I just want normal buttons and dials back. Not time-based capacitance buttons that take 5.02 seconds to activate, not 5.0 seconds; nor free-spinning encoder wheels that mandate you give it a jiggle before the washer does anything, even if it's already on the setting you want.
I want kachunk-a-chunk back first. Then we can decide if it needs smarts.
The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive.
They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
But one cool part about things like motorized kerchunk-a-wheels is that, upon failure, a motivated person on Gilligan's Island can often mend them back into service with a screwdriver and a sharp rock.
But these are [often] thousand dollar appliances. "Capacitive buttons are cheaper" shouldn't be a factor.
It's hard to understand why companies can't build things to last, use real buttons, provide parts for servicing at cost, add local APIs for anything "smart", forgo any secondary income streams (eg screens showing ads), and still make a profit.
> [...] more failure-prone than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
No, they're not. And even if they were, they're repairable. I can even drill a new hole, mount an industrial 5cm push-button and wire it where the original button was connected. Can't do that with a touchscreen.
They're not expensive, they're inefficient in terms of water use. Which means they are a non-starter for national retail in the US because there are a few desert states that have captured federal regulation which mandate ever decreasing water use because that's what those desert states want.
Some poor schmuck in "basically Vietnam" climate part of Arkanas has to go to work and fix waste plumbing that's full of deposits from low flow urinals, get home, throw his clothes in a washer that won't clean them because it's trying to sense the bare minimum water it can use (which is too little for anyone who does work outside an office) and then shower under a POS low flow shower head, all so some jerks in the desert can feel like they're saving the planet.
State water situations are diverse. This is a textbook example of something that should not be regulated federally.
I don’t buy the “more failure-prone” thing if “failure” is defined correctly. Here’s my comparison:
1. Assorted old appliances I have experience with. I have washer and dryer buttons (possibly the last LG model that had them, purchased quite deliberately) working flawlessly after quite a few years, and I have experience with some high-end old dishwashers that had absolutely perfect button performance for about 20 years.
I can compare this to new high end dishwashers where turning the thing on requires triggering a capacitive power button that is very very hard to trigger deliberately even with completely dry fingers. I’ve seen two different related models of this unit with the same problem - they are effectively “failed” almost immediately. Never mind that these dishwashers react to anyone leaning gently against them.
So my score is: near 0% failure rate for mechanical buttons and near 100% for capacitive sensors.
(Even the really nice capacitive sensors on nice phones and watches don’t work well under kitchen conditions, so I’m not sure this problem is fully solvable even with more expensive capacitive buttons.)
>> I just want normal buttons and dials back. Not time-based capacitance buttons that take 5.02 seconds to activate, not 5.0 seconds; nor free-spinning encoder wheels that mandate you give it a jiggle before the washer does anything, even if it's already on the setting you want.
> The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive.
> They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
Capacitance buttons also failure-prone because they literally don't work half the time. The GP was also describing other failures with the modern style controls.
I'm tired of this gaslighting: "kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons" work and are more reliable. I have literal first hand experience with them working reliably for decades. I also have literal first hand experience with capacitance buttons, etc. constantly not working from day one.
The only bit of truth to your argument is they may be more expensive. But I'll take [slightly] more expensive and working over not working any day.
And if you disagree with me, I'll sell you an empty box as a dishwasher. It won't work, but it'll be less expensive!
my microwave oven has two knobs: how hot and how long. I paid an extra £50 to get a model of fridge without WiFi. sadly my washing machine is already at the free-spinning encoder stage - I don't hate it with a passion, but more of a low-enthusiasm.
I dread replacing anything that breaks in the next few years.
My grandma lost her vision when she was young. Even before capacitive buttons, buttons were very hard to find by touch. It has been an issue for more then a decade.
Off topic, but a lifehack for those who have visually impaired loved ones: we use glass paint contour paste on the center of buttons.
It's basically used in glass paintings to stop paint sliding from the glass, so it can make a good noticeable bump or line.
But – it only works on hard surfaces and if the buttons themselves are not very sensitive.
If you can lightly brush the button while you are "looking" for bumps, then it works.
My former cook top was solely driven by capacitance buttons - which became entirely inaccessible the moment there was an overflow, leading to more overflows and a situation that rapidly got out of hand.
The first step in an emergency is switch off the cook top - luckily the breaker switch was nearby.
Do people really want them, or is that what is offered and do most people just buy whatever they see in a store or on the first page of a retailer online?
We keep pretending that everything that companies do is because consumers want it, but we ignore the part where companies do certain things because its better for them. Like a washing machine that uses 4 gig of data a day, or a washing machine that needs access to you photos????
If you're talking about the motorised control wheel things that old washing machines used to have, they went away largely because they are failure prone, and their failure modes can be bad (for instance in some machines if they fail while the machine is filling, well, it will just go on filling forever). The microcontrollers in modern machines can fail, to, but generally are easier to make fail safe.
As has been said already those can fail nuclear disaster style so I have no interest in having those back. Give me an ethernet port and a wifi interface (ideally supporting at least wifi 6 but ideally wifi 7 so it's not polluting the airwaves causing interference. It should also be able to be disabled if I want to use ethernet only) that has a locked down web interface exposed on one port with some standardized interface (is rest still what all the cool kids are using?) that exposes all the machine functions and lets me configure access credentials. The apps are spyware garbage that I'm sure are fine for some people but with local polling I can integrate this stuff into my home assistant setup and do all I would ever want with it and block the machine's external access. All these commodity manufacturers of household goods are trying to lock us into their software walled gardens to rip us off more/sell our information to advertisers and governments and that needs to be aggressively stopped imo.
My parent's new washing machine doesn't have a real indicator of position on the selector wheel. The wheel has a chrome-like band going around it. Somewhere in that band is a light-grey stripe. It's barely visible from the side even if you look very closely. It's completely invisible when simply looking at the machine from a normal perspective.
Who the hell approved that design?!
I have drawn a big black mark on the wheel with a sharpie.
Most low end appliances have buttons and dials as the interface to the "will last long enough to not be available when it breaks" computer that the fancy touchscreen stuff uses.
My washer/dryer has a microphone so it can hear the tones from LG support over the phone that tell it to play back its diagnostic code.
Kidding aside, the trust we put in the myriad of internet-connected devices with microphones in our spaces is mind-boggling. Even lightstrips and lightbulbs have microphones to sync with music, and often show up as open Bluetooth devices for setup each time the wall switch is turned on.
I bought a house and was pleased to find 0 smart anything in it. It's not even that I care about privacy, just don't want to deal with pointless tech problems like uh lightbulbs needing updates.
> Introduced in the early 2010s, the smart washing machine promised convenience and efficiency by allowing users to control and monitor their washing machine remotely. The connection to a Wi-Fi network allows the user to operate functions from a smartphone, download additional wash programs, and receive alerts when a load is complete.
Unless the thing will load and unload itself, all those "features" are stupid.
We really ought to have a special derisive name for buzzy features like those, that make absolutely no sense and are basically useless in the real world.
One feature I would like to have in a washing machine is a controlled start and an end signal so that I can automate a valve switching the water on and off.
For the rest I agree, the real deal will be a load/unload functionality :)
We already have this with the dryer function... It's too hot to allow you to open the door and accept the risk yourself, so I need you to wait 10 minutes for the machine too cool before I unlock the door.
I have that with my washer. There's a catch on the door that won't open until it's CERTAIN spinning has stopped. Granted, that's a safety issue of sorts.
Of course it was the first part to fail. Of course you have to enter from behind to override it.
I am playing with home automation, and one of the reasons i’m only using zigbee devices is that they have no outside network access. I have two wifi thermostats that I bought before, and one of these days I’m going to have to set up a firewall of some kind to block them from outside access.
I'm sad I went for a WiFi based solution many years back (Tado). They say cloud costs are getting too high and are suddenly super aggressive in limiting API usage. Give me a fully working local API then, you twats.
I haven't found a good local-only or ZigBee based system that allows precise room control that controls the central heater efficiently based on demand. I could get a bunch of ZigBee radiator knobs, but then I'd have to do a lot of programming/automation to get a good system as a whole. I have to say that Tado does that brilliantly (that's why I chose them in the first place)
The wifi devices are cheaper IME, so I created a IOT VLAN that does not have internet access, nor access to my normal network unless it was initiated from the trusted side.
Ikea home automation is all zigbee, and that stuff is dirt cheap. But if you want something ikea doesn’t sell, like wall switches and thermostats, wifi stuff does tend to be a hair cheaper.
A vlan sounds like the way to go to quarantine devices.
They've been the current frontier for nearly a decade now! Mirai, back in 2016, famously was heavily composed of IP cameras, one of the earlier examples of what we now call IoT.
Readit News
I want kachunk-a-chunk back first. Then we can decide if it needs smarts.
They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
But one cool part about things like motorized kerchunk-a-wheels is that, upon failure, a motivated person on Gilligan's Island can often mend them back into service with a screwdriver and a sharp rock.
It's hard to understand why companies can't build things to last, use real buttons, provide parts for servicing at cost, add local APIs for anything "smart", forgo any secondary income streams (eg screens showing ads), and still make a profit.
No, they're not. And even if they were, they're repairable. I can even drill a new hole, mount an industrial 5cm push-button and wire it where the original button was connected. Can't do that with a touchscreen.
However, if you go to the store, you'll see washing machines with old knobs much cheaper than machines with new fancy screens.
Some poor schmuck in "basically Vietnam" climate part of Arkanas has to go to work and fix waste plumbing that's full of deposits from low flow urinals, get home, throw his clothes in a washer that won't clean them because it's trying to sense the bare minimum water it can use (which is too little for anyone who does work outside an office) and then shower under a POS low flow shower head, all so some jerks in the desert can feel like they're saving the planet.
State water situations are diverse. This is a textbook example of something that should not be regulated federally.
1. Assorted old appliances I have experience with. I have washer and dryer buttons (possibly the last LG model that had them, purchased quite deliberately) working flawlessly after quite a few years, and I have experience with some high-end old dishwashers that had absolutely perfect button performance for about 20 years.
I can compare this to new high end dishwashers where turning the thing on requires triggering a capacitive power button that is very very hard to trigger deliberately even with completely dry fingers. I’ve seen two different related models of this unit with the same problem - they are effectively “failed” almost immediately. Never mind that these dishwashers react to anyone leaning gently against them.
So my score is: near 0% failure rate for mechanical buttons and near 100% for capacitive sensors.
(Even the really nice capacitive sensors on nice phones and watches don’t work well under kitchen conditions, so I’m not sure this problem is fully solvable even with more expensive capacitive buttons.)
> The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive.
> They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them.
Capacitance buttons also failure-prone because they literally don't work half the time. The GP was also describing other failures with the modern style controls.
I'm tired of this gaslighting: "kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons" work and are more reliable. I have literal first hand experience with them working reliably for decades. I also have literal first hand experience with capacitance buttons, etc. constantly not working from day one.
The only bit of truth to your argument is they may be more expensive. But I'll take [slightly] more expensive and working over not working any day.
And if you disagree with me, I'll sell you an empty box as a dishwasher. It won't work, but it'll be less expensive!
[1]: https://speedqueen.com/products/top-load-washers/tc5003wn/
I dread replacing anything that breaks in the next few years.
Genuinely asking because I plan to do this once I have to get new appliances, is there something missing that way?
I feel very sorry for the visually impaired that are looking for house appliances in this decade
Off topic, but a lifehack for those who have visually impaired loved ones: we use glass paint contour paste on the center of buttons. It's basically used in glass paintings to stop paint sliding from the glass, so it can make a good noticeable bump or line. But – it only works on hard surfaces and if the buttons themselves are not very sensitive.
If you can lightly brush the button while you are "looking" for bumps, then it works.
My former cook top was solely driven by capacitance buttons - which became entirely inaccessible the moment there was an overflow, leading to more overflows and a situation that rapidly got out of hand.
The first step in an emergency is switch off the cook top - luckily the breaker switch was nearby.
I want it to be less intrusive and irritating not more.
There are washing machines without any screens, just old buttons. Also they are cheaper, I can see now in the store for just €270.
But looks like many people wants screens, apps and happily pay extra for washing machine with extra features.
We keep pretending that everything that companies do is because consumers want it, but we ignore the part where companies do certain things because its better for them. Like a washing machine that uses 4 gig of data a day, or a washing machine that needs access to you photos????
Who the hell approved that design?! I have drawn a big black mark on the wheel with a sharpie.
My washer/dryer has a microphone so it can hear the tones from LG support over the phone that tell it to play back its diagnostic code.
Kidding aside, the trust we put in the myriad of internet-connected devices with microphones in our spaces is mind-boggling. Even lightstrips and lightbulbs have microphones to sync with music, and often show up as open Bluetooth devices for setup each time the wall switch is turned on.
Unless the thing will load and unload itself, all those "features" are stupid.
We really ought to have a special derisive name for buzzy features like those, that make absolutely no sense and are basically useless in the real world.
For the rest I agree, the real deal will be a load/unload functionality :)
Of course it was the first part to fail. Of course you have to enter from behind to override it.
I haven't found a good local-only or ZigBee based system that allows precise room control that controls the central heater efficiently based on demand. I could get a bunch of ZigBee radiator knobs, but then I'd have to do a lot of programming/automation to get a good system as a whole. I have to say that Tado does that brilliantly (that's why I chose them in the first place)
A vlan sounds like the way to go to quarantine devices.
Deleted Comment
Watching Sanctuary Moon? Fair enough, washing clothes is pretty boring.