Things in your life that suck the life blood out of you: white appliance content

We have a Samsung washer-drier that had a mind of its own, worst washing machine we have ever owned. Its gone bang now, so happy to get shot of it.

Bloody thing has lasted almost 10 years of daily abuse. It sucked so much energy out of us… switching off part way through cycles, refusing to spin anything light or heavy (like three towels), 8 minute musical tune when it finished and then refusing to open the door for ages. Reviews all said it was sh1t, but it was a insurance replacement so we were ignored by the supplier.

Many a time I wanted to build a large backyard slingshot and launch it into space. Sigh, tis gone now.

Any other household objects that dont do as they should out there? After spending a day setting up a Dell laptop with Windows, my O365 account and my son’s school Teams account for him, this should be on this list….

Chromebook.

Bought it for the kids schooling in lockdown.

School login doesn’t work properly with the google remote saving & sharing system, took us right to the *edge* of sanity.

It’s getting an axe through it the day it stops being supported.

Every home printer I have ever owned, the last one went out the 2nd floor window when it stopped working and I haven’t replaced it.

Every home printer I have ever owned, the last one went out the 2nd floor window when it stopped working and I haven’t replaced it.

Tried a laser printer?

They are like a breath of fresh air after inkjets.

One of them was a laser, but an older Brother one which suffered with never-ending paper jams. The next one will be a laserjet, probably a HP with cartridge subscription so toner appears when the printer tells HP it’s getting low.

Every home printer I have ever owned, the last one went out the 2nd floor window when it stopped working and I haven’t replaced it.

I hoofed a printer out of the back door in a fit of rage. As it gracefully arced toward its final concrete death the machine unfolded, the light glinted off a glass surface to remind me that it was a combo printer scanner.

Took 2 weeks to clear up every last shard of glass.

The printer won.

Amazon Kindle Fire Kid’s tablets. Even rooted they’re utterly unstable junk. Before rooting one of them managed to remove the adult profile from the device effectively rendering it tied to one wifi network in perpetuity.

Anything in the Ring range. Almost guaranteed to cut off or crash right when yo…
Their PIR-activated lights are fantastically bad. Activation flowchart goes like this: someone walks past > Pir detects motion > sends event to Californian servers > servers send message to switch on light > person moves out of view > light switches on > camera activates > alert received on phone.

The dyson ball upright in the rental we’re in. Oh my god.

Hm, I’ve got a Samsung washer drier, it works fine; also Kindle Fire kids tablets when they aren’t full. Also my printer has sat here for years working perfectly. I don’t know what you lot are doing to your gear to have it hate you so much. Maybe complaining about them on the internet? The appliance community is pretty active these days, word gets around. They know you.

School login doesn’t work properly with the google remote saving & sharing system, took us right to the *edge* of sanity.

Shit setup isn’t the Chromebook’s fault. Oh, our kids both have them, they’re great and work perfectly 😉

Oh and – you can turn the Samsung washing machine tune off.

@molgrips, If only everything was as reliable as your Merc 🙂 Hee hee.

I don’t expect everything to work perfectly all the time. I do get very annoyed when things are poorly designed from the outset, because the designers were just bad at their jobs. I don’t mean just genuine mistakes like engineers designing as system but under speccing a part, because they were forced to make cost cuts or they miscalculated on some trade-off or something. I get how that happens.

I mean things like the infotainment and controls on our Hyundai. Quite possibly designed by people who don’t drive. A lot of it is just conceptually ridiculous, and nothing to do with cost. It give you stupid messages and beeps and bongs all the time, often when you have no idea what it’s on about. That’s all software, and doing it better wouldn’t have cost a single Won more.

I’ve had a number of washer-driers over the years from various manufacturers and am fairly convinced that they’re all just inherently shit.

Mumsnet has a ‘classics’ thread on this. https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/mumsnet_classics/3058228-household-objects-that-are-pricks (warning, it’s very sweary)

Does the push button on a loo count? I permanently have a spare in stock, because between the button and mechanism, it gets replaced all the bloody time. According to the local plumbers merchant, Wirquin is as good / bad as any other brand model.

They would say that, if they can keep selling you parts.

I mean things like the infotainment and controls on our Hyundai.

I had an i40. I named it Crosby, because every time you did something it went “bing!” Stupid bloody thing would have a fit like Don Hector Salamanca if you dared to leave a bag of crisps on the passenger seat without plugging in the seatbelt.

Truth be told, I’ve yet to see a modern ICE head unit that doesn’t feel like it’s been designed by someone who’s never used it.

Dialysis machine?

I’ll get my coat…

Agree with you Cougar, washer-dryers are terrible. We’re on our second in our rental – lately with a brand new hotpoint that has a minimum cycle time of ~3hr for any kind of clothing. If you want it drying add another 4 to that. It’ll often choose to not stop at all with the countdown timer sat on 00:01 for hours on end.

I’ve had a number of washer-driers over the years from various manufacturers and am fairly convinced that they’re all just inherently shit.

I dunno – I put clothes in mine, they come out clean.. surely it’s doing its job for the most part?

Truth be told, I’ve yet to see a modern ICE head unit that doesn’t feel like it’s been designed by someone who’s never used it.

The car has smart cruise control and automatic braking and stuff. Which actually works rather well. It’ll bring you to a stop in a queue, and you have to touch the accelerator before it’ll move off again, which is entirely reasonable as a safety feature. So functionally it’s great. But the instant the car in front starts to move, it bings and says ‘the car in front is moving off’. Not after a few seconds, but instantly. So even if you’re fully aware and watching it and on the ball you still get the bing. You know how annoyed you get when people behind you beep at the lights the instant they go green? It’s that.

The other pure distilled example of benign stupidity is when you drive off with a battery at 100% the regen braking doesn’t work, of course, because the battery’s full. So when you lift off it coasts a bit more than you might expect – but of course the normal brakes still work fine exactly as a normal car. The problem is that it bings and tells you that the regen braking isn’t working, every time you lift off until the battery charge level drops, which is about 4-5 times at the start of a trip. The stupid part is that there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it, and I don’t really need to know – so why are you binging me?

Oh and this takes the cake for poor design. When you are using satnav and want to disable it there’s a button on the 8″ tablet display. But it’s about 1cm square, and it says ‘stop guidance’ on it in a tiny font. How the jeff are you expected to read that when driving let alone press it without taking your eyes off the road for an extended period? Completely unnecessary. Some designer had to choose a size for that button, they could have chosen any size, but they thought ‘that looks fine, job done’. Well, it doesn’t look fine from the driver’s seat!

The Merc one is good though. Screen is a bit small but it’s an older car. But they’ve clearly thought about it a lot. For example, Hyundai claim that you can just talk to it for the voice recognition and it’ll interpret what you want. But obviously that doesn’t work, you still have to know what it’s expecting. On the Merc, when you press the voice button it shows you a list of the stuff it’s expecting. This is fantastic, because it means the system is actually usable. You can actually do stuff with voice – even enter addresses whilst driving! That simple thing renders the entire system 1000% better, for no cost, just a bit of thought and some UX testing.

Anything in the Ring range. Almost guaranteed to cut off or crash right when yo…
Their PIR-activated lights are fantastically bad. Activation flowchart goes like this: someone walks past > Pir detects motion > sends event to Californian servers

Ah, that explains a lot. I’ve never been able to see/speak to the person at the door when I’m in the workshop on the same wi-fi circuit as the Ring doorbell. But the one time I did manage to have a conversation with the delivery guy was when I was on a beach in Costa Rica.

If it helps the UI on a Tesla is astonishingly good and other than getting a bit shirty when you hoof it off a roundabout does a good job of not beeping.

What concerns me about the Tesla is trying to use that big touchscreen instead of tactile buttons. Earlier versions of my car had physical buttons, and they actually removed them in favour of touch spots on the dash for the later models. I guess it saves money but it’s worse. Volvo have a touch screen, but they’ve given you a wrist rest so you can steady your hand whilst pressing buttons. That’s a brilliant idea – they’ve thought about it properly.

a brand new hotpoint that has a minimum cycle time of ~3hr for any kind of clothing.

Ours claimed that loads would take 3hrs when it was new, but that was some kind of maximum that it stated before it weighed the clothes. It turned out to be much less, and now it appears to have learned our typical habits because it gives us sensible times now. As for the 3hr drying time – it’s probably not a vented one, so it has to circulate the hot moist air through a condenser or some kind, and this means it takes much longer than blowing air through – it’s unavoidable I think with that type of machine.

Indesit “moon” washing machine, all form no function. Supposedly by some combination of pressing buttons in sequence, not adding soap and sacrificing a goat you could access other functions, but I never figured it out.

Of those 5 buttons you have
On-Off
60C – the only full cycle that does a proper spin at the end.
40C – didn’t do a full spin so things took ages to dry
30′- like the 40, but half assed the washing stage too
delicates – like the quick wash, but takes 2 hours.

Gone back to a Bosch where if I want to do a 30minute 30C wash with a 1400rpm spin, it’ll let me.

Did stay in a hotel with a laundry room last year with the most amazing machine and dryer (Miele? or Bora? I think), you could set the temp, the spin and the TIME! Perfect for when you haven’t got time for a 2.5h cycle, but have more than the standard 15-30mintue quick wash.

Current dishwasher is irritating. It’s our 3rd in 7 years. The Proline one that came with the house was fine, then died. The Kenwood (badge engineered by Currys) one that we replaced it with was fine, but developed a leak that couldn’t be traced (everything was bone dry apart from the drip tray underneath) and after the 2nd week of evenings spent pulling it apart I decided this much free time wasn’t worth a £200 dishwahser. 3rd one is a Beko, it’s fine, but doesn’t rinse or steam dry very well. So mugs with a slight lip underneath collect mucky water, which then sloshes onto the plates below when you take them out. So then everything needs toweling anyway.

^^^ WTF is that!!! Did it come from the Early Learning Centre!! 🤣

^^^ WTF is that!!! Did it come from the Early Learning Centre!! 🤣

It wasn’t even a great design, the soap tray inside the door had a little lever on the bottom, which eventually chipped the paint of the front panel, which meant it rusted through.

I quite like our Samsung (it hasn’t broken yet..). It has a door that you can open to put in that sock you dropped and didn’t notice. One issue is that if you put liquid in the drawer the little flap to stop it draining away isn’t well sealed enough to stop it running out if you set the timer, so the liquid runs down into the drain where it gets pumped out when the cycle starts. But using capsules or a little silicone cup in the drum fixes that.

We have a Grundig dishwasher that works well enough but drinks rinse aid for some reason even on the lowest setting.

Ikea home automation – when controlled with smart speakers

Chromebook pisses me off as well. It’s linked to my google account so has to be opened up using my google login details. I don’t want the kids to know my google password, so I have to unlock it every single time the kids or wife* want to use it. I keep telling them not to let it run out of charge but do they listen….

Fortunatley this is not so much now as my son has a gaming laptop so all his school work on that and daughter prefers using her tablet for most things.

*I’ve told her the password about a million times, I think shes jsut doing my head in on purpose.

Anything windows/microsoft, especially my 2 utterly hateful laptops, both of which decide what they want to let work on an hourly basis! And how do they know when you’re in a rush and quickly need to do something that that’s the ideal time for 4 hours of updates

Chromebook pisses me off as well. It’s linked to my google account so has to be opened up using my google login details.

Can’t you give them their own logins? I’m sure there’s some sort of ‘family’ setting on Android, is it not similar?

I like our samsung washer/drier – seems to do the job just fine, adjusts the cycle lengths based on the weight of the load and dries stuff intelligently – ie doesnt just blindy dry for 3 hours, but detects the moisture content and stop when dry (or not dry if that is your desired outcome). I even like the tune it plays triumphantly when a load has finished. it does seem a bit needy in terms of drum cleaning, prompting you to do a drum clean cycle every couple of weeks though.

Hopefully it will last longer than the previous bag o sh!te hotpoint we had that managed about 4 years before just conking out due to some electronics issue.

Our tumble dryer, not sure which make, pretty much refuses to start drying clothes unless you press the start button multiple times, open and close the door, press start button again and then beg it to please do its job.

Yes I know I could turn the singing-binging-bonging tune off. I want to be notified, I just dont want a three minute tune.

Just bought a Xerox wifi, chromebook mft colour lazer printer and its utterly brilliant, in set up and use. Of course the cartridges cost as much as the printer but we need a duplex colour and hate ink-jets so what can you do!

We binned a Polestar EV for a Merc and is sooo good, and even has normal controls for some things. We had a LG washer drier was excellent so off to buy one of those again. Sumsung was the worst washer drier I have owned and I will not buy another Sumsung item on principle now.

Home pc’s are just pooh, I hate them.. Work data centre stuff I am happy with. Windows laptops and O365 a so hate – 16 hrs on building and setting one up for my son, all because his school are running an old version of O365!. I love my two Google Chromebook’s and now I have a brilliant printer 🙂

Truth be told, I’ve yet to see a modern ICE head unit that doesn’t feel like it’s been designed by someone who’s never used it.

Aye. That’s a fair assessment.

Can’t you give them their own logins? I’m sure there’s some sort of ‘family’ setting on Android, is it not similar?

Apparently not….

There may well be, but I just got exhausted trying to find a way round it. I’m sure it wasn’t like it when I first bought it but then something updated and it all went to shit. They all have goole accounts as we use google family link but apparently the chromebook will only open with my google account details, unless you use the guest function but then you don’t have access to most stuff.

I wouldn’t buy another.

I am hoping this Christmas day I can just relax, for the last two I have spent my entire afternoon and evening setting up some hatefull piece of tech crap.

One year it was a Oculas VR for my son who was nine at the time, and you have to have FB accounts etc, and the other was trying to set a pair of Alexa’s screens until I realised there was no way to have separate accounts and proper division of settings. Utter crap.

But the instant the car in front starts to move, it bings and says ‘the car in front is moving off’. Not after a few seconds, but instantly. So even if you’re fully aware and watching it and on the ball you still get the bing. You know how annoyed you get when people behind you beep at the lights the instant they go green? It’s that.

If I’m right in thinking you’ve got an ioniq 38, you can turn that off in the little menu on the steering wheel. It is very strange; the rest of the time the car is paranoid about stopping distances, sometimes braking really quite hard way before it needs to, but when the car in front moves it wants you to go while its still only a couple of metres away…

Beko heat pump drier. Has a sensor, not sure what it senses, but it certainly isn’t the moisture content of the clothes. No option to override or put in a time to dry. Consequently everything needs the 1:50 Daily programme followed by a :45 programme. The lint catcher has no seal, so lint accumulates on the filter, rather than in the lint catcher. It’s infuriating.

Washing machine and dryer? I moved to Miele ones. Never given them much thought since.

Definitely any printer. These are the very droppings of the Devil. Why can’t they just do what they’re meant to?

I am hoping this Christmas day I can just relax, for the last two I have spent my entire afternoon and evening setting up some hatefull piece of tech crap.

I’ve learnt from this last year and spent an hour yesterday setting up new tablet for daughter’s christmas present. Got to do it while they’re at school though so I can intercept the 600 emails google sends to confirm everytime you press OK or agree before they see them.
That’s an hour extra post-dinner nap/drinking time I’ve just earnt myself for Christmas Day.

If I’m right in thinking you’ve got an ioniq 38, you can turn that off in the little menu on the steering wheel. It is very strange

Actually yeah now you mention that I have seen it, but I left it on cos I thought it might be useful if you weren’t watching. A delay would be nice!

Definitely any printer. These are the very droppings of the Devil. Why can’t they just do what they’re meant to?

This +1billion

How, two and a bit decades past the point where every home has a printer, are printer drivers still so utterly pathetically useless.

Couldn’t they just standardize around anything?

I get that a £2000 cannon photo printer will probably need it’s own driver, that’s fine. But the other 99.999% of the market is £30 deskjets that just need to do an acceptable job of printing a CV. Despite what the box shows, there is no way it’s ability to render high quality photo prints would be hindered by just compressing everything to .pdf or something.

Somehow the latest HP manages to print smoother from my phone than the PC!