Posted on 01/22/2024 2:46:25 PM PST by lowbridge
Betsy Anderson’s luck with refrigerators stinks as badly as the food she’s tried to keep cold.
“One morning I went to get milk out and it was sour,” said the Redwood City homeowner.
First, a $2,800 Kenmore Elite fridge — with an LG compressor inside — died in late 2019. “It was like 15 months old,” she said. “It basically stopped working. It wasn’t cold.”
Anderson filed for warranty service. But after two months of replacement parts failing, techs canceling service calls, and Thanksgiving approaching, she broke down and bought another fridge: a brand-new LG.
Groundhog day: $2K fridge edition
It only lived four years. “That just died, this year. Same thing. And I didn’t even bother calling them,” Anderson said.
If you’re keeping score, that’s one Redwood City home with two dead fridges in just five years.
“Yeah, two,” Anderson said. “Unfortunately, we bought another LG fridge. So, I guess that’s the definition of insanity, right?”
-snip
“It’s a nationwide issue,” said Los Angeles attorney Azar Mouzari. She represents plaintiffs who are now suing LG. She says her firm is focused on a critical part called the linear compressor inside LG and some Kenmore refrigerators. “Which is really the heart of the refrigerator," Mouzari said. "It’s what keeps the food cold.”
According to LG literature, the linear compressor uses less energy and makes less noise than other compressors. LG offers a 10-year warranty and, online, boasts “20-year durability.” But Mouzari argues in the lawsuit the linear compressor’s actual lifespan is nowhere near 10 years, let alone 20. Her suit claims they frequently break down far earlier — and LG knows it.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcbayarea.com ...
1 year ago, we got a new fridge. It’s a Kucht, which I purchased from Amazon, with 12 monthly payments with no interest. It was $2500, before taxes. I just finished paying it off. It works like a champ, so far. Kucht mostly makes very high end appliances, and professional appliances, and are an American company. The fridge was made in Mexico, which is one reason why I bought it, instead of all the others, of which most are made in China. It has a 4 year warranty, which is about 3 years more than any of the others. It replaced my 15 year old, $800 Kenmore side by side, which is still going strong on my screened in back porch. This one is a French door type, with a bottom freezer; I got tired of not being able to easily see what was in the back of the bottom shelves with contorting myself, in that side by side. Every other brand out there, with perhaps the exception of Nancy Pelosi’s $10,000 fridge, has terrible reviews and failures, including the hallowed Kitchen Aid. One repairman site said fridges with ice and water in the door have more problems; the ice maker in my side by side quit, but we didn’t want to replace it. This fridge has an ice maker only, in the freezer. It does have plumbing for a filter for the ice maker on the back, which is absolutely essential in our case, as our municipal water is terrible. I expect it to last for many years.
Just like the movie “Robots”.
A clue for some.
If your frig compressor stops working and your hear “clicking”
the start capacitor has failed.
15 dollar part at the bottom of the fridge.
Pull the fridge from the wall, remove the cardboard in the back and you will see a capacitor relay combo held on by a clip. Remove and order from amazon.
Please unplug fridge before removing cardboard.
In our family, we handed down refrigerators and freezers for decades. We got an upright freezer from my in-laws when they built a new house and it worked for about twenty more years. The same goes for the used refrigerator that we were given from “Who knows...I can’t remember?”. We have purchased multiple used appliances over the past few decades and only purchased brand new ones a few years ago. I don’t expect them to last as long as the used ones we purchased decades ago.
It’s a bit like new light-bulbs. Years ago, they lasted for years. Now, they blink, sputter, and quit after only a few months.
“planned obsolescence”
When I see one of those fancy refrigerator or stove the only thing I can think of is just how expensive they would be to repair.
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I’ve maintained the same criticism re vehicles ever since the introduction of electronically controlled door windows!
Never buy an icemaker. Never buy a refrigerator with any mechanism in the door. Never buy one with more than one refrigerator compartment and one freezer compartment.
LOL we’re on our 4th dishwasher in 20 years. My husband had to essentially rebuild the last two, piece by piece.
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I’ve lived for seven decades in a number of modern houses with a dishwasher (my wife), but we’ve never used the dishwasher appliance in any of them. We consider them basically useless.
Ah, Two (2) dishwashers is the way to do it... One for the clean cups/dishes/utensils... The other for the dirty.. And vice versa = never unload a dishwasher... And have more cupboard space!
My brother was an appliance tech, worked for a couple of big companies, and he said to avoid LG and Samsung.
Most manufacturers of white goods are now aiming for a life span of 5-7 years for “durable goods” like your fridge, stove, etc.
It may be a bit spendy, but buying Whirlpool, Miele, mid and upper level G E and Bosch is a far better option than nearly anything from Korea right now.
Wife bought a cheap GE chest freezer at a Home Depot 20 years or so ago. Lived in the garage in southern Nevada for 16 years. Think lotsa heat.
Still working today in the Kansas basement.
I was an appliance repair guy. The refrigerants are the problem. The kept changing them from R-12 up to R-1234 or whatever. R-12 running freezers and fridges, you could put a new compressor in them after there was a failure, and get another 30 years out of them. DESTROYING THE OZONE my ass. R-12 was so heavy of a gas that it would setting on the lowest part of the shop. You could practically sweep it into a dust pan. The AC in your cars, lasted longer and everything else. The new units, are better looking, but if they operated on older refrigerants, they would be more dependable. Now, you may as well buy a new one, if your 2 year old dies. Renting an appliance for a few months, will cost you about 12% of the cost of a new.
In the past your fridge stopped working because a component failed. Your thermistat, your compressor, your cooling fan.
Now your fridge can fail because a sensor fails.
Now your fridge can fail because a computer board for controls, or sensors, fail.
You missed the defrost timer.
Had one quit, couldn’t find an exact replacement. Found one that wired up the same, stuck it in.
Fridge was working fine ten years later when I sold the house. Back in the 80s.
Yes, I wasn’t going for an exhaustive list, just naming some examples.
I was just relating an incident in the deep dark past. An exhaustive list would take a page nowadays. Too many computers running things they don’t need to.
Serious misapplications of the technology.
Another example: A programmable HVAC thermostat is nice. You can set different temperatures for times when nobody is home and for sleep times. One that connects to the internet is just asking for trouble. No sane person would do that IMNSHO.
I have a ancient freon freezer over 50 years old that I keep in an un-airconditioned storage room. It’s still going strong!
Unregulate America Again - URMA!
Yep
Beerlizard1996 · 2 yr. agoWith advancements in technology like insulation and refrigeration, a new fridge will be way more efficient with power consumption and on how much stuff you can fit in there.
· 2 yr. ago This is one of the most pervasive myths and it’s not universally true. Fridges became really inefficient in the 60s and 70s when they started adding more features like ice makers and auto defrost, but most fridges from the 50s and older are just as efficient or more efficient than new fridges. They just get cold, and that’s it, nothing extra. They have extremely overbuilt compressors that are usually pretty efficient, and the lifespans for those compressors are almost unknown because they generally haven’t been reached yet.
I have a fridge from 1936 in my house, still running the original compressor and refrigerant. I replaced the dry rotted wiring in it and put a new door seal on, but otherwise it’s 100% as it left the factory 85 years ago and it looks almost new. I measured its runtime per hour and multiplied the compressor’s rated energy use while running by that number, and it beat current energy star rated fridges of the same size in terms of efficiency. Add in the fact that it hasn’t had to be replaced (thrown out) yet for almost a century, and it’s by far the more environmentally friendly option than buying a new one every 10-20 years.
Pretty much the only real practical downsides to pre-1960 fridges is that the freezers are small and kids could theoretically get trapped in them. If you don’t have kids, and have a chest freezer somewhere in your house I’d actually recommend getting a refurbished vintage fridge over a new one because there’s a non-zero chance it might outlive even you, not just the original owners.
Edited to remove “absolutely” from the first line. (https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/comments/p9twdg/comment/ha1ssly/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
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