Asklemmy

Mine opens with the long press of a button.

But my beep gives me a different problem, I never hear it. Imagine a shy introvert whispering, "Excuse me, if it isn't any trouble, would you please kindly move your laundry?" From across the apartment behind several closed doors.

The end result is me nerotically checking it, and sometimes it just refused to end. Like the timer says some amount of time and nothing is happening. If I open it, the display sheepishly flashes CL, which I assume means clean and not clear.

I just bought new ones, to be delivered tomorrow.

So i hope they aren't much assholey yet.

The door locks are often wax motors, which extend pretty quick when heated but have to cool off to release. The re-lock sounds like a huge wtf. Couldn't they just limit the tumble rpm so they don't have to lock?

I ditched my front load petri dish for a 10 year old Speed Queen top loader off marketplace. No regerts.

Not very annoying at all. Does a little jingle when it's turned on. Door unlocks when finished, no beeps. Instantly unlocks when paused too. Even can integrate into Home Assistant, but the manufacturer (Fuck you Haier) made it worse for no real reason.

We have/had a combination machine from Whirlpool which we got in 2019. It was fairly cheap, I don't remember exactly, but somewhere €600 on a sale.

I've replaced the heater element twice. The shock absorbers twice, because as I was installing a new one the threads stripped immediately. I've replaced the drain pump once. Now it's been sitting unused for a month, rusting because the heater element has broken once again.

Good thing we've got a shared laundry room in our apartment complex!

I have a Kenmore 80 Series washer and dryer set. There's a knob on the control panels to turn the buzzer off. It runs until it's finished. There is no lid lock, the washer is top-loading. The drum brake is a bit loud these days, should probably look into that. And it's probably about time to clean out the dryer's vent, the dull men's club will enjoy that.

Pretty sure the washer goes on the bottom

Washer is showing age, dryer is not. The worst issue is my hard water. Even copious amounts of bleach don't get my whites beyond gray dinge with it

My dryer is a Kenmore from the 80s. It is incredibly loud, and I have to push it back in place after every load. It has never broken, though.

My old washer died about two weeks ago. It was a 30 year old Frigidaire that shorted something and made magic smoke. That was a pretty asshole move.

We replaced it with a Speed Queen and it's been great so far.

Fuck modern appliances.
I'm lucky enough to have bought both washer/dryer almost 20 years ago. Both of 'em for $600 at Future Shop, which now ironically only exists in the past.

I never really think about these appliances, which is the nice part that I realky love about them.
They don't remind me they exist with beeps or phone notifications. They just do their thing.
Anyway, the washer is an old, cheap top loader, that can also periodically be used to tamp the soil beneath your foundation to make sure your house is stable. You activate that feature by bunching the bed sheets all wrong on the same side of the drum.
That's a nice feature that's been deprecated in newer models.
It's an overall easy model to repair because it's mostly just an oversized salad spinner with 2 water valves and a pump.
The dryer is like the quiet nephew that you like but never hear much about, nothing much to say really, but it works.

Anyway.
When the temperature dial on the washer broke 15 years ago, there was no way I was paying $90 to buy some complicated part that would break again.
So I just removed the knob and twisted the stranded wires to a dumb switch that you could reach by putting your finger in the knob hole as a proof of concept, left for the cold valve, right for hot. Sketchy? Sure. Warm? I don't know? Use a bit of both, or whatever.
I never even got around to actually solder it, which is weird because I've soldered lots of electronics. It worked, I guess I forgot, so whatever.

Until it stopped working a few months ago, having finally shaken itself loose and I opened it up again, only then realizing I didn't solder it way back then. Oops.
This time, I ordered a proper 3 position rotary switch, which I did solder. Left for the cold valve, right for the hot valve, and amazingly: middle for both, which is how warm water is made.
I also 3d printed a knob to fit the new switch.
Fancy right? but my last repair is still nowhere near as complicated as the original broken part was and we still only ever use the cold water setting.

Now, it turns out the reason the original part is complicated and expensive is that in normal washers, the temperature selection thingy only ever changes the washing temperature and not the rinsing temperature.
This means which valve needs to open has to change depending on where it is in the wash cycle, thus the more complicated part.

Anyway, technically, my washer now has more features than before it broke in the sense that we could theoretically now rinse with hot or warm water, which y'all plebs probably can't. Not that we ever use anything but the cold setting, but we could and you can't.

The dryer? It has just kept working.
Now and then we'd feed it something wrong like a bunch of loose balls from an old bearing that was sitting in a pant pocket or a set of lockpicks or whatever and I take the back panel apart to retrieve the stuff stuck in the back elbow somewhere. When that happens, I also vacuum the lint that is stuck in this quantum realm of not being caught in the lint filter, but also not expelled out, just caught in that same hungry void elbow.

Both have no music, no tunes, no beeps, no capacitive buttons that you don't quite know if you pressed or not, no lockout, although there's a safety switch that stops the drum from turning if you open the lid. No wifi, no app, no mold.
There's no soap dispenser, although I do have a peristaltic pump and tubing so I could easily enough just drop that in a jug of liquid detergent and time how much to use... but... we prefer powder detergent anyway because shipping water around is just dumb when I can get the same shit in concentrated powder and add water myself, which washing machines conveniently already do.
A bucket of the stuff lasts several years too.

They're old and all that, but these things keep on doing what they're made for while friends have gone through 3-4 sets in the same time line.

Fuck modern appliances.

My AEG has been steadily running for 15 years in my possession. It was used already when I got it. It’s a very simple one with no alarm, no display, not even a tiny one with a timer. Just a dial and a start button. The door sometimes needs an extra push to lock fully.