Today’s refrigerators can connect to the Internet and display your digital photo album. All of these new features mean that the appliance may need servicing sooner, and that servicing can be expensive.
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New refrigerators, ovens and dishwashers have all sorts of new features: you can view your vacation photos on a screen on your refrigerator door, check the temperature of your food remotely or connect your dishwasher to the internet. They are also cheaper and more efficient than in previous decades.
But many of the latest models of kitchen appliances have a shorter lifespan than those of the past. Due to their complexity, they require more frequent maintenance and repair costs are often comparable to the price of a new appliance. Furthermore, it turns out that many people simply do not use most of the new features.
Perhaps no one knows the specific limitations of new devices better than the people who have to repair them.
“We used to be able to tell people a dishwasher would last 15 years. Now you’re lucky if you get five to seven years out of it,” says David Costanzo, owner of Appliance King of America in Boynton Beach, Florida.
At home, Costanzo has an all-original 1935 GE refrigerator that he says “works perfectly,” but these days “you’d be lucky to get 10 to 15 years out of a refrigerator. And 10 to 15 years ago, that number was closer to 20 years.”
A major culprit is the switch from mechanical to electrical systems that power the devices.
“Appliances have a lot more sensors,” says Darin Williams, owner of Reliable Appliance in Anchorage. “Nowadays, you have digital integration in motors instead of strictly mechanical motors. And because a lot of things are more digitally focused, those types of components are more likely to fail than something that’s analog and mechanical.”
In a modern device, you are less likely to turn a knob that activates a motor (a mechanical system) than you are to press a button on a screen that connects a bunch of small components to a motherboard (digital integration). More complexity means more things can go wrong.
“The motherboard controls everything,” says Leonardo Ben Fraj, owner of Optimal Appliance Repair in Washington. And that has big implications when something goes wrong, because the motherboard often costs about half the price of the entire appliance. In other words, it can cost you almost as much to repair it as it would to simply buy a new appliance.
And even if you’d rather repair than replace, that might not be so easy. When it comes to electronic components, “the pace of change is so fast that a company might make something one year and then the next year they won’t be making that part anymore,” says Michael Pecht, a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland. “They’re making the next generation, and that new part might not fit with the old one.”
Pecht has consulted for major brands in the U.S. and the European Union. He says some of their CEOs and vice presidents have complained about the difficulty of competing with Chinese companies, which often promise extremely cheap products. “There’s a lot of pressure on them to make it cheaper,” he says. “So when you think about making it cheaper, what do you do? You skimp on materials — you don’t use the best, highest-quality materials.”
You’re using plastic — lots of plastic. That, of course, breaks faster than metal. “One of the biggest things we see, in terms of failures, is broken components,” says Daniel Wroclawski, a reporter for Consumer Reports who focuses on home appliances. Components like shelves, ice makers, and water and ice dispensers are all more fragile than they used to be.
Plastic does have some advantages: It’s easy to form into complex parts, and its light weight means it’s cheap to ship. And metal isn’t perfect — it can rust, for example. But even when metal is used today, it’s not as good as the heavier metal used in appliances 20 or 30 years ago. “The metal is a little thinner. The wires are a little thinner,” says David Oliva, president of RD Appliance Service in Plainview, N.Y.
Manufacturers continue to push smart devices, which means they’re connected to the internet. Wroclawski says there’s no evidence yet that those features have led to more outages. In fact, internet connectivity can sometimes even help with repairs, especially remotely. “But there’s that possibility, because if you make these things more complex, you increase the likelihood that something will break at some point,” he says. (Cybersecurity experts also warn that smart devices could make your home’s online network more vulnerable, and connected devices are constantly sending aggregated usage data back to manufacturers.)
And this added risk doesn’t amount to much, because most consumers don’t use the Wi-Fi capabilities of their devices, according to surveys conducted by Consumer Reports. “Most people who own them either don’t use the smarts or aren’t even aware the smarts are there,” Wroclawski says. “The use cases, frankly, aren’t that compelling.”
However, manufacturers keep trying to add more features.
“It’s almost like a space race for appliances,” says Williams, the Alaska-based refurbisher. “The manufacturer that comes up with the coolest thing that excites the consumer market is more likely to sell that product. Whereas when the consumer actually gets their hands on that product, they realize that the feature is not something they need or use at all.”
When asked what people should look for when buying new appliances, Ben Fraj, the DC repairman, said that bells and whistles are at best distracting and at worst a potential for early repair. The best appliances, he said, “don’t have time for this crap.”
