Search results

My maternal grandmother died in 2004 having never owned an automatic washer. She kept using her Maytag wringer until she was no longer physically capable. (Although in the winter, she would sometimes take everything to the laundromat.)

Regional brand preferences Alabama Power also had those types of deals on machines. But north of the Tennessee River we were under TVA, and they weren't allowed to do that. So we had lots of independent appliance stores (a few of which are still in business), and the department stores. There...

Don't think I've ever seen a house with central air/heat that had the registers installed in the wall like that.

We had one of those. You don't use a pad with the carpet glider. It's supposed to freshen the carpet, but all it seemed to do was add humidity to the room -- last thing we need in Alabama.

If I'm on your jury, I will vote for acquittal.

Interesting bit... A mall where I live, built in 1985, has deteriorated substantially and is about to close. It has been sold (at pennies on the dollar) to an investment group that wants to tear it down and put in a condo development. However, one of the few remaining tenants is Sears... and...

The Norge self-service dry cleaning machines definitely got hotter than that during the dry cycle. The door glass got hot enough to almost burn you if you touched it. I recall that distinctly. As mentioned, safety-wise, perc was a big improvement over gasoline. My understanding was that...

I don't know if this influenced the Fridigaire designers or not, but 1957 was the year that the Indianapolis Motor Speedway opened the structure that was called the Control Tower. It replaced an older structure that was built in the shape of a Japanese pagoda.

Isn't the 1-18 mechanism just the Rollermatic with the motor moved to the corner of the tub? Were there other differences?

"If they feel then need to regulate anything why don't they regulate the temp on your household water heater and let the individual appliances raise the temps. " Well, if the water heater is gas, now you're using electricity to heat water that could have been heated more efficiently with gas...

Set your mower high You need to mow tall fescue at 3-4". But it makes a good lawn. We prefer it over Bermuda for our shady lawn in north Alabama. It's a bit of work here to keep it watered and weed free in the summer -- you probably won't have that problem. One particular thing we like is...

I imagine that the impeller design was cheaper to build, since it seems to have fewer parts. What I remember about the impeller designs, though, was that they were all noisy and fairly rough on the dishes. I've seen a couple of videos of impeller machines running with a transparent top, and...

Yeah, LPS light is distinctly yellow. It's the most efficient form of street lighting ever created at this point, but people dislike the color. Last time I saw any was in a hotel parking lot in San Diego about two years ago.

I keep seeing this trope that Americans in the 1950s simply had no concern whatsoever with what things cost or how much resources they used. But if you look at advertising from the era, it just isn't so. You'll see plenty of ads touting the cost- and resource-saving benefits of their products...

We built our house 12 years ago and specified three heat pump units, with strip heat secondary (no gas service in our neighborhood) for three zones. The builder put in Frigidaire units, two 2.5 ton and one 3.5 ton. The larger unit was problematic from the start; the installer didn't get the...

I don't think twin tubs ever caught on much in the U.S., at least not in the South. I don't recall ever seeing anyone who had one, or seeing one in a store. My great-aunt did her laundry, with her Maytag wringer, on the back porch. There wasn't any water supply (all the water was hauled from...

DADoES, my step-mom had an early '70s Kenmore and it behaved the way you described. When we moved to a neighborhood where the water pressure was high, on the rinse fill, after the water shut off it sat for about 20 seconds until the timer advanced and the rinse agitation started. It was kind...

In college I lived in a university-owned apartment (with two other guys), and it had an late-1960s BOL Roper gas range. It was nearly impossible to put anything in the oven and not have it come out burned on the bottom. It burned TV dinners. And the burners pretty much had two settings: full...

I have some Craftsman tools that my dad bought for my birthday in 1976. Most of them are still good as new.

Two of us here We run ours 3-4 times a week usually, depending on how much we have been cooking or brown-bagging lunch (or not). We're on septic so we almost never run a non-full load. Growing up, the first house we lived in did not have a dishwasher. Through my childhood and young adult...