Some Refrigerator Advice From Mother....

This article from Mother Earth News is actually from the mid-80s, but it still makes some points that, if anything, are more valid today. Remember, Mother knows best... Some comments after the jump...

Triple Your Refrigerator's Life Span

Perform these quick, once-a-year home-maintenance tasks to add life to your cooling kitchen appliance.

According to Leroy Richter, former director of THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS Eco-Village and refrigeration and heating instructor at a local technical school, proper maintenance of a modern refrigerator can extend its life from barely longer than the 5 year warranty period to 15 or even 20 years. But wait. You say you have an old one out in the garage that's gone 30 years without a bit of attention? Why shouldn't your new fridge—the convenient side-by-side with ice maker—last at least that long?

Read more:


In Ted's opinion:


Modern appliances generally have a useful design life of 5 - 8 years. In addition to some of the issues raised in the article, modern designs emphasize energy efficiency and useful interior capacity. When I was growing up, my parents had a refrigerator with evaporator coils on the to and a compressor motor about the size of the motor in a Prius. Modern compressor motors are about the size of 3 hockey pucks stacked and use about 30% of the electricity. They also have a 1 year warranty instead of a 5 year warranty. 


In addition to keeping the compressor coils clean, it is important to make sure that the door seals are flexible and flat. You should be able to feel the suction when you open a refrigerator or freezer door. Compressors aren't designed for continuous operation. In fact, they should run no more than 5 - 15% of the time, depending on usage. If it is cycling on and off frequently, you probably have a leak. If it stays on for long periods, your coils are clogged or you have lost refrigerant, hopefully the former.


If you service your reefer regularly (especially if you have pets) you should be able to double this. Tripling it seems optimistic to me...

Front Load or Top Load? It's a Wash...

There is a great deal of confusion and misinformation with respect to the pros and cons of front-load vs. top load washers. Although, at the end of the day (or whenever you do your laundry), it's largely a personal decision, this write-up from Ask.Com does  reasonable job of laying out the issues. We'll have more on this after the jump, but, in the mean time, you be the judge...

Top-Loading vs Front-Loading Washers - Which is Better?

Helping You Choose the Right Washer for Your Home

If you're in the market to buy a new washer, one of the first decisions you'll want to make is whether to buy a top-loading or a front-loading washing machine.

Until a few years ago, front-loading washers were seen almost exclusively in laundromats, but these days, you can find them in more and more conservation-minded homes as manufacturers begin offering a broader array of choices.

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The article discusses the need to bend down to load a front-load washer (we've always had to do it with dryers). For people of a certain age, this becomes increasingly annoying. The article does not mention the fact that there are pedestals available which relieve this problem. Obviously, you can't use this in a stacked configuration, but if you require a stacked configuration, the choice has already been made for you. Side-by-side front loaders on pedestals are quite ergonomic. And, you can store stuff in the pedestal drawers.Pedestals generally run from $200 - $250, but some people make them themselves out of plywood for a lot less. Hey, it's in the basement or a closet, isn't it?

DIY Appliance Repair Part Deux...

So, you want to do it anyway? It can still be worth it. If you don't have a service plan and the appliance is less than 8 - 10 years old, or you have bonded with it in some way and really don't want to see it go, fixing it yourself might be worth it, as long as you can diagnose the problem properly. Generally, if you can repair it for less than half the cost of a replacement, and the unit is in otherwise good condition, go ahead. Have a big time, as they say. Since your labor is free (this is a hobby, right?) you only have to worry about the parts cost (see: Johnny Cash song in earlier blog post).

You need a couple of things:

1. A repair manual or other source of repair information, and,
2. A source of parts.

There is a reasonably good source of both called RepairClinic. There are others as well (See, I surf the net so you don't have to). A lot of newer appliances with electronic controls with LCD displays (if you don't know what these are, maybe you shouldn't try repairing them) have self diagnostic capabilities. Sometimes, these are even explained briefly in the installation manuals that accompany the unit. Usually, it involves holding down two or three buttons while powering the unit on with your foot or or your nose, at which point it will display a code of some sort which, with many years of study (or a cheat sheet) you can interpret. Kind of like cars, except that you don't have to buy a code reader.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can reset the offending condition and hope for the best. If this happens during the warranty period, don't do this! The next time you get the problem, it will probably be out of warranty, and you will be toast. At any rate, these diagnostic codes can be very useful. They must be - the service guys use 'em. Once you are sure of the diagnosis, you can price the cost of repair part(s). You want to be reasonably sure of yourself at this point. Trying one part after another is going to be really hard on your wallet. For you financial types, this is called a "Stupidity Tax." Unless, of course, you think of it as a hobby expense.

Although modern appliances are considerably more complicated than they were 20 years ago, they don't approach automobiles on the complexity scale. You can fix them without really expensive diagnostic equipment. Also, fixing them (or trying to) will make you a more educated consumer the next time you need to buy one, and that's what this blog is all about.

DIY Appliance Repair - Is It Worth It?

Let me answer this with an unqualified "Maybe." "It depends" also works.

First, a personal story. About 6 years ago, long before I went to work at Sears selling these beasts, I bought a Kenmore dishwasher (made by LG) at a Sears where I lived in Western New York. Being the macho appliance geek, I declined the 5 year service coverage, assuming (correctly) that I could fix most anything that went wrong.

Sure enough, about 2 years later, the pump motor started to go, so, after trying a couple of things, I popped the hood and pulled out the defective pump motor. Took about an hour. I perused the on-line discount appliance parts site on the net. The least expensive replacement cost $241 with shipping. That was only about $60 more than 5 years coverage would have cost me. I calculated that to build the dishwasher from aftermarket parts would cost about 3 times what the dishwasher would have cost new. Plus my labor, of course (which, according to my wife, is free and worth nearly every penny).

Johnny Cash more or less summed this up in a song quite a few years ago.... You can watch it here. (Sorry about the ad)

Steam Part Deux...Laundry Edition

There is an article in eHow below about the value of steam in laundries. FWIW, I think that the value is completely different for washers and dryers: it allows washers to do a better job on delicates and dryers to do a good job on 'fluffing" or wrinkle removal. Anyhow, here's what eHow sez:

Is a Steam Washer Worth the Money?

By Jonathan McLelland, eHow Contributor

While steam washers provide multiple benefits, are they worth your money?

If you have stepped into an appliance retail store looking for a new washing machine, you probably have seen a steam washer. These advanced washing machines are typically front-load units and are significantly more expensive than their top-load counterparts. Steam washers might provide some benefits, but you have to decide if they are worth the extra money.

Read More...

More on Refrigeration from the Energy Star Folks

Refrigeration Innovation

What makes a refrigerator energy efficient?

Refrigerator technology has improved significantly in the past 40 years. Three key improvements add up to greater efficiency:

These advances are just the most recent progress in the long history of refrigeration. We've come a long way since the early days of refrigeration to today's highly efficient ENERGY STAR qualified models!

Want a brief history of refrigeration? Get a magnet and stick it on your 'fridge. 

The Hog in Your Kitchen

An interesting article on energy-efficient refrigerators...


THE NEW WAVE OF
ENERGY EFFICIENT REFRIGERATORS 

Swelling Energy Use

Refrigerators didn't get to be energy hogs on purpose. It's just that energy conservation ranked far below appearance and convenience on the list of design considerations in the '50s and '60s.

Energy guru Amory Lovins has often used the homely fridge as an example of how this approach affected energy use in the industrialized world. The motor was hidden underneath the appliance, where it radiated its heat right up into the food compartment. Manufacturers cut back on insulation so that they could increase the amount of usable space without making the appliance bigger -- not in itself a bad goal, but without high-performance insulators, this strategy allowed heat to stream right back into the cold box.

With little insulation, the refrigerator's metal skin got so cool that it tended to "sweat" -- to condense moisture from the air. So designers installed heaters on the outside of the fridge to evaporate the dew. The result was that a typical refrigerator in 1976 used an average of 1800 kilowatt-hours per year -- way more than any other appliance in the home. This was nearly four times the consumption of 1950-vintage models, which used about 500 kilowatt-hours a year and had their motors on top. By 1981, US models consumed twice the energy of Japanese models, according to Natural Resources Defense Council scientist David Goldstein.

The potential for conservation was not lost on energy-efficiency activists like Goldstein and Arthur Rosenfeld, formerly of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and now a senior adviser at the Department of Energy. The obstacle, as they saw it, was that the free market wasn't going to encourage the efficiency gains that technology allowed and society needed.

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The Second Age of Steam, Dishwasher Chapter

If you are worried about Ebola on your stemware, steam may be for you. Otherwise, well, maybe...

This from "How Stuff Works":

Believe it or not, the modern world largely runs on steam. Most people associate steam power with antiquated steam boats and the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, but the truth is, many of today's power plants still rely on it. Whether it's a fossil-fueled or nuclear power plant, its process involves heating water to its gaseous state -- steam -- to turn a turbine and create electric power. But simple steam also has more hands-on modern uses.
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Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

From Consumer Reports:

Repair or replace it?

CR's guide to having products fixed–or not

THE TEMPTATION TO TOSS  Frustrated by cost and inconvenience, and lured by new products, fewer readers are repairing.

You're hosting Thanksgiving but it's your range that's taking a holiday. Do you call for repair or scramble for a replacement? To help you make the right decision, as part of the Annual Product Reliability Survey conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, we asked 13,477 subscribers to share their experiences with 20,613 broken products.

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