Speaking of beeping, why is it so hard to completely disable the "I'm finished" beep on household devices?
My microwave beeps, incessantly.
My dishwasher beeps, four times, when it's finished. Especially nice when this happens after midnight when everyone is sleeping.
My washing machine beeps, for the best part of 10 mins, when it's finished. Also nice when this happens in the wee small hours.
My tumble dryer - praise the Lord - has a function to disable its beeping. The beeping got disabled within minutes of it being installed.
My microwave beeps for a solid 10 seconds every minute after a run. In this condition, it is perfectly safe no matter what.
My oven beeps exactly 1 time when preheated, similar to how FedEx and UPS notify upon package delivery. In this condition, it could burn my house down if left unattended. There are no subsequent beeps.
Although I guess if it's not a safety thing, the cost of the extra design might be more than I'd expect to save on my electric bill from the once a year or less I leave it on overnight by mistake.
Really? I have a hard time imagining how heating elements in a steel box is going to burn your house down.
I've also had an electric oven where the element was damaged and started melting/deforming. Not sure how far this would have gone if left alone.
You’re pre-heating your oven, so it’s empty. There are no realistic circumstances where an empty oven could burn your house down simply by being on at a preset temperature.
This is a big assumption. A lot of people, myself included, store pots and pans in the oven when it's not in use. I frequently forget to remove them before preheating.
In my case the pan that I keep in there is made of cast iron, so there really isn't anything that can go wrong. But I would bet good money that there are people out there who keep wooden handled pots and pans in the oven. Is it a bad idea? Absolutely. But it's a realistic scenario.
My Instant Pot does the same thing, but I only use it in the evening, so not so much of a big deal as the microwave oven.
[1] Before: https://i.imgur.com/xuyQJwL.jpg
[2] After: https://i.imgur.com/ZwX8zWs.jpg
Sound Off: When in Standby, press and hold − button until display indicates SOFF [1]
But most of all, it is being cheap and using a piezeoelectric buzzer driven on/off instead of a speaker driven by a small routine that would produce a pleasant sound.
Microwave ovens used to sound a bell when they were done, back when timers were mechanical.
My washing machine loudly plays a lengthy fecking song when it's finished!
I do wish that, at the least, there was a way to reduce the volume of all these beeping things...
Had no idea it was about a trout of all things, or indeed why they chose such a song?!
Let me guess... one of the big Korean manufacturers? Seems to be popular over there for some reason.
Fortunately, on my LG, you can turn it off - but there's no middle ground: it's either a 30 second tune or complete silence.
I need this! Ours beeps when it's done, then starts up again for a couple of minutes, beeps again... repeat ad nauseam. Yes, I KNOW YOU'RE FINISHED!
When my old microwave (which emitted 4 long beeps when finished) broken down, I specifically looked for an unit with:
- knobs, ie. no buttons (and especially no touch buttons!)
- shortest possible 'cooking finished' bell
I managed to find one that I like but it wasn't easy.
For dishwashers, we now have one that just opens by itself when it is done (to dry) - no beeping or anything. Maybe a bit hyperbolic, but it was quite a life changer!
It will beep FOREVER untill you turn it off. This should be a crime.
Of course, the best way is to make it configurable, but surely.
Plug through the device and when it's done, shout at Mycroft (or other spyware DA) to power it off.
Hmmm? So it annoys you if it beeps at those times, but not when it RUNS at those times? I'm confused...
Utility room is a long way from the bedroom, and the utility room door fits well.
As long as you don't select a high-speed spin cycle the washing machine is more or less inaudible from the bedroom.
The beeper, however, isn't inaudible, especially at night.
Great design choice to make the beeper the loudest part of the device ... and then make it unmuteable. Yes, we did once ask the Siemens repair guy during a service visit.
This should be illegal.
I really miss the induction hob. Cleaning the rangemaster is a complete nightmare, it’s full of places where dirt can accumulate, there’s even holes down the back and gaps in the side where food falls down that are unrecoverable. The gas rings sometimes don’t light up and gas leaks out while you’re cooking and don’t realise, it’s much more dangerous for children and I’ve left it on without realising a few times now.
The buttons on the induction hob sucked, yes, but the user experience was so much better, literally wipe clean and done, safe and powerful. Maybe if I had a cleaner I’d prefer the rangemaster…
And my mom is afraid to let anything drip on it, because they told her she needs special cleaner or it'll ruin the finish. And my parents are not gullible people.
Look forward to more of this shit, too: CA just outlawed gas appliances in new houses. But in an area stricken by permanent drought, do they do something sensible like requiring greywater recovery systems in new construction? NOPE.
That said capacitive touch has no place in the kitchen.
An example that comes to mind is Continuously Variable Transmissions (CVT). Most types of motorsports avoid CVTs for reasons of weight, unreliability and decreased repairability. However, for normal road cars, CVTs are very widespread and they do the job just fine (until they don't, but that's another story!)
>The only profitable division of the company is its Complaints Department, which, according to the series, takes up the major landmasses on three planets. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines its marketing division as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," and an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
Like fan (convection) ovens, is this just something that Europe is used to and is alien to people in the USA?
Personally, I love that the entire surface of the hob (including buttons) is a flat piece of glass. It makes cleaning trivial.
Before: turn the knob to max and wait a moment.
Today: long-press the on/off button to turn the stove top on, press another button to select plate, adjust power by hitting the plus button ten times to get it to the max setting. Then wait a moment.
That's the worst damn user interface you can think of for using a physical machine that begs for tactile controls.
Kettles on stoves are weird to us.
But for the vast majority of us it's electric.
I'm not sure the etymology of "put the kettle on" has been strictly about a stove-top for a very long time. To me it's a method-independent phrase, and a reference to setting the kettle to boil, not its physical placement.
When cast-iron stoves were common and possibly the primary source of heat for many homes, I am pretty sure that for most of the cold parts of the year, they would be fired-up and kept hot most of the day and night for warmth.
So - it wasn't a big production to boil water, you would just put it on the already hot stove.
(And also - I did not know this until recently but kettle can mean just a large cauldron/pot - although typically it would also have a wire handle and a lip/spout for easy pouring. Hmmm they were also used to hang above campfires, so my stove theory might go even further back...)
Delighted that my new place just has knobs!
You can't find the touch-buttons in the dark, say when you want to make coffee in the wee morn, so you're forced to turn on lights. When you finally find a button, it takes forever to turn it to max. You have to fiddle around to turn it back down again, first click the button for the corresponding plate you want, then click a separate button to actually power it down. Again, it takes forever.
It's also impossible to train tactile memory for it, becuase the buttons are too close and too hard to discern on the dark-on-dark top, so if you try doing it blind, you'll just end up fiddling forever to find the damn thing.
If you spill something over the touch area, it'll start beeping and complaining before it turns itself off. Meanwhile the corresponding pot might have already boiled over, and you can't react in time, because the touch panel is covered in boiling liquid.
Also, honestly, I think it's actually harder to keep the ceramic top clean than a regular top. Reason: It smudges real easy, and you're never sure how much pressure or abrasives you can use without making scratches. On the old tops, you just didn't have to worry. It could withstand a sledgehammer amount of abuse before scratching or chipping.
And don't even get me started on the microwave installed here... I brought my own two-knob micro despite there already being one installed here. That should give you a clue.