The appliance that elicits anger and frustrated at it’s mere sight. The treacherous device that never worked right.
I bought a cheap espresso maker off Amazon. It’s so cheap that nothing can be adjusted, not the pressure, the drip, the heat, nothing. Every single shot I pull from that thing tastes like burnt ass. I even invested in some nice expensive espresso beans, and no luck. The cheap machine is in fact a piece of crap. I should have known better.
How much was it?
It’s this one. I bought it on Amazon for the same price, $29.99: IMUSA Espresso Machine
My front loading clothes washer. It frequently doesn’t drain right. If you create a fault tree on what causes that, you can have:
- Faulty water level sensor
- Clogged water level sensor hose
- Clogged filter
- Clog around the heating element
- Broken check valve
- Faulty pump
- Clog between drum and liner
- Faulty control board
The pump can clearly be heard running when the water levels are too high, so I know the sensor, sensor hose, controls, check valve, and pump are all functioning. Sometimes, the pump runs for way longer than you’d think necessary, with only a small trickle of water coming out little bit by bit. This indicates to me that there is a clog upstream from the pump. Multiple times, I have squeezed myself back behind the washer to take the back off and access the filter (which should be accessible from the front). I’ve found no clog there. Ive taken out the heating element to check for clogs around it, and found nothing there. Ive shown a bright light from inside the drum to highlight any potential clogs between it and the drum, and seen nothing there. Despite all of that, the problem remains, and when I manually spin the drum with nothing inside, I can hear what sounds like stuff moving around inside.
I assume it must be ghosts or something at this point.
I wouldn’t call it an appliance, but I almost always use cast iron for beef.
My oven is a piece of shit that has unreliable temperature control and manages to have hot spots even with the fan on. I bought it new and I don’t think it will die any time soon. Joke is I paid a lot more than for my previous oven and it’s the worst piece of shit I’ve ever had, a miniature countertop oven I had way back that was old as balls gave more consistent results.
Printer, obviously
Waffle maker. Damnit I love waffles, but I can only clean out so many ruined waffles before I turn to pancakes.
Pancakes also work better than waffles with embedded blueberries or similar, if you’re into that.
Oh man! I was thinking waffle maker too!
Every consumer grade one had weird power issues, cooks unevenly, or would just be a pain to wash. I used to work at a breakfast place and those high end ones are incredible compared to the garbage that the average person has.
I finally found a really good one after years of junk. But I’m afraid if I praise it too much, it’ll hear me and crap out. (The Dasher Mini waffle maker.)
Coffee dispenser at work. It acts up like it’s a printer. Replace left cartridge. Replace right cartridge. Cleaning required. Thorough cleaning required. Unknown leak. Heating water please wait. Unknown error. Fuck that, I’ll piss in a cup myself if I don’t get my coffee now.
Then there’s also the towel roll thing in the toilets. I swear it’s stuck for longer time than it’s functioning. It’d be a full time job keeping that rolling throughout the day
Ugh. If you have even a little space on your desk you could get a “5-cup” (that’s about 2 mugs) drip coffee machine and some unbleached paper filters for about $25. You could still make that refreshing stroll in the direction of the big machine, but with your fresh hot mugful already in your hand.
My fridge’s ice machine has never worked and instead just made my fridge piss itself on multiple occasions.
Alexa.
Firewalls in general.
What about them?
I keep buying cheap toaster ovens. I keep paying the price for it. At least I know my smoke alarms work
Get yourself a nice Panasonic one. $150-ish I have one that’s over 10 years old
We must’ve lucked right out because we bought the literal cheapest toaster we found ($12 about 9 years ago). No special features, not even a cancel button, just a little knob for the doneness. It worked so well for the 7 or 8 years we had it, and the only reason we replaced it was cause we wanted a 4-slice toaster.
Thing was a champ, I was trying to see if I could find it online but can’t see it anymore. I think it was Master Chef brand.
We have an Oster one now with a fancy touch screen that I can see is about $70. It works about as well as the previous one we had.
Printers. There is no excuse for (consumer) printers to be as shitty as they are.
There are reasons, but none of them are excuses: If patent hell wasn’t a main obstacle put in place by the large printer manufacturers, I am sure open source hardware alternative would’ve forced industry improvements ages ago.
US parents only last for 20 years. Technically, nothing is stopping you from making a part-for-part copy of a good laser printer from 2005 and selling it the same way some companies do replacement toner.
It’s just that making a cheap and reliable appliance is HARD if there are dozens of distinct parts that all have to move together. Heck, id expect a near-clone of a Cuisinart stand mixer before I’d expect a printer.
(And, even then, i doubt it’d be much cheaper than just buying one used.)
US parents only last for 20 years.
Jeez, I’m way past my warranty. Almost at 27 years.
even enterprise grade printers are shitty
And there is a very good reason: Good Mechanical engineers are epxensive, so instead they hire crappy mechanical engineers
Don’t worry, commercial printers are equally bad but in a different way.
Every vendor feels the need to inject their own special secret sauce into the drivers instead of making a tool that Just Works.
OS people need to make the drivers. Once.
The driver is only “I bake you a PDF, and you will eat it and you will like it”
Brother printers to the rescue. I think they are still untainted by crap bloatware and just do the thing.
Their mobile app is crap but the printer rocks!
Yeah, there is no true rage like trying to get a Xante to work properly. “YOU HAD NO PROBLEMS 2 HOURS AGO WHEN I FED YOU 2,000 #10 ENVELOPES! WHY WON’T YOU PRINT THIS LETTERHEAD!”
Or my Canon 8000 that has decided it doesn’t want to print double sided on satin paper anymore. Or that is will staple a booklet, but only if i have the paper size down as 12x9 portrait instead of 9x12 landscape.
For me, it’s specifically the HP printer my wife has. It has one of those subscription models where you pay per page (or per some unit, I forget) and you can’t use it without an account and an internet connection.
I bought a Brother that offers but does not mandate a subscription and tried to get her to use it, but she is convinced the awful disgusting subscription model is easier.
Every time I see it it makes me a little sad and a little mad, but I had her put it on my network that has guest isolation, so it can’t touch or spy on any of my other devices and only impacts her.
(My feelings about it aren’t quite that strong in reality, but this is a thread about appliance beef. If her printer weren’t isolated, I might actually feel pretty strongly about it.)
Any device someone ask my help with figuring out. Its rarely the appliance that pisses me off and more the blatant learned helplessness and fundimental inability for fellow adults to rub two braincells together on figuring out a new thing or to troubleshoot a simple problem. A lifetime of being the techie fixer bitch slave constantly delegated the responsibility of figuring out everyones crap for them has left me jaded to the average persons mental capacity and basic logical application abilities.
I have a Samsung printer that simply hates me. Whenever I need to print something urgently it will disappear from the wifi. It shows up for a few milliseconds when restarted and disappears again. However when you have the time and energy to investigate the problem it works flawlessly.
It’s not the printer, dude. It’s the radio.
The stove in the place I rent. Only been living here maybe 2 years… and that thing is the devil. I thought it was just me getting used to an electric stove again. Nope, that thing is just a piece of shit.
Nothing can simmer, nothing can be left unattended for more than a few minutes (at most), it can’t maintain anything close to a consistent temperature, and forget boiling water before you die of old age… I use an electric kettle just so I can boil noodles in less than 40 minutes
Maybe it’s my pots?.. nope, I’ve tried. Maybe I’ll get better at using it?.. no, and at this point I wouldn’t even want to. It’s just a piece of shit. My mother-in-law is a great cook, and she was pissed when she burned smothered chicken on it… because she hasn’t burned smothered chicken in probably 20+ years; she confirms the stove is garbage
Fuck that stove
Thanks for hearing my rant, I feel a little better now
Edit: I forgot to mention that the fucker is BRAND NEW too. We’re literally the first people to use it. Garbage-ass, giant piece of horse shit
You could get your thermostat checked. Depending on the stove, it’s something you could probably do yourself. It’s like a ten dollar part, maybe?
We’re just planning on moving now, cause we hate this place and there’s a multitude of problems: A/C can’t keep up with cooling the house, costs a fuck-ton in energy bills, the management company won’t fix shit and they’re a nightmare to work with. They tried to blame us for rats getting into the attic, when it was a known problem before. Took us 2 months to make them hire pest control, and then acted like we should be grateful for normal-upkeep, and not having rats get inside
The neighborhood is actually nice, but the big-name management company are basically slum lords with a smile. But we had 3 dogs at the time and rental options were few, that had a fenced yard and would accept 3 dogs. 2 of them sadly passed this past year, and as much as I miss them and it wrenched my heart… we realized we could probably find something better now and not need such a large yard (our last dog is old too, and doesn’t romp in the yard anymore. He just enjoys little walks now)
The stove is just one of the things I hate about this place and I don’t want to fix any of their shite, even for $10. We’re just making it work for now
I trust your mom. She’s gonna be right.
