EU and the right to repair

[RejZoR]

7 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

Of these, I know Bosch, Siemens, Electrolux, and Liebherr. 

Gorenje is very strong in the Balkan region (former Yugoslavia) and they also make a lot of stuff with famous designer studios like Pininfarina, Ora Ito and Karim Rashid.

 

SMEG is specialized in retro looking appliances, Beko (Arcelyk) is a Turkish manufacturer that has been incredibly strong in recent years across entire Europe, Indesit is very popular in Italy and UK afaik and Electrolux in the Scandinavian region, but can be found across Europe as well. There are some brands that are from same main company, for example Electrolux, Zanussi and AEG are all owned by Electrolux.

 

There is also Candy which I forgot to mention but just noticed they got acquired by Chinese Haier last year. Interesting.

[Anomnomnomaly]

8 hours ago, williamcll said:

Will other manufacturers with companies in EU have to follow this law as well?

All manufacturers like to save costs, so if a country passes a law that requires a certain standard for goods... the manufacturer will produce goods to meet them and sell those goods to all countries even if they don't need the same strict requirements.

 

It's why in the US car makers produce cars that meet California's much stricter emissions rather than the rest of the country that is more lax. It's why in Europe cars now have daylight running lights that come on with the ignition because in some countries it's the law... those countries have very little daylight for months at a time and above the arctic circle, months where the sun either never rises or sets properly.

 

 

[ARikozuM]

14 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Gorenje is very strong in the Balkan region (former Yugoslavia) and they also make a lot of stuff with famous designer studios like Pininfarina, Ora Ito and Karim Rashid.

 

SMEG is specialized in retro looking appliances, Beko (Arcelyk) is a Turkish manufacturer that has been incredibly strong in recent years across entire Europe, Indesit is very popular in Italy and UK afaik and Electrolux in the Scandinavian region, but can be found across Europe as well. There are some brands that are from same main company, for example Electrolux, Zanussi and AEG are all owned by Electrolux.

 

There is also Candy which I forgot to mention but just noticed they got acquired by Chinese Haier last year. Interesting.

I think Frigidaire (US brand) might be owned by Electrolux. Only noticed because most fridges I've owned use Electrolux parts. 

[Scheer]

One downside to this is going to be cost, the appliances will likely rise in cost due to complexity in making them easy to repair, and parts will skyrocket past their already insane prices because now they have to warehouse that many more parts and keep the overhead of them.

 

ORRRR the big companies could only release a few new models each year and support them better, rather than the couple dozen or so they do now. Less R&D and less models to keep parts for, easier for repair guys to fix because they won't always be working on a new to them model. Of course that's just silly to do tho, consumers need all 3,000 different variations of shelving layout in a fridge to choose from.

 

Appliance spare parts are crazy expensive for some reason, had a couple days of really bad power during an ice storm and it took out my dishwasher, stove, washing machine, and mini fridge. I was over $1500 for the control boards to fix them all. The light under my microwave still flickers if you turn it on... but they wanted $350 for that board and that was nearly as much as the whole microwave.

 

The big thing that seems to have gone away in the past decade are parts that fit tons of different models. When I was ordering a new compressor for our old fridge to use it as a beer fridge the compressor literally fit hundreds of different models. The compressor for my new fridge fits like 10... and its only a couple different models, just in different colors.

 

Printer manufactures, mainly pointing my finger at HP here, are even worse. Fusers, which are regular maintenance items used to be half or less than the cost of a new machine, now they are sometimes more than the machine AND require an hour of tearing the machine apart to replace when they used to be as simple as opening a door and pulling it out. They're even using the same shell and internals, just modified to make it hard to replace. Then yearly they "update" the model and ever so slightly change every major component so you can't interchange them, usually by adding a small plastic tab and changing the coding on the chip so even if you cut the tab the machine will still reject the supplies. Sometimes there is good reason for this like using a mono component toner and developer or a new drum coating that wouldn't be compatible in the older model, but typically its just a cash grab...

[RejZoR]

@Scheer

Idon't think that will be the case. What I think manufacturers will do is consolidate parts even further. So that basically all models will have same components to as wide extent as possible. It'll be cheaper for them in the end too and easier for consumers to fix things. And they won't have to specially extend parts manufacturing since they'll be making them anyway.

 

Or make them modular, so that parts of components will be shared and then they'll stick extra fancy bits on them for the premium models. So it won't be a glass refridgerator shelf with aluminium covered edge as one part, but will be same glass shelf across ALL models, they'll just stick plastic edges on cheaper models and aluminium on premium models. Coz currently you can only buy the glass shelf whole for most models. Meaning even if they are left with aluminium edges, it'll be cheaper to sell them for recycling or use them elsewhere than write off whole shelves coz they can't fit them anywhere and breaking them apart would be too much work.

[greenhorn]

Having read and thought a bit more about the right to repair, I see two problems that could be addressed by a new version of that law:

1. Even if spare parts are available, the question remains whether they are being sold at a reasonable price. I have seen both reasonably and unreasonably priced items when looking for spare parts (for example: 3 Euros for a plastic part, 120-130 Euros for a dishwasher hose with a magnetic valve, all for a ~250 Euro model).
2. As far as I know, access to spare parts needs only to be granted to professionals (correct me if I'm wrong on that, which I hope I am). As I said before, this is likely to make some repairs too expensive to be worth it.

[Scheer]

8 hours ago, RejZoR said:

@Scheer

Idon't think that will be the case. What I think manufacturers will do is consolidate parts even further. So that basically all models will have same components to as wide extent as possible. It'll be cheaper for them in the end too and easier for consumers to fix things. And they won't have to specially extend parts manufacturing since they'll be making them anyway.

 

Or make them modular, so that parts of components will be shared and then they'll stick extra fancy bits on them for the premium models. So it won't be a glass refridgerator shelf with aluminium covered edge as one part, but will be same glass shelf across ALL models, they'll just stick plastic edges on cheaper models and aluminium on premium models. Coz currently you can only buy the glass shelf whole for most models. Meaning even if they are left with aluminium edges, it'll be cheaper to sell them for recycling or use them elsewhere than write off whole shelves coz they can't fit them anywhere and breaking them apart would be too much work.

It would be wonderful if they would do that and go back to how it was a few decades ago, I just don't see it happening. Companies either make their money upfront on the initial sale, or they take a loss on that and make it up on parts and service. Since the bill will force them to make it easy to repair with hand tools, there goes a chunk of that service revenue (which they didn't really get anyways), so they are either going to make the initial cost more, or the parts more. 

 

Making something easier to work on will always cost more money to do because it involves a lot more R&D and more connections (and parts) which leads to more warranty claims because every connection is another potential failure point. Since the bill is forcing them to make them easily repairable they still need to find a way make it cheaper for you to buy a new appliance rather than having it fixed. The only way I can think of for them to do that is increase the cost of parts.

 

The difference between a cheap fridge and expensive fridge isn't simply cosmetics, its the efficiency of the compressor, quality of the insulation, overall size compared to interior space, etc. Those aren't things you can have common across a range of products and are the significant cost of the product. One of the few things I can think of they could consolidate are PCBs, make a master PCB for the whole range with button/display panels that only have the feature set of that specific model. But now you are spending $10 more on every PCB when 95% of your microwaves sold don't use that extra $10 it cost you. I'm sure they've already thought of this and realized its cheaper in the end to have 5 different PCBs, which is why they do so. All they will have to do is re-crunch the numbers factoring in overhead of keeping all the extra parts on hand and inflate the prices accordingly.

 

In the end, the companies are accustomed to making the amount of money they currently make, if a bill makes things more expensive for them they aren't just going to roll over and take in half the profit, they will adjust to make sure they still make the same amount which will cost the end user more money.

 

Maybe (hopefully) I'm wrong and this will work out well.

 

 

And after typing all of this I actually read the article... I'm a little confused on the fridge part. Basically, they want to save electricity and have appliances that last longer. The best thing you can do to save energy is throw away your old fridge and buy a new one, its crazy how much more efficient my new fridge is compared to my 15 year old one. Since electricity is really cheap where I live it would take too long to justify replacing it, but its still $30 more per year to run than my new one. If I lived in California where it was $100+ a year, the energy savings would pay for the fridge in 10-ish years without accounting for the cost of repair that will pry happen within those 10 years. Then again, maybe we are now at the point things aren't going to get much more efficient and its due time for keeping everything running longer. I'm also not factoring in all the energy and emissions involved in manufacturing and transporting the fridge to me, so its pry just a wash I guess.

 

I must say, this is quite interesting to think about how it will play out.

[Thaldor]

46 minutes ago, Scheer said:

-snip-

And after typing all of this I actually read the article... I'm a little confused on the fridge part. Basically, they want to save electricity and have appliances that last longer. The best thing you can do to save energy is throw away your old fridge and buy a new one, its crazy how much more efficient my new fridge is compared to my 15 year old one. Since electricity is really cheap where I live it would take too long to justify replacing it, but its still $30 more per year to run than my new one. If I lived in California where it was $100+ a year, the energy savings would pay for the fridge in 10-ish years without accounting for the cost of repair that will pry happen within those 10 years. Then again, maybe we are now at the point things aren't going to get much more efficient and its due time for keeping everything running longer. I'm also not factoring in all the energy and emissions involved in manufacturing and transporting the fridge to me, so its pry just a wash I guess.

 

I must say, this is quite interesting to think about how it will play out.

Company greed will always be on the otherside of the scale. And in reality how much worse can the situation get? If you break the pot from your coffee maker (if it isn't Moccamaster), it's 90% of the time cheaper to get a whole new coffee maker than buy a new pot. The big problem in that is, who is going to be that stupid to buy a pot that is more expensive than a whole new machine which includes that damn expensive pot? The real reason why that pot is that expensive is that there is nothing that forces the coffee maker manufacturer to make extra pots and the "new" one is usually taken from another coffee maker package and send to you.

 

 

If we talk about fairly recent home appliances and their lifecycles, there is a lot to hope for. Yeah, that fridge from the 80's consumes more energy than one from the 2019 but will the one from the 2019 even work after 10 years? Or better what are the chances for the fridge from the 2019 being in working order after 10 years? Even if the new fridge consumes a lot less energy than the old one if it lasts only few years and starts to have problems that are unfixable because the manufacturer filled all of the electronics and stuff with epoxy, that new fridge will be a more strain for the environment than the one from the 80's. The thing is in the bigger picture the amount of energy the fridge uses while operating is a lot less than what went to manufacture it and what goes to recycle it, like if you were to buy a new fridge every 5 years there would need to be a crazy amount of development that you would use less energy to keep your food cold than using a single fridge for 20-30 years. Not to even mention that it has been quite well known that Freon gases are harmful but they are still used in some fridges because the alternatives are more expensive.

 

For this the most extreme and same real example are printers. You run out of cyan ink, do you think it is more expensive and uses more energy and stresses the environment more to produce the ink cartridge or to produce a whole new printer with that cartridge?