This was the candid admission of the appliance salesman who was selling us a new refrigerator because our less than eight year old one had died and would have been too expensive to repair. We both went on to reminisce about appliances either we or our parents had owned that lasted twenty, thirty years or longer. What is troubling in all this is that all the new appliances tout their energy saving features. What they don’t talk about is the cost of manufacturing, shipping, delivering the new appliance and the costs of removal and hopefully re-cycling the old one. We discovered that our electric utility would re-cycle the old one and pay us $50 if it worked! That left us out. Truth is, the new refrigerator isn’t any more energy efficient than the old one, which we would have kept using if it worked!
As it happened, we’ve been in the market for a newer car to replace our 17 1/2 year old Ford Taurus station wagon. And we found one on a local dealership’s website the same afternoon that was exactly what we were looking for–a 2008 Subaru. Friends of ours speak of having Subarus for 20 years or longer. We’d never had a car as long as the Taurus, and it WAS running when we traded it in.
Seems kind of odd in a way that a refrigerator that does nothing but sit there and cool lasts only half as long as an auto exposed to all kinds of temperature and road conditions, shocks, physical stresses and use. Interesting as well that the A/C compressor on the car still worked after all this when the one in the fridge didn’t.
This seems to be nothing but an effort of the appliance industry to manufacture on the cheap. Various sources I looked at said compressors these days fail in as little as three years, generally the range is eight to seventeen. That is the key refrigerator component and one that in the past would last 20-30 years or more.
Since this is a book blog, one thing I will observe is that well-made books on acid free paper stored properly can last hundreds of years. I have a set of books from my mother that are nearly 100 years old. True, some books are made cheaply but I have sci-fi paperbacks from my youth that are still readable nearly 40 years later. Maybe this is one of the reasons for my love of books. Some are old friends I can go back to years later and remember the pleasures of reading them many years before. Not something I can do with any refrigerator or car I’ve owned!
This is actually something that Jason Merkoski talks about in “Burning the Page”. In the eBook revolution, we’ve traded durability for convenience. Sure the cloud backs up a book thousands of times so even if a particular hard drive fails (and they do every day in big datacenters), the book survives. But your typical eReader probably only lasts a few years, and they’d all be useless if a big EMP were ever to hit the world. Probably one reason to print a copy of the fractal book, just in case the Amazon cloud on which it’s hosted ever goes down (and I lose my 3-4 flash drive backups). Be a little depressing to lose something I worked on for 14 months. Of course if an EMP strikes the world, a programming book about fractals wouldn’t be of much use. Hmmm.