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A comment on Declining quality of consumer-grade products – 2009 fridge compressor autopsy. Parent comment

Re:Declining quality of consumer-grade products – 2009 fridg... by userbinator on Sunday August 14, 2022 @09:40PM (#32464962)
special plastics that degrade rapidly after 5 or 6 years

...so the company making parts with them can then extoll the virtues of "biodegradable" in their marketing...?

Also, for those who doubt the claim about the Honeywell thermostat having a battery, I did some further research, and it does appear to be true:

https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/128526/honeywell-th...

https://www.amazon.com/review/R3V5R0MJGEFNXH

But then this video shows that it is relatively easy to replace, it's not soldered in place, although the comments there do mention that the presence of the battery isn't documented anywhere in the original instructions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VKowLXfERo

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Re:Declining quality of consumer-grade products – 2009 fridg... by somewhat_drunk on Monday August 15, 2022 @12:50AM (#32466011)
The first two links you've provided about the battery don't prove or even suggest that the battery is essentially intended as a chemical timer to disable the thermostat when it runs out, which is the gist of the claim.
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Re:Declining quality of consumer-grade products – 2009 fridg... by K0balt on Sunday August 21, 2022 @07:38AM (#32539189)
We had a over a hundred deployed so I did pretty exhaustive analysis. There is no rtc or anything that needs power. The at328p chip used has nonvolatile storage, the battery does not supply power when the power to the thermostat is removed, and the battery keeps a gpio pin on the mcu high. It’s pretty plain.
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