Are there any actual long-term reliability studies for appliances today?

[michaelz08]

It doesn’t feel like there is. Consumer Reports is obscure in the data they collect and it’s only from members, who perhaps aren’t always representative of the regular population. They’re really only good for performance testing, and even then it doesn’t seem like they’re perfect.

Yale Appliance “publishes” their results under the term reliability, but I take issue with that term as they only go back a single year. That’s more like “initial quality” than reliability. No wonder their rankings can be a little weird… LG beating Miele? Really?

Some repair folks make videos on YouTube, nothing consistently quality though. Ben’s appliances on YT sometimes leaves me scratching my head.

Any thoughts on all this? Any other sources people find to be worthwhile?

 

[combo52]

Long-term major Appliance reliability studies

Hi Michael, other than consumer reports there’s really not much, and consumer reports while helpful is quite flawed. They only ask how many times the appliance is broken. They don’t really take into the severity of the repair, etc..

I think consumer report should also ask what your last dishwasher was, and how long it lasted for for example that would give some idea of longevity that people keep an appliance.

I don’t see any problem with consumer report data being limited to their readers. They have several million readers, although their readers tend to be a little more affluent and better educated than the general population, I don’t think it should affect the ratings too much.

Very expensive high-end brands are going to have many more warranty calls, when people pay that much they expect a little more.

High end appliances are also made in more limited numbers and do have more problems initially at least.

I get a lot of information from my customers. I’m always been very analytical and analyze Appliance life and repair rates, I’m always asking my customers how long the machine lasted what problems they have with it how many people are in the house how many loads a week they do, etc. so I get a fair idea of which machines hold up better than others.

I do wish organizations like consumer reports would actually take the Appliance apart and see how it’s made. You can tell a lot. I had to put a heating element in a five year-old Electrolux dryer today. What a piece of junk. It’s a pain in the ass to get together in part half the screw strip out you certainly wouldn’t be able to take it apart and put it back together five times, this type of thing would actually be very easy for consumer reports to analyze, but I don’t really think they care about long-term reliability anymore.

If you look at Speed Queen laundry appliances compared to almost any other, you can see that they’re designed to be repaired the front panels come off of everything, almost all gas dryers today have to be completely disassembled to get to the gas burner Speed Queen take two screws off just like old times and the gas burner and such as right in front of you.

Changing a door boot on a Speed Queen front load washer is a simple task, changing the water pump on the front load washer only involves four screws and two simple hose clamps, for example. So it’s easy to see why the average Speed Queen will probably last twice as long as other machines.

John L