one that broke down irreparably after 12 years.

I chose it by summing machines' cost, and the projected cost of each one's electricity needs going 10 years in the future, if prices go up by 10% per year, and picking the cheapest total one.

The cost of the machine itself ended up being 1149 RON, and the cost of the electricity would be 938 RON, which is almost the cost of the machine entirely.

So it is indeed important to consider efficiency and updating an old machine, and compare with what you have.

As long as the improvement in power efficiency keeps up, it will not make sense to keep an appliance for 50 years. But once that improvement stops, so does the reason for replacing them.

I see no reason to replace it, new stuff doesn't look better, doesn't work better and doesn't last more (probably the opposite). Tons of things are like that. Yes new fridge will save a bit more electricity (compared to already savvy one from 15 years ago) but the amount of energy and material that go into creating new one, and the amount of waste it produces when disposed of, are non-trivial and not handled well even in richest western societies.

I don't agree with 20 years warranty, many things like batteries and capacitors just don't last that long. But some form of longer warranty would definitely motivate manufacturers to focus more on quality.

Some capacitors can last just as long depending on their specs. For batteries, it's more complicated but longer warranty would probably incentivize R&D for durable batteries instead of smaller/stronger batteries, which would be a great win for the environment (see also: supercapacitors).

But the point is most devices are designed to be thrown away, not repaired. If your devices had apparent screws, and easy-to-replace parts, it could be repaired very easily by any skilled laborer (preferably as a public service, but it could also come from a local private workshop). Unfortunately, i don't know a single way to incentivize manufacturers to produce easy-to-repair products apart from extending warranty significantly: when they hold the responsibility to do repair on 100% of units not just the 0.1% people actually care to return (which will likely be replaced not repaired), they may be interested to make stuff easier to repair for everyone else.

Of course I am talking about cars that use the same fuel type.