As a contractor i agree 100%. If you buy a house your contractvwill say that you can't come in and check the house before it is finished for safety reasons, but in reality we know why. For that reason i am builing a house myself and the inspectors say i overkill in some cases which i believe should be a standard.
Amen! I'd never trust almost any modern house construction. I'm on year 3 of overbuilding my new shop. The electrical inspector kinda laughed at me for running the conduit for the feeder 40" deep under my driveway (code is 18"). I used glued mortise-and-tenon joints to attach the studs to the top/bottom plates, glued the 2x6s forming posts on multi-stud areas (next to window/door openings) together, used big glu-lams for all headers, sealed every sheathing seam, used both liquid flashing and Flexwrap on window openings, shimmed windows to drain the sills, installed a real rain screen (using 1/2" plywood strips @ 12" OC) under the siding, peel-N-stick rubber gaskets over every conduit penetrating the sheathing, and 5/8" fire-rated drywall everywhere. The building will last way longer than most. I despise cheap construction!
I'm with you. My land is fairly remote, so I'm doing everything I can to ensure I can live efficiently, with as little reliance on public services as possible. But it is extremely difficult to find builders in my state that want to build a net-zero, passive or even just a highly-engineered home. Everything is about pricing, convenience and time, which in my opinion is what is driving planned obsolescence in the first place. Americans have lost the will to buy quality products that last for generations because we just assume we will always be able to upgrade in a few years. Well that's just fine...as long as supply chains don't crumble, resources don't run low and pandemics don't disrupt economies. Now we're starting to see the effects of when those things happen. Hopefully, it will cause people to rethink the disposable economy that we find ourselves in.
As someone who doesn't know how to do all that.. am I better learning how to build one or are there legitimate builders out there? I am afraid of having a house built just for it to be trash.
@@muffinbutton1484 Every builder will claim to be a legitimate builder, unfortunately it's up to you to research durable building, have what you want on paper and be prepared to enter the worksite in progress to make sure they aren't cutting corners.
Agreed. It's generally not hard to over-engineer something (eg. use 2x thicker slab, 2x thicker steel). The hard part is convincing the clients why they should pay double the price... or in the case of aerospace; convincing gravity to let your plane lift off the ground.
There is a simular saying in my trade; Any machinist can build your part and solve your problem well. Only an engineer can design it to barely work for twice the price. I should note. Machinist, as it was used locally; in the industry has since been separated into three diffrent engineering fields and one "low skill" trade still called machinist. It was considered too difficult and expensive to apprentice machinists, and there was only about 40% who could pass each skill test that came along. Out of four. So I got lucky on that one, last apprenticeship NASA paid for and I just made it under the cut off. Albeit without enough hands on time at the time, but I got all the engineering side of it.
I'm kinda happy to say that in EU there are more and more laws put in place to offset this. We have mandatory warranty lengths on electrical appliances, a new law called 'right to repair' was instated couple of months back. There was a huge lobbying campaign going on but politicians fighting for this were louder than manufacturers. I was proud of our representatives that day.
Lucky you having politicians actually doing something useful AND doing it in favor of the consumer. Too bad I’m in America where we are free to be exploited and taken advantage of. Best country in the world!
Sadly the American public has been used for decades as the grand experiment in how to rape their hard earned income to be used for buying off increasingly rich politicians, corporate facilitations and endless illegal wars for the profits of the MIC, while they receive absolutely nothing for their tax dollars.... even during a supposed pandemic.
@Skunket It was a engineered virus to be used as a weapon of war on human beings that escaped (called gain of function research) ... which should never have existed in the first place and Fauci founded, knew and backed it along with his bogus solutions that change and fail from week to week. There was nothing 'natural' about it and yes it caused deaths, less than publicized.... and worse, is now being used as the excuse to literally alter the life humans have known for at least the last 300 years and freedom and democracy will be the biggest victims for all of us who live on this planet... which is the goal of those who want to control and own us chattel. You should fear this virus less than those who pay for it's creation.
@Skunket Well we DON'T trust our government, because nothing comes back to us... no health care even during a pandemic, no health care at all actually...which is the biggest cause of bankruptcy in the USA, while Fauci changes his mind every week about what should or shouldn't be done, while charging you to be tested for covid when he was actually a part of the 'gain of function' research in Wuhan (another word for weaponizing viruses). Every dime we make goes to facilitating the enrichment of corporations at the expense of the citizen and into illegally starting wars all over the world. I'm glad you can feel that your government is on your side, I would like to feel the same... but that is really not the case here.
I've never been so glad to live in a 180 year old homestead. It may be mostly not up to code, but when your house was built before your state was a state (Michigan), you get a lot of grandfathering. I've put patchwork into just about every part of this building, and some of those
I think the easiest way to address this problem is to require all manufacturers of products to take the product back and dispose of it when it dies. When manufacturers have to directly bear the cost of disposing of their products, they will have much more financial incentive to make products last longer and also be more easily recycled at end of life.
@@aayotechnology There are always exceptions, but I think in general they do go hand in hand. Certainly energy consuming devices can get to a point where their efficiency is far enough behind the state of the art to make them worth replacing evening considering the energy required to make the replacement and the energy required to recycle the product, but often this analysis is not done very thoroughly and it can take a fair increase in efficiency to make it worth scraping a product that is still working well and is reliable.
@@LTVoyager so a gas burning vehicle would be considered sustainable in your eyes if it got 100 mpg? Even if it consumes fossil fuels. That’s a pretty big exception to your rule considering there are over a billion out there
I am sitting in my 100 year old house in England, on a chair that I inherited from my uncle, who bought it many years ago from his sister-in-law. In the corner is my 18th century table, and I've a coffee sitting on a table that my father made about 50 years ago. Most of my furniture is inherited, I am lucky. It has all lasted long enough for me to do so, and much will outlive me. However, in the kitchen it is a different matter, the oven looks odd, there is a gap above it because I could not find an oven and microwave to fit the space where the 5 year old microwave blew up 6 years ago, then the oven stopped working the following year. The fridge and freezer, bought at the same time as the other items, stopped working 2 years ago. The washing machine though was my parents, so is about 20 years old. I'm watching this on a television that I bought 10 years ago. The screen has not been working properly for a couple of years, but I'm hoping that it will last a while longer. In my wardrobe I have clothes that I bought 25-30 years ago. Still in good condition because they were well made. Last week I binned some shirts, they literally fell apart, despite being only 2 years old. Here in England it seems, from my experience, that if you are lucky to have things that are old they are well made and will last, but if it is new, then all of the issues raised apply. However, although companies can be accused of greed, they are providing jobs. If everything were to last and last, then they would need fewer workers. I do agree about government's role. Here they banned incandescent bulbs a few years ago. When replacing bulbs we had to buy halogen. Now those are to be banned in favour of LED. This is all very well, but some of my light fittings were not suitable for the halogen bulbs then available. I had to replace perfectly good lights. Most people that I know have similar stories. Most of them are also not shopaholics, so are not choosing to throw out and replace. It is being forced upon us. It also is often worse with items that we can no longer do without, kitchen white goods and electronics. As yet the house issues do not apply so much here. I'm afraid I do get a bee in my bonnet about this issue, hence the essay! However, rant over, and thank you for this video.
I'm sitting in a metal office chair that was built sometime between the 1950's and 1970's. The base sheet metal parts were brazed together with filler/rod that is golden colored. It isn't spot welded. I saw the metal when I sand blasted the chair to refinish it. The only "plastic" is the caps on the ends of the legs, and it is very tough. I have recovered the seat, back, and arms a few times with new fabric. My desk is made from particle board or mdf because it is 3/4" sheet with white melamine on both sides. I built it when I was 18 years old and now I am 40 years old. 22 years isn't bad. My Tig welder is from 1965 and one of my air compressors is from 1947 while the other is a couple decades newer but the same Westinghouse Air Brake Company brand and design, just bigger. The air compressors were designed and built to be used on trains. I found the rebuild parts for both air compressors and restored the one from 1947. The bigger version I have could be replaced with a new air compressor today, with similar quality, but it would cost $3500 or more. They are used in commercial buildings/shops. Industrial quality and size products are still built fairly well, but everyday inexpensive average consumer products are made cheap and to fail. New Tig welders use advanced electronics instead of huge transformers, so they have many advantages, but the price is huge and they can easily fail before the warranty is up. The parts to repair them can cost almost as much as a new machine, when not under warranty.
Aha! Essayists unite! Let's see if I can keep this brief, maybe - But there's an issue you brought up that *I* get a bee in my bonnet about :p "They are providing jobs". I find this to be a rather limp excuse for propping up an economy that depends on consumerism to force people to depend on jobs to live. Yes, we are not yet at a point where robots can replace humans in every field necessary for life to continue. We do need things to be made, at some rate, or we just won't have those things. But that observation is a far cry from artificially creating fake jobs that don't actually provide any real value, just so people have SOMEWHERE to turn misery into a pittance of money. "Oh don't worry, we'll give you a lot of things to do that make us a lot of money, and we'll give you just enough to scrape by in return! Which completely excuses creating a world where you need more and more money just to stay afloat." Money, or as you pointed out, inherited wealth, in this case in the form of stout and reliable goods. No need to replace your table a dozen times when you have a perfectly good one that will last longer than you will, yes? I would very much like to see a world where people are encouraged to create, hold onto, and acquire those kinds of wealth, instead of being hemmed into this horrible, resource-glutton consumerism. I have to admit, we really need to solve this problem BEFORE automation can catch up to basic goods like the ones we're discussing here. Because it would be a horrible tragedy to have a system where MORE faulty-by-design goods can be made at faster and faster rates with fewer and fewer human workers involved, and sold to people who have less and less to support themselves with, due to dwindling job opportunities. And yet that's exactly the future we're looking at, unless we start doing something about it... *now.* Part of that is getting away from this idea that jobs must remain a necessity, and gravitating towards the idea that jobs must be necessary to continue to exist. And creating an economy that is job independent - An economy that, however we might achieve such a thing, does not require every person to work to live.
My take on the job creation idea: if we didn't need to spend so much, families might return to a 1 income household and children could be raised by their actual parent. And a single person might thrive without a roommate.
You are the reason the world is in so much trouble today. Bragging about your fancy brandnew century old stuff and boasting about it. The Terp I live on is at least 6000+ years old.
If people save money from not having to replace their stuff every X years they will spend it on other goods and services, creating jobs in others sectors. There will not be less jobs, just jobs in other locations and sectors.
A perfectly legitimate idea, "planning for when our product becomes obsolete" turned into a not so legitimate idea, "how can we make our product become obsolete faster."
In Germany, we have debates, that the warranty required on everything by law should get extended from two years to five years. I would absolutely love to see this happen, but for some products even five years is terrible warranty.
If the government were to force companies to extend warranties on products, you as a consumer would see the price difference yourself. Government is no the solution.
@@jeremytibbals7057 I think what you're missing the point, is this goes back to the old argument buy 7 $10 blenders or one $70 blender in the same time frame. The forced warranty would increase minimum costs but the products would be forced to be created better on average. In order for the company to not lose money.
I purchased a 50s ranch house over a newer model home based partially on the construction methods. Also it was observable that the foundation was good. So much stuff from the 40s and 50s seem really solid. Old electric fans from the 40s are the opposite of planned obsolescence. It seems like we crossed some weird threshold in the 90s. I worked in construction then. You could see it happening.
Same here, bought a 1960 ranch with concrete block walls for this very reason. Of course I still got screwed on garbage orangeburg piping they used for the main exterior sewage line and had to replace it. They really began pushing the cheaply built wood frame houses with poorly engineered water barrier materials starting in the 90s.
@@Son37Lumiere I think ours is cast iron but that I wouldn't be surprised if it was terracotta at a certain point. One of the first things I did was remove the trees nearby in hopes that I could table any issues with it. I hope your newer sewage line lasts way beyond your lifetime. It sounds brutally expensive.
I once worked in construction litigation. I was at a site inspection and we were looking at bathtubs. They were the kind made of fiberglass, molded into the space. They were failing and leaking. The buildings were about 5 years old. I asked the building expert why they failed so quickly and he told me they are only intended to last ten years because people will remodel their baths anyway.
Wow. We have a "modern" fiberglass kind of bathtub, and it's lasted 16 years so far with a tiny bit of very minor chipping. I cannot imagine it leaking after 5 years. Like, no.
It is usually some small part that fails. Giants are trying to seed the idea that nothing is repairable and if so, only by them. My dishwasher just recetly stopped working. It was just a burnt end switch, they get tired after thousands of clicks. Don't let yourself be fooled, everything should be repairable.
Should be repariable. Should be.-- but after repeated failure of the warranty repairs, as happened to us, you have to decide it would never happen and had to buy a new washer, giving them the otherwise new washer--who knows what was done with it. We had to get on with our lives --not constantly schedule someone to come to our house waste our time, tell us they fixed it, week after week.
I had that with my furnace. It stopped working and the only solution (from experts was to replace it). Some youtube searches + a whole weekend taking it apart, I was able to fix it for under 50 bucks and its good for another 10 or 20 years. It was some work but honestly nothing that an average home owner cannot handle.
When I was growing up in DFW in the 1980's one of my parent's friends was a GM Quality Manager. His job was to analyze cars that had survived for more than five years and 60,000 miles to determine which parts hadn't worn out. These parts were then Value Engineered to ensure that they minimized cost while getting much closer to fully wearing out at five years without prematurely failing. These efforts ensured that the initial cost of the vehicle was minimized while also ensuring that all of the car's systems would fail almost simultaneously at five years and 60,000 miles. Our talk was quite enlightening. A few years after this conversation, Japanese car companies moved into GM's turf and were winning consumers over with their 100,000 mileage track record (Honda and Toyota). Soon, GM had to retool their cars so that they would catastrophically fall apart at 100,000 miles.
I don't think matching the lives of individual components ("catastrophically [falling] apart") and planned obsolescence are necessarily the same thing. The car's target life could be increased by selecting the components that break and strengthening them. Maybe that part was a joke though? I own a Piaggio motor scooter and I’d much rather everything fall apart at once than pay a shop $150/hour in labor forever. Factories are incentivized to work efficiently, which benefits everyone. Shops are incentivized to work as slow as possible which only benefits them. If I were to buy a new electric scooter it would use less fuel and also have fewer parts to break.
@@andyb2339 This is where the "dumbing down" of people in general plays in. So many today not only haven't a clue how their vehicles work, and of course wouldn't know a wrench from a hole in the ground, but don't even know (or care about) the most basic of routine maintenance. Shops put out videos of where people have brought in vehicles and have NEVER even changed the oil! As a culture, we've been groomed to be dependent on others for everything. People can't even read maps anymore because they depend on electronic gadgets to verbally tell them where to go.People don't even go shopping anymore - they get somebody else to do it for them!
My brother's 2011 Ford Focus recently had a head gasket go and the shop told him the car wasn't even worth fixing. Meanwhile, my 2010 Pontiac Vibe (built on a joint venture with a Toyota engine) is still running strong. Growing up in Michigan, buying Japanese cars was verboten. When I went to see my mom, my family wouldn't even let us park our 2013 Mazda 5 in the driveway for the first few years of owning it. It's the best vehicle I ever owned. GM is even worse than Ford. My next vehicle will be American made though. A Tesla.
@@Nphen I've got a 93 Exploder and a 97 Camry. Both still run, but guess which one has routinely required more maintenance, repairs, or had parts just age terribly.
You forgot aesthetics. "Modern" buildings rarely look good, and if a building is ugly we tend to not care about it. If we don't care they get neglected and age much faster than if they were cared for and repaired and upgraded. It's very, very simple really and was perfectly understood a hundred years ago but today it's a concept seldomly taken seriously despite its massive impact. We're building houses and places that looks like crap and rapidly turns into crap.
Hogwash. People don’t care for things because they’d rather be doing something else or spending their money on something else. It has little to do with the design.
@@seanwhalen5738 Gotta love the stucco and fake brick tile they use. I'll take the design of an late 1800s Victorian home over the crap on the market, anyday.
Thank you for bringing attention to the fact that manufactures are some of the biggest polluters. I just want a slower life. A house, fashion and appliances that last. I don't want to buy more-more-more. It's depressing, having a house full of flimsy stuff.
Planned obsolescence for one company is an opportunity for another company. I'm thinking of Honda and Toyota building better quality and longer lasting cars than the Detroit automakers. People switched brands and bought Japanese instead of American cars.
This right here is another reason why planned obselence is essentially just a conspiracy theory and is complete nonsense. Even the content creator here bought a fridge from a different brand so exactly how did GE benefit from building a fridge that was only meant to last just beyond the warranty?? The old way is still the best way: make your product to last and you've made a customer who will last too. (I commented about this earlier; but the real reason for cheap parts and products facing early is because they are cutting corners and hoping the shiny advert will still win them customers. )
@@Wolf-Rayet_Arthur it's not a conspiracy theory, we literally study how to do this in college. It works because people don't switch brands easily in some markets.
@@AmandaVieiraMamaesouCult So you're saying that you learn how to cut corners using cheaper materials in the knowledge that the shiny advert will keep people loyal to the brand... and yet you comment to say i'm wrong?
@@Wolf-Rayet_Arthur you claimed it was only a conspiracy theory, whereas he claimed he even gets taught how to do it. So, if we accept his claim as true, I'd say he would also be correct in saying you were wrong. Honestly, it's a bit more complicated than that. Things are designed with specific scenarios in mind and then build to the specifications which ensue from those scenarios. Many tools for example are designed to last for approximately 100 hours of operation with light loads. Which is totally fine, if they are used once a year for fifteen minutes, as is the case with many tools. The real issue is that companies aren't required to disclose those specifications. So consumers have no way to tell whether some product will actually do what they need it to do and for how long approximately. IMO there is only one indication for what a product is actually worth: that's the amount of warranty the manufacturer is willing to grant to its customers and how many strings he is going to attach to that offer. So, bottom line, I'd say you are actually correct. He isn't learning how to cut corners. He is learning how to design things to specification. Which is totally not a bad thing and also not a conspiracy. It's consumers buying stuff for it being shiny instead of looking for actual long lasting value which makes it hard for companies with actually long lasting products to compete ... It's just easier and more convenient for us to blame those companies for catering to our preferences than to change our own behavior and to demand better laws. Right to repair and right to reverse engineer are a thing in Europe, as are mandatory minimum warranties on all technical products. Things aren't gloomy here either, but at least my LEDs don't die in 4 months. I actually haven't had a single one die as of yet in the last 10 years ...
Thank you. I think flip shows contribute to this too. I wish more of the tv home shows focused on a house's bones, instead of using the structure as an inconvenient headache that takes away money from generic design.
Even 30 years ago, the best advice when laying any kind of floor or wall covering was to stash away a meaningful extra for eventual repairs, speaking from family experience. Unfortunately this is not new by any means. Also, those ice-maker integrated fridges (called "american style" here) are just asking for trouble (and if not cleaned properly, basically food poisoning) due to extra parts to malfunction. For piping without having to excavate the concrete slab: have a cellar. Of course, it's much more expensive at start, but that solves the majority of problems that can arise, and also creates a smaller amount of new ones. But it's expensive.
I loved having a basement in Ohio, but in most of Texas, to my knowledge, basements or cellars are not practical because of the soil. I think limestone is prevalent throughout, but I can't say for certain as I've never done or seen a soil survey.
@@grondhero it's the watertable that is the issue. You can had dig a well in Texas, usually within 10 feet, twenty to thirty feet is a deep well. Obviously you want to go deeper, but you can dig very shallow and hit water. Your basement then basically becomes a poorly constructed ship hull, and the house "floats" till it breaks. Not such a big issue for larger commercial buildings because they have the weight, and money for proper mitigation efforts during construction, but houses are just too light, or the efforts to mitigate it pre-construction are insurmountable due to complexity or practical funding. And...in Smith County at least, if not state wide, they are banning pier and beam construction for residential use, and mandating slab construction. Which make access for repairs more untenable.
While a cellar is often great, it's also quite expensive. There's much cheaper, small design changes possible to the same effect. While pvc is technically to code for all dirty water extraction where I live. I, for instance, will use the municipal sewage type pipes for any parts buried. Adds less then a hundred bucks to the material cost, and is rated for 75 years. Electrical conduits also get a pipe. Worst case if any changes or replacement is ever needed is then one small access hole in the house, and a little digging in the yard.
Fantastic presentation, it definitely feels like everything nowadays is deliberately designed to fail, even infrastructure. Northern Virginia is basically is a state of perpetual construction because contractors are being paid just to build things and leave instead of building them to last
it gets even worse when you watch Notjustbikes' youtube channel, most suburbs and towns in America are in the red because of all the incredibly expansive infrastructure they can't afford to maintain, and they just keep taking debt to make more. Giant stroads, unwalkable areas, inexplicable fences so you can't ever walk from a house to a business
First off, I like your video and the way you lay out information. Planned obsolescence is absolutely a bane on humanity's ability to progress into more efficient human flourishing, and some of the causes of it that you have already listed are absolutely true... but it is my belief that the consumerist behaviors of the public are merely a symptom of a larger cause. After years of spending much of my free time investigating history and public policy, I believe that this system of cronyism is designed from the ground up to be wasteful, to supply petty conveniences that make people feel good, and to ensure long lasting reliance on the crony system. First, ill define cronyism. Cronyism is an economic system that looks much like capitalism; in fact, it is extremely often called capitalism by those who dont have an understanding of economics and others who want to hide that we live under a crony system. In addition to facading as capitalism, on the back end a cronyism system the real mechanism that dictate many factors from price all the way down to supply and demand is the governments deep involvement in many, if not most, of the markets. This combination, facading as capitalism while really being heavily influenced and effected by government involvement, is what cronyism is. As an addition, lets define capitalism. A google search will provide this: "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state." Note, that to be a capitalistic system, businesses, and entire markets must lack control or involvement of the state (government). While researching the history of public policy and economics, it doesnt take very long for one to notice how consistently high-influence individuals within large corporations hop back and forth between being some kind of 3 letter acronym (CEO and so on) and running/winning public office positions, many call this the revolving door of the government and corporate world. It doesnt take a genius to guess that these same individuals, and their government friends, more times than not pass legislation that benefits the companies, processes, and products that profit greatly. As it turns out, a vast majority of these products of course end up being created with planned obsolescence, or lack cost efficiency. As for housing, this is no different. Government enforced codes force people to build houses within a very narrow window of methodology and many times with specific materials. You mentioned the slab issue, and how post and beam would be a fantastic solution, which was a great example. Another example regards dry laid stone masonry. Dry laid means with no cement or mortar. This technique has been around for ages, and there are still examples around in some places which are great examples of why dry laid stone is amazing, the most obvious reason is certainly that it lasts for hundreds if not thousands of years if done right. Another amazing thing about dry laid stone is that anyone can do it and learn it, yes it is physically involved, but it is simple. It doesnt take investing in thousands of dollars of equipment to shape the stones and put them together, no, just a couple hammers and some chisels, time and a bit of strength and an individual can build a foundation wall, pier, fireplace and chimney, or entire houses out of the most abundant resource on the earth... stone. Whats the catch then? Well, try to get a code inspector to approve your dry laid foundation in most places and your SOL..... I wont even get into the morality of somebody else having the right to tell you how to build your own structure.... Almost every single process of our lives has been monopolized by a cronyist system (the government/big business partnership). This has created multiple generations of individuals who cannot create much for themselves: -They cant grow their own food. -They cant build their own houses. -They cant even entertain themselves. -They cant catch and clean their own water. Now, of course people are okay with this because when we let others who specialize in something do it for us, they generally do it very well, and there is a huge amount of convince to not have to do all of the things that are necessities for life, they certainly can add up. But.. there is an extreme on both sides of the spectrum, and right now we find ourselves on the side where almost every aspect of life has become a highly centralized process in which big business and government have taken responsibility (and control) of almost every aspect of our lives. When people stop paying attention to this, which they have for the most part, things like planned obsolescence, money funneling, or probably the worst, that most people have no clue about, a horribly unhealthy centralized food and water production system, can all emerge at the detriment of the majority and the vast gain of the very very few in power.
I dunno Ms. Carr, calling it "planed obsolescence" makes it sound like a conspiracy of bad faith, but from my humble 10 years experience in the construction industry, most crappy homes are a result of a trifecta of client's cheapness and general ignorance, inexperienced and uninterested construction crew, and a greedy contractor. These three always come together and it's a systemic problem in the industry (at least in my country). p.s. I think it would be interesting for many to see a video about CEB and rammed earth construction. I'm seriously considering constructing my new home from stabilized earth blocks, and it would be very interesting to hear your perspective on this new/old construction tech
Agreed. Planned obsolescence is the wrong term. It really is everyone wanting to do as little for as cheap as possible. I would argue the consumer is just as greedy, wanting to spend less is basically the same as a contractor charging as much as they can.
@@agisler87 I wouldn't put much guilt on the consumers though, these are mostly normal folks, a lot of times they're in a pinch, but what's worst is that they are not informed and are easily manipulated into believing they are about to save a buck. And you can't blame them, i mean, most of the guys *working* in the industry rarely know anything outside their practice
@@agisler87 Considering wages have barely moved for decades while housing prices have multiplied ten fold how can you possibly blame clients for wanting to save some money?
@@Son37Lumiere I am not blaming consumers. I meant to only point out that an employer labeled "greedy" because they don't want to pay more for labor is doing the exact same thing as a consumer unwilling to pay more for XYZ. I think the word greed is almost always misused and is never defined by the person who uses it. A greedy person can be doing good or bad. When does someone become greedy? It puzzles me.
@@agisler87 Give me a break. It is not the same thing. Paying your employees a minimum wage or just above so you make millions a year is the definition of greed. One doesn't become a billionaire without screwing others over in one form or another to achieve that wealth.
My wife and I have had this same discussion numerous times. We still have the same dryer we bought in 1998; I have changed the belt and various electronics a couple times, but most of it is the original components. The washer we bought with it finally rusted through just 2 years ago. Meanwhile, the fridge we bought 5 years ago (to replace a 20 year old fridge that came with the house) is already showing signs of wear. We have gone through a few dishwashers, and each one lives a bit less time than the one before it. I have also thrown out numerous tools and appliances (power drivers, saws, toasters, coffee makers) because one small component failed and a replacement part was either unavailable or cost more than a whole new item. A lot of the time, it’s the add-on bells-and-whistles of modern items that fail early, and I don’t really want them in the first place, but you can’t find a version without them. I think that if you had a store that sold basic, solid products with user-replaceable parts, you could make a killing. But what manufacturer these days would make them for you?
I noticed that too. The simpler the appliance or tool, the more it lasts. I had a 25 year old washer that finally died and was able to replace it with a model almost exact to it, which is a very simple, no frills machine, and see if it lasts longer than one of those with a lot of add ons. My appliance tech told me the same, the versions will lots of add ons don't last, unlike models like the one I just picked.
It's amazing how long lasting much of the old appliances were, my toaster is from the 50's and still rivals those made today. The microwave ovens from the late 70's were the peak of build quality. If something does go wrong with them, it's usually because of age alone more than actually wearing out.
The Kelvinator fridge my grandmother bought in 1937 still runs. I drive a 1972 Jeep and a 1988 Land Cruiser. My wife's Honda has paint that is scratched and tatty after little more than two years. We built, and I omitted a few touches I now regret, such as solar heated underfloor heating and conduit trunking to allow more cabling to be added. But the second unit we built and sold has now been gutted and rebuilt by the new owners, just because they wanted a different arrangement of the rooms.
Have you ever looked at the energy consumption of this Kelvinator Fridge? My guess is that a new more economic one will pay for itself within a year. If you recycle your old fidge is even more environmentally friendly to replace your old fridge than to keep using a very old one.
@@heelgraag YOU are probably right. My ld Jeep's fuel economy is terrible, the Cruiser uses twice the fuel a friend's modern van uses. On the other hand, the energy cost of recycling, say, the Jeep into a new car must be more than the fuel I waste over the five years modern cars are designed for.
@@heelgraag The compressors on old fridges weren't that much less efficient than modern ones, and R-12 was a highly efficient refrigerant. Also, old fridges didn't have defrost, a big energy hog. So in real terms, the 1937 Kelvinator almost certainly uses less electricity than a modern one. And considering it's never been replaced, it hasn't accrued the carbon emissions to produce new fridges for the 84 years of its existence.
I think it would require an expansion of the EnergyStar concept to cover things like home construction, so the value of trading a couple hundred sq-ft of floor space for heavier insulation and a better foundation for your area are carried over when you sell. Another expansion of the idea would have a "Product Life Star" with ratings for repair-ability and durability along with energy; maybe have a projected annual carbon footprint based on it's prorated life. A problem I had with my older home is that when the old fridge died I had trouble finding one small enough to fit the opening-everything readily available was way too big- an expansion of the Super Size Me idea.
When I was growing up in the 60's we had a new refrigerator and a used one. The new one had fallen off the truck and had 2 fist sized dents on the side and my dad got it 50% off, this was before I was born, probably in the early 50's. This refrigerator worked faithfully, without problems until the early 80's. Then we got a new Sears frost free model. It had maybe 1 1/2 inch walls and ran 45 minutes out of an hour/every hour. In 1971 my parents bought a Sears Kenmore heavy duty dryer, which got flooded out when the basement flooded. Replaced the igniter and it kept running years later we replaced the belt and drum rollers. Now 50 years later it is still going strong in my house. Now true they did not have the features we have today, but appliances today are woefully inferior in design and a glaring lack of quality.
I like Kenmore very much. Older appliances from this brand last almost forever. I have a dryer that is 22 years old and a vacuum that is 20 years old from that brand
Great Video! It always amazes me how bad building practices are in North America especially. I have to complain about something though. 3:25 That is NOT a difficult repair in any way. Desoldering that would be very easy if you have some experience. The part doesnt look too special either, so finding a replacement shouldn't be too hard either.
Yeah, I was just looking at that piece scratching my head trying to work out how that could take hours to replace. I've got minimal experience, but that looks like an hour at most, all included.
Yes, not the greatest example for those of us who are not scared to repair. Something like a failed IC that has the part number scratched off would be a better example .
Belinda! According to ICC building code 403.1.6 all perimeter wood sills shall be anchored to concrete foundations with min. 1/2" BOLTS. Sections 317-318 require pressure treated wood in contact with concrete foundations. Your example of a random nail in a non-PT board is miss-leading. There are many areas of improvement that should be addressed in the code (such as use of particle board as flooring in home and mobile homes) but this is not one. In addition, the top wall plate to roof rafter connection must be an approved metal bracket in areas of potential high winds (wind load) such as hurricane alley in the USA. The codes exist, your examples are violations, not standard building practices to insure planned obsolesce.
We talk about recycling,we speak of energy efficient but we fail to improve the quality of homes and products that we produce we unfortunately have grown complacent to the issue because replacing repairing seems to be a acceptable strategy for our economy. I do enjoy your channel your honest opinions
The right to repair movement is gaining momentum. Unfortunately this depends on legislation and the government to fix that problem. It will not work. I believe the market will correct most of this when a companies produce products that are durable and reparable and get rewarded for it in sales.
When have markets ever corrected? If they did the quality would increase somewhere. It is not increasing at all. Food, equipment, houses, cars - the quality is beyond horrible on all fronts.
I'm a home inspector and have seen many appliances and utilites from pre 1950 that are still operational and were built to such a high standard compared to today's products. We saw a water heater from 1950 made out of ceramic and it was still working!! Today's hot water heaters do not last nearly as long.
in my house for years we cracked this joke that appliances contain a time bomb that explodes the day after the warranty expires- this vid suggests that's not too far off from what actually happened.
Sunken living rooms! There are so many design trends that realtors say you need to follow to be able to get top dollar for your home. Colorful wall to wall carpet, sunken living rooms, wall paper of any design from any point in time. The colorful bathrooms of the 50s are now a negotiation point to get a lower price (Because no one can sit on a teal toilet in 2021, apparently) Paint color choices too, to a lesser extent. In 20 years, people will be digging out those filled in living rooms and installing colorful toilets and carpet because, inevitably, these trends come back around.
I want to know where these stupid "design trends" in the US come from. One current one is painting homes for sale a depressing grey and painting kitchen cabinets white, even when the cabinets are real wood. Realtors tell their sellers to do this, and then they tell their buyers to want this? Is that how this nonsense works? Who is getting the kickbacks from the makers of white and grey paint?
I tried to find the most used paint color ( resale value) and after several Google pages, could only find designated experts and paint companies declaring the best colors to use. No actual data.
@@YSLRD Unless the paint color greatly worsens the look of the home, like a garish color or it makes the home look darker than it is, I can't imagine it matters much. I just hate grey. To me, a newly painted home means 1) they raised the cost of the home to make up for the expense of painting; 2) they might've painted to hide damage, like water spots. Plus, on the most recent house I've saw, they repainted the interior grey, but didn't bother cleaning/fixing the gutters. However, the house is in an excellent location, so there was a bidding war and it went contingent quickly.
@@redbloodedbutterfly It's not limited to the US. I'm in Australia and just about all volume built houses have a white and grey colour scheme throughout the interior.
Planned obsolescence is the reason i buy older vehicles, easy to fix, easy to maintain. That's why my 65 has been on the road for 55 years. The fact that this is starting to apply to houses is astounding, looks like I'm building my own house now.
I was told to use this strategy when buying my first car. But I find anything old that the 90s it's really hard to find parts for. Alot of my friends followed the same strategy and ended up having to scrap their old cars since nobody was selling the parts needed to fix them. I think it's a balance. You don't need to buy a fancy new car every year. The car I have now is a 2002 model, and has a wide variety of parts available but also not expensive to fix or repair.
I got a used 2012 chevy volt (plug in hybrid) for $3250 at this point save my so much money in gas that is a "free car", In 2 years I change one $70 window regulator
@@dylantd9189 fair enough, i used rockauto for most of my car stuff. I inherited the pickup, and the tradeoff is big now, most 90s stuff is becoming classic and come with the classic tax
An F1 Driver once said: "A good race car falls apart after the race." Because additional durability would come at the cost of speed. Electronics are designed the same way.
While planned obsolescence is a problem the flip side is that we tend to purchase from the cheapest manufacturer. Doing this forces the manufacturer to use cheaper, inferior materials to meet the expected price point. The truth is, their are still great long lasting products our there but most people just will not pay the price.
See computer components. The CPU and motherboard I am typing this on is from 2008 and still works perfectly fine. (MSI X58 Pro motherboard with an Intel i920 CPU) It was built and advertised as a high durability motherboard and was priced accordingly.
@@Crosshair84 You bought based on quality rather than price. I have many items that are 30 - 40 years old and work just fine. Why? because I spend the money up front to buy quality. In the long run it's cheaper than buying based only on price.
The basic assumption of "planned obsolesce" is flawed. On the engineering side, it's more often known as "design life". When you design a product, part of that process is determining the pricepoint you want to sell it at and how long it needs to last in order to make that pricepoint seem reasonable. You can make a $10,000 refrigerator both repairable and last 20 years, because you designed it to last 20 years and you selected components and manufacturing processes with 20 year lifespans. by contrast, if you designed your $500 to last 20 years, you would end up losing $3,000 per refrigerator because it cost you $3500 to make. Finally, regarding the building standards in texas, they are mostly non existent. You want to live in a "low regulation" area and this is the result, and nobody is willing to pay for quality they don't see.
More people need to read this comment of yours. Thanks to the conspiracy theory of planned obselence (PO), companies are being regulated wrongly - such as apple who have been made to stop throttling their phone performance to protect the battery despite this being the thing they were doing to make sure their phones lasted as long as possible. Instead, they should have been forced to ensure that the batteries they were fitting were either; replaceable, or designed to give a certain amount of current for longer before the throttling technique was used. But people heard about PO and the EU made a law to make that scary myth into an illegal myth. Meanwhile, people like OP video creator here are making videos that basically make it seem like the consumer has no power and no choice, stuff just isn't made like it was in the old days.
@@aayotechnology I think the commenter that you are replying to is already suggesting a fix for building; better regulations. As for manufacturing I think that regulations and enforcement is actually a better tool than consumer buying power here too. Everyone is looking for a bargain, so the 20 year refrigerator that costs 2000 just won't fly off the shelves when there is an option for 500 that says it's quality-made on the box (but isn't). If consumers want better products they should ask their politicians to put tighter regs on things. This makes sense from a rational angle, and an environmental one.
Please, change the title of this video because is super misleading. You're talking about USA houses and in many parts of the world, people build houses that will last centuries even if built today. I respect you very very much but USA is not the center of the world. So deal with it. With love, from Italy.
Ironically, this is sometimes due to the government mandating that pollution controls be difficult to bypass. People want to bypass them because they damage the engine, mainly diesel vehicles. To the point where "DEF deletes" are a thriving industry. Of course, pollution controls for cars nowadays are beyond absurd. Standards are tightened every few years to justify the budgets of bureaucrats, not because they make any environmental sense. We could probably set the standards back to what was in place in 1990 and not many people would notice. The standards for drinking water haven't really changed in decades and we're doing just fine.
The European law protects consumers in this way. According to EU law the manufacturer of your old frigde is liable for the majority of the repair cost. Because a normal fridge should last 10 to 15 years without issues. This is the responsability of the manufacturer they cannot rid themself of that responsability by only giving a one year guaranty. Ofcours the liability of the manufacturer is bigger after only 2 years then after 10 years. It can be a hassle to claim this kinds of damages especially if the product comes form outside the EU. The EU is also forcing all mobile phone manufacturers to use one and the same chargers. They gave the market time to solve this obsolencence problem themselfs but the markt said it was impossible. So now it law and they will have to do the impossible. My moral of the story, in a good political landscape where the intrests of the people is always priority number one, insead of lobbyist and financial donors, these issues can be solved fairly simple and we will all win.
Great video as usual. I am an independent HVAC company and you are correct on the equipment manufacturers. They have a drop in refrigerant for r22 but you need to find and fix the leak before using it. They are changing out 410A refrigerant as well. Neat.
On the ceramic tile bit, you don’t have to use cleavage membrane or Schulter mat. You can use fluid applied crack isolation membrane. Also, that video showing popping tiles was because of lack of expansion joints not crack isolation.
Great video! We bought our first house 5 years ago, and I was so shocked about how little information was available about it. We've had to repair so many things (old house), but in the process I have created a manual detailing products and locations, and was thinking it should be standard to do that. Thank you for bringing this up!
Great minds! I built a rental property and as part of the rental conditions, the house will be visited by a plumber every year and an electrician every two years for maintenance checks. The house have a manual that I compiled and every maintenance checks they have to send me pictures of the parts they changed and write down what they found, and what they did in the manual. I took this idea from car service logbooks!
We should start a trend to base our buying decisions not on the flashy new features but on experience with brands. If the trend spreads the best marketing is to have made solid products 10 years ago. And the best marketing for the next 10 years is making solid products now.
We already do. That's why people say 'Oh Toyota is a good brand' or 'Kenmore is nowhere near what it used to be'. The issue is that the 'market forces' are pretty much what the manufacturers say due to things like ignorant consumers, marketing, cartels or just straight up propaganda.
Is there a real reason solid brick and concrete homes aren't more common in the US? They can be a bit trickier to insulate, but their durability is pretty incredible. I live in South Africa, where at least 90% of houses are concrete or brick - wood framed homes are fairly rare here. Brick costs 5-10% more - really not an unreasonable amount at all.
Well, I live on the West Coast where we have regular earthquakes. So building with brick is considered pretty dangerous here. I know some people deride concrete as environmentally unfriendly due to the amount of CO2 created in its manufacture. But I don't know if that's why it's not used, or whether it's more an aesthetic thing.
@@oliviastratton2169 brick definitely doesn't stand up well to earthquakes. But reinforced concrete performs excellently, far better than wood framed buildings. Concrete would also be more resilient to those fires you guys seem to have every year. Granted, fire can still damage a concrete building, but they are far more resilient.
@@gabrielfraser2109 Yeah, durability isn't the problem with concrete. Like I said, the aversion to concrete is probably due to environmental concerns and/or aesthetic sensibilities.
It depends on what part of the US you live in. In the Southeast, concrete block or brick homes are very common. Hurricane Andrew forced a complete rewrite of building codes in that part of the country.
Soil heave can be ameliorated by diluting the clay content of the foundation with sand down to the permanent water table. It has to be well mixed though, which is difficult. The large voids between the sand grains allows the clay particles to expand harmlessly into the empty space, if the clay weight percentage is sufficiently low. If the clay concentration is sufficiently high, they will move the sand particles, and with it the bulk soil. This can produce several tonnes of force per square meter. If the overburden structure is simply too heavy, the soil will self-excavate to the sides, undermining the building.
Interesting! Here we just use pier and beam foundations whenever there's a clay rich soil. Easily adding 10k to the construction cost. In recent years I've seen foam concrete being used more and more, mainly for extensions. Which aims to balance buoyancy with building weight. But if simply replacing the top soil can stabilise the structure, that could be a far cheaper option. I'm gonna look into that, thanks!
If you could do a video on the DFW soils and explain why "most homes have a slab-on-grade foundation instead of a pier and beam one" and why that is bad, I would appreciate it. (Is the pier and beam the one where the foundation looks like it's on stilts and that animals can crawl under?) We've lived in our 1965 home with slab foundation for 10 years now and so far haven't had any foundation problems. But our washer and dryer have to be replaced, which happened a year or two after the warranties expired. My grandparents bought a home in 1970's and after 30 years, the kitchen appliances were still working. That's not something you find nowadays.
My dad had one that ran on gas. I think it was from the 40s maybe earlier. It was big and pink with a latch. He had to manually defrost it each year but it was still running when he got rid of it. He only did that because he was worried about the grand kids getting locked in it. That's 60 or 70 years without a repair.
I believe we're to blame for this. We support companies that fight right to repair, we buy electronics with non user serviceable batteries, we buy cars(looking at you German manufacturers) that are not known for reliability and require heavy maintenance schedules(dealers make more money) to keep running, etc..etc.. If we cared enough to do the research and buy only high quality things they wouldn't be able to sell them anymore and they'd stop making them.
I just spent several minutes replying to your comment and TH-cam deleted it because i included a link to video. Grrr. Basically my comment is that when money is being devalued, it is natural for people to shorten their time preference, and to spend their money sooner rather than later, because the same amount of money will buy you less in the future. There are many historical examples of how people react when their society's currency experiences hyperinflation.
Maybe a lot of what is perceived as planned obsolesence is just stuff build down to a competitive price as consumers are inclined to buy the cheapest product.
Yes, we had to spend thousands of dollars in repairs on our 1985 home in Texas, and we only lived there for 3 years. Water line burst under the slab, the air conditioner went out, the master bath shower was leaking into the closet, and we had a hail storm that ruined the roof. Then we got defective shingles and had to replace the roof again before we sold it. Thankfully the insurance and shingle manufacturer paid for that.
Belinda, this was an incredible video. Thank you so much for saying what needed to be said! Now, specifics ... Regarding the failure of your newer GE products, they are really no longer GE - the appliance line of business was sold in 2016 to Haier Group Corporation, a Chinese multinational home appliances and consumer electronics company headquartered in Qingdao, Shandong, so while those new appliances might have a GE logo on them, they are now are nothing more than cheap Chinese crap designed to fail early and force more consumption; I have also noted rapid failure of the so called long-lived LED bulbs - I just had to replace another one yesterday, I will have to pay more attention to this and might have to go back to incandescents for some fixtures; Regarding cheap home construction, it seems as if the only way to assure durable construction is to build a custom house, which would be prohibitively expensive for most people - developers will build up new subdivisions with THEIR preferred builders and only offer prospective home buyers limited options on models, colors, finishes, etc, resulting in a "take it or leave it" situation for buyers desperate to get into a new home (or at least, the homes that aren't snapped up by large investors to force more and more people into becoming renters instead of homeowners); Apple is notorious for producing easy-to-fail and unrepairable devices - keyboards on some devices are designed to allow immediate liquid penetration onto critical circuitry in the event of a spill, instead of simply running off a plastic keyboard surface, and documents surfaced years ago instructing technicians at repair sites to either replace entire boards or entire devices rather than replacing individual parts; Front loading home washers have a reputation for poor performance and development of mold or mildew, I just replaced my old appliances with new high-capacity Whirlpool models, of which the washer features the innovative removable agitator which will hopefully resolve the problems associated with the new machines with no agitators ; When having new flooring installed, it is standard procedure to order 10% more than the measured area to account for wastage during installation, but I ordered 20% more to insure sufficient material left over should repairs be necessary, though storage of excess material might be an issue for some (I like the AquaGuard brand of laminate flooring); Unless specified, it might not be "illegal" for customers to shut off water valves in the meter boxes, but if damage occurs, the customer will be liable for damage to the utility's equipment - buy a water key at a hardware store (can also be used to shut off gas supply in an emergency) and use common sense if there is no private water shutoff valve (typically located under a small round cover within a couple of feet of the meter box) by turning the utility valve slowly and carefully, stopping the attempt if the valve seems stuck and won't turn with a decent amount of force; All-electric homes do not necessarily receive all or most of their power from coal-burning power plants, as the electricity generated by ALL the plants in a transmission interconnect (aka "grid") goes into that grid - you have no physical control where the electrons come from, and only about 20% of them come from coal-fired plants in the ERCOT interconnect; Regarding old-school appliances, my mother bought a new refrigerator (I forget the brand) back in the 1960's, and at last report, IT STILL RUNS TODAY! The skin of my house is now about 35 years old (based on records I could find) and the siding is already falling apart, being made of the the notorious hardboard siding that is rotting out all along the bottom; The idea of an instruction manual for a home is BRILLIANT - I receive countless calls at work from residents who have no idea how to troubleshoot even the most basic of issues, have no idea how their home's utility systems work, and in some cases have no idea what their homes are even equipped with. Keep up the good work, Belinda. You are providing a badly needed educational service to the public!
I think structural hempcrete block walls with plumbing and electrical chases and with simple plaster inside and out is great on many levels including making repairs or changes very simple and low cost. I think perhaps compacted earth with hempcrete on top for the insulation value leaves our slabs more easy to repair or change. I think hemp or bamboo engineered floating wood floors are a great option, but I do generally prefer floors that can get very wet without suffering damage. Perhaps large floating tiles could be a great option that could be moved and replaced with a simple vacuum handle. I think metal roofs with automated seam bending to help reduce costs is a great, long-term, fireproof roofing material.
Bad: My 1000€ HP ENVY x360 ("Premium Line") is just over two years old and the screws (cost pennies) that fix the screen to the hinges have failed. For some reason the metal back panel needs replacement, so HP is the goto-repair shop. They've given me an offer over 461€! The laptop isn't even worth 600€ anymore if it was perfect! Good: My sound system consists of 30+-years old MB-Quart speakers and a 20+-years old Onkyo Amplifier. Not only is the quality absolutely amazing, the reliability crushes all modern digital sound systems.
I very much agree with you on the "green upgrades" that lead to tons of waste, especially electronic waste. If companies really cared about "being green", they would make it easier for the average user to repair their own products, instead of pressuring people into buying new products.
If you 'really' wish for stuff to last you have to look at Soviet engineering school - they put reparability as primary design requirement. Their Elbrus 8 computer (equivalent of Intel i7) comes with thick manual that includes a circuit diagram! But then.... Would you 'really' reach into your computer with a soldering iron to repair it? Would you 'really' drive a Soviet-looking car?
There’s a significant consequence to the way our buildings and stuff are being made. Instead of having 14-17 minutes to get out, more modern homes have 2-3 minutes. This way of planned obsolescence and cheap furniture is literally costing us our lives.
According to my refrigerator repair tech: "Never buy Samsung appliances." He suggest Whirlpool and to buy the most basic Top Freezer with the fewest working parts.
Interesting that you mentioned front loading washing machines and their bearings. The washing machine at the house died this week and the tech diagnosed the problem as being the bearings. At $250/hr it would cost more to fix than to replace.
So the thing is bearings fail, there is no way you can make a bearing last forever. this applies to top loading too, or anything that has a bearing. Expecting a bearing to last 100 years or even 25 in a washing machine is not realistic, they do after all spin at up to 2500 rpm with uneven loads.
@@user-by7hj4dj9s Industry standard bearings are not expensive. The problem is that items are built with specialized bearings which are expensive or unavailable and not designed to be easily changed out. I don't think it would be that difficult for a company to use standard parts and make it easier to change wear items, but there is no incentive to do that. They make more money if they can save a little by using lower quality parts that snap together easily when built and require the item to be replaced sooner rather than later.
@@user-by7hj4dj9s Bearings have factors of safety. You can increase the life of a bearing by choosing one made for a higher load rating. Manufacturers just refuse to do so. I have seen 70 year old washing machines on the original bearings. I have seen hundred year old motors and dynamos on the original bearings. We need minimum quality standards enforced in law. Planned obsolescence is a human and environmental disaster.
Not to mention that most modern washing machines use non replaceable bearings. So when before we could open the drum and replace the bearing, nowadays you usually have to replace the entire drum. Which just happen to be priced at exactly one buck over the machine's value at the time of failure..
2:16 - FYI, my Phillips LED bulbs have lasted me 6 years so far. So yes, LED bulbs _can_ last much longer, which I already knew from previous tech experience. Phillips products in general seem to last longer than average, and are often cheaper too, so I buy their stuff whenever I can. Just stay away from _anything_ made by GE!
This reminds me of a situation my dad witnessed in Pakistan. He visited his brother in laws house and the brother in law complained that something was wrong with the water tank (I think it kept leaking), so he had to call a repair man every few weeks. One day my dad checked the tank and realised that he simply needed to replace the washer and it would be fine. He also noticed that instead of replacing the washer cheaply and efficiently, the repairman had wrapped the washer in some sort of cord or duct tape or something, so that it would stay in place and still work for a few weeks, but then it would start leaking again. So my dad fixed the washer and then he saw the repair man and asked why didn't he replace the washer in the first place? The repair man said: if I fixed it on my first visit, I wouldn't be called back again, I'd lose out on the extra income from call out charges every few weeks. It's common to come across such cowboy handymen over there, but in more recent years, it's become an increasingly common phenomenon in the West as well. Dad gets frustrated that electric appliances don't let you open the back with a screw driver and replace simple parts anymore like he was able to do when I was a kid. I think the old local shop that sold spare electric parts doesn't even exist anymore- last I heard it was converted into a grocery store.
Unfortunately, Samsung appliances are notoriously unreliable (despite them having a solid track record with mobile electronics and other divisions do pretty well). The 10yr warranty is in response to that reputation problem. Most people do not leverage manufacturer warrantees, so long warranty offerings are good business strategy. It annoys me that pundits continuously blame consumers when we could regulate industries making high impact electronics and machinery so they have extended service lifecycles. I've fought tooth and nail to extend my IT installations to 5 year service contracts when the standard is 3yrs. Why? Because the tax code has amortization plans bound to a 36mth cycle. That's not the client's fault at all. Lawmakers are corrupted by corporate cash.
Your example about the fridge has nothing to do with planned obsolescence. Why would GE on purpose build a low-quality product? That would only drive costumers to their competitors. With so many moving parts and complex build, of course something will break eventually. That is not planned obsolescence. It’s consumers that demand cheap products, and the manufacturer does what it can do while still maintaining a margin. Do not buy cheap products if you want something with high build quality and that lasts.
New Zealand has consumer law which means the retailer must repair manufacturing defects, and if it can't be repaired in a reasonable time frame then they must refund the consumer. The consumer guarantee lasts for the reasonable expected lifetime of the product. If a retailer doesn't repair or refund, it only costs around $10 to take them to court, lawyers aren't allowed either. Research this law, and push for your politicians to copy it.
@@gsabic extended warranty is toothless compared to good consumer law. You can also buy extended warranty in New Zealand, but only an idiot would pay for it because consumer guarantee covers you for longer and for more.
@@nameberry220 nobody buys an extended warranty in USA because doesn't make economical sense. there is not free lunch, if you change legislation to force products to include a longer warranty you will pay more for those products.
@@gsabic Not true. Did you watch the video? Planned obsolescence is about products being designed to fail. The consumer will always pay less when they're protected by good consumer guarantee law.
Can't agree with 6:35 It's not fault of consumers for believing authority / experts and falling for psychological marketing traps. Common thing companies do is place the blame on consumers. But the fault lies within them. We should first fix the source of the problem not the consequences. (I guess fault of consumers is not demanding regulations.) Good video otherwise
Natives in Costa Rica built monumento Guayabo that purifies water using sunlight, more than 2000 years ago. Roman concrete of roads have lasted more than 2000 years. Our concrete could last 200 years at most. Not a single modern construction or product wll last that long. And we are told we are "advanced" civilization. Future archeologists will say our culture was supersticious and worshipped an invisible god called "electronic money". There were tokens of bliss and grace called bills and coins, but most of its power was invisible. Rulers bow before that god. The money Olympus had many currencies to choose from, and dollar was the Zeus of all. Bank priests played games of grace and allowed crisis to make some god favorites to get more grace while others were sacrificed into starvation.
I've was told by a plumber who came to fix the dishwasher in my condo, that very basic, inexpensive American home appliances such as Frigidaire and Whirlpool, tend to last many years longer than more trendy but complicated Japanese and European appliances. It turned out that my dishwasher, a cheap Frigidaire commonly found in apartment complexes, was not broken at all. The problem was a plastic shipping plug left in the new disposal, installed by the realtor. Total cost of repair, less than $70. Basically the cost of the service call itself. That was three years ago, and the dishwasher still works perfectly. Ironically, I had also purchased the same model of Frigidaire dishwasher, eleven years earlier when remodeling my last house. It too lasted the entire 11 years I was in the house. In fact most of the American manufactured appliances I had in that house worked perfectly over the decade I lived there, including the cheap used washer & dryer I had in the garage. The sole exception was the Frigidaire double door refrigerator, The water & ice dispenser stopped working after 10 years. The lesson I guess here is that sophisticated and trendy are not always reliable, at least in terms of home appliances. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about my old house. A Fox & Jacobs early 60's track home that had a slab foundation that crumbled like a graham cracker pie crust.
Belinda I absolutely adore your content but the basis for this video isn't true. I get your argument about planned obsolescence especially with respect to big tech companies, but I feel like you simply made this video as a result of being angry about your fridge and contradicted yourself as a result. What actually happened is that a compressor failed. Was this compressor "planned" to fail? No, it was the most reliable it could be at the price point it was sold at (including the profit the manufacturer can tolerate). That is to say it was cheaply made. Manufacturers are competing with each other at every budget, so if one does it they all have to. If it was a more expensive fridge they would have used higher quality parts. You could have replaced just the compressor for I'm guessing 1/3 the cost of your new Samsung fridge (the price of compressors is high due to the tolerances and mechanical complexity), but you CHOSE to replace it. In doing so you perpetuated your argument of planned obsolescence by throwing away an otherwise functional fridge for the perceived benefit of "features". Here is the hard truth that nobody wants to hear: stop buying cheap products that are poorly made. The reason your fridge was "doomed" to fail isn't because someone had a board meeting to make their products fail past a certain date... it was because that fridge was so cheap that it was barely functional to begin with. Spend more, get a quality product, and then manufacturers won't have a reason to cobble together products that fail quickly.
I have made a second career out of repairing appliances with obsolete or ridiculously expensive electronics modules. (All my appliances except the microwave have mechanical controls.) I have always wondered what would happen if manufacturers were responsible for the end of life costs of a product. Would parts be available for a longer period of time? Would there be a more robust market for used parts (specifically cosmetic parts that are typically not stocked more than 1-2 yrs after a product is discontinued.) Engineers will build to the product specifications provided by management. If product cost if prioritized over reliability and serviceability, the consumer will receive a product that lasts only to the industry standard “generally accepted life” for a basic product. (5 yrs for most large appliances)
I think two other areas that could be touched on with planned obsolescence have to do specifically with the suburban housing typology. One way is the nature of how suburban tract homes are increasingly built from cheaper materials and intended to last considerably shorter amounts of time before a critical failure or condition that requires replacement. No state is a worse offended than Florida, which continues to build in OSB and other engineered wood products, despite the local climate causing those materials to rot and fail in 20-30 years. (Additionally as a hurricane zone, those building's being weakened poses a risk to life/safety) This is instead of more sustainable or more durable materials like rammed earth, adobe, or terra-cotta and stucco, which in that climate might last closer to 100 years. The second is the ephemeral nature of "commodity grade" tract development, and it's relative short useful life. In an urban context, buildings are built to last 80-100 or even greater time scales, and are intended to be adapted to reuse throughout their life. Suburban homes, are often built with a single use, single internal configuration, and instead of refurbishing at the end of life, wind up being demolished and replaced with new construction. That uses a large amount of resources to perform a task that a marginal increase in cost would greatly extend it's useful life. Or a change in zoning and/or development typology, would increase the useful life, and reduce the carbon footprint of a house, say in a duplex, attached housing, or small apartment or condo complex. Which I guess gets to the point, that our building and zoning codes encourage single use zoning, and automobile dependance which pushes on us buildings as commodities instead of buildings as long lived infrastructure designed for long term adaptive and mixed use.
American LED light bulbs also have planned obsolescence. They are purposely designed to over use current that shortens the life of the LEDs. Look up Dubai LEDs which are designed to run for the 30 years life of the LEDs. They are legal for use but extremely hard to get ahold of outside the Mideast.
Used to work in a rack and pinion steering rebuild factory. We refurbished them. They were designed to fail at about 50000 miles when the seals would wear out by grinding themselves into the aluminum casting and causing internal leaks. All we did with them was rebore the casting and insert a stainless sleeve. The warranty’s on cars in those days was 30 to 40000 miles. Our used rebuilt units would way outlast the original. Designed specifically to fail no doubt. Love your channel Belinda!
I have been enjoying your videos but I'm afraid in this case I'll have to call you out. Planned obselence is basically a conspiracy theory in most cases, and you are repeating several of them here. While it might seem convenient that manufactures use inferior methods or materials in their products, it is important to remember the old saying: never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. In this case, stupidity is built into the system. Where many companies spend twice as much (or more) on marketing than R&D, and when it comes to making more profit year on year to impress shareholders, it's easier to cut a buck than make one - the result is that companies will buy cheaper plastic fittings and parts instead of expensive but long lasting ones in order to make their products for as cheap as possible. They will then send the marketing team out to promise that the product is made of the best quality available and hope that people believe it. They don't "plan" obselence they just build it in so they can save a chunk of money on the manufacture while knowing that the consumer will buy anyway because they like the brand or the advert. When it comes to enclosed unit design though, this is a real issue. The right-to-repair movement is fighting against companies that do this as their main business model, but even these companies are generally not trying to force people to buy new stuff when the old device breaks down - they are trying to ensure that they are the only available option for repair. The last half of your video is basically a complaint about hiring bad builders and states having lax building regs, so not relevant to planned obselence. The whole issue can be solved with better regulation of the consumer goods industry. Forcing them to advertise more honestly, or manufacture to tighter standards. People resist this because they think the price of goods will go up - which of course it will, but buying a freezer for $450 every 4 years is still more expensive than buying one for $800 every ten. Regulations could even those two equations out; turning a 4 year freezer into an 8 year one for the same overal cost. The result of that would still be $900 for 8 years of home food storage but the environmental cost would be lower! It's about how people want to demonstrate their control... And spreading the myth of planned obselence is only muddying the waters and preventing people from uniting to solve the correct problems
I think a good way to combat planned obsolescence would be to document it online in a wiki, compared alongside documented best practices and the products that use them. I've been dreaming of a "methodology" wiki for a while now, like a much more in-depth engineering & construction "wikihow", but sadly I don't think I have what it takes to become the man to build it. I hope either someone else builds it, or that I can overcome my depression and prove myself wrong. I think the former is most likely, however.
Mrs Carr this is all because of easy come and easy go. People make money without breaking a sweat. There teenage millionaire now. Long story short. Na this not gonna stop unless some guy like Thanos shows up and make the balance, I'm just saying 🤔😂
It’s no secret that all efforts towards sustainability are partial fixes without a fundamental change to our economy. The lightbulb conspiracy is a good example whereby long lasting bulbs, despite being invented, simply would not sustain a business model in the capitalist economy. So long as profit & growth is the name of the game the economy requires planned obsolescence or businesses fail. As individuals we must simply consume less, fix more and build local resilience.
Honestly most of what you describe is more excessive corner cutting facilitated by very weak legislation in the US. European homes are mostly build to last and yes they are significantly smaller but I also don't get why you'd need five bathrooms in one house.
Recently purchased a new Whirlpool fridge (plain white/top freezer). The thing made a gurgle sound about 50% of the time. I called the vendor (Lowes), and asked them to send a tech to check it out. They said rather than send a tech they would prefer to simply replace it, which they did under warranty (new one works fine). Don't know what happened to the fridge they hauled off, but it made me think that they must build them so cheaply they're 100% unconcerned about any salvage value.
We had a fancy shmancy samsung 4 door fridge that we splurged on. 3 years later it died. In our area there are zero shops or techs that work on samsung appliances. I contacted the upper management at samsung, long story short, they bought our fridge back. Stay away from samsung unless you know someone who can work on them.
except the ones built for the former and current robber Barron's. believe me as a builder in Seattle for 30 yrs there are homes i have worked on commissioned by the tech Oligarchs that will last a century or much longer and have design in place to facilitate future upgrades minimizing invasive demolition
Please make videos about the crazy house rehab culture that encourages ripping out perfectly fine parts of a house and replacing it with trendy new stuff. So wasteful, so foolish.
When it comes to homes, the problem lies with the legislation. There is so much of it at so many levels of government that its impossible to build anything other than cheap shitty houses. In the UK we have 11 sections to our building regulations and within those sections normally only 2 to 3 lines. In america you have more detailed requirements for the size of the lettering on the front of a house than we have for the structural loading requirements. " The building shall be constructed... so that loading... is transmitted to the ground safely... without impairing the structure of any other building." Thats it, thats all we need to do. How we do that is down to us, and we are trusted to build those houses to meet those requirements. What more do you need from legislation. Meanwhile in America you have a million words to tell you how many light switches a room needs. Then you complain when everything is built shit and cheap and falls down all the time.
The thing I see in the US housing market is houses are valued based upon how they look, their location and square footage. The price of a house is not based upon the quality of materials, design or inner working. Which makes it a bad investment to renovate a house above code, that an owner might not live in for life.
Dyson vacuums does this by designing a trigger switch that breaks over a few years. I opened one up and found the trigger was made if plastic and very thin in areas where it should be thick. I ended up fixing the cracked trigger by plastic welding and embedding a metal rod into it.
I plan to hire a builder in the very near future so I'll be having very frank discussions on this topic with them. I'm willing to spend a little more if it means I get electrics, plumbing and flooring that are so solid they wont need replacing and I won't have to tear up the building to get to them for repairs. Currently got an offer accepted on some land.
The best building material on the planet is pumicecrete Pumicecrete is a mixture of pumice cement and water mixed and poured into a set of reusable forms walls are poured from 12" to 24" thick pumicecrete is fireproof termite proof rust rot and mold proof and has a high R value and good sound attenuation solid poured walls means no critters can live in your walls If you would like to build a house that will last forever pumicecrete is the material you want
I don't actually believe this is planning. Instead chasing profit right now. Anybody who can plan that good would come up with some better ideas how to make money not harming the env along the way
You leave out one huge factor. Consumers drive the price point, they will go for the lowest price often without considering quality so the retailers pressure manufacturers to reduce prices and quality suffers. Consumers are just as guilty as the manufacturers for our predicament, it is just easy to blame the manufacturer.
I do not feel this supposed dopamine kick. I want to cry whenever I have to buy something new. I tear out my hair and rend my cheap foreign made clothing because I know I am being raped by the mark up and will be do for another raping in a few years time.
Products are disposable because consumers prefer cheaper products. Generally the corporations have both good and cheaper product and the cheaper sells way more.
This will continue as long as consumers remain either, addicted to buying into stupid fashion changes or wake up to how they are being screwed by the system.
A rew years ago the only fridges/freezers found in the landfill where because the plastics inside failed - compressors used to last longer then the purchacer! - 40 years was common , not uncommon.
I am on my 3rd stove in the 29 years I have lived in my home. It is always the circuit board that goes bad. I would like to be able to buy a decent stove that has NO electronics. My grandmother's stove lasted her a lifetime. It was so old it did not have a pilot light and she lit it with a match.
As a contractor i agree 100%. If you buy a house your contractvwill say that you can't come in and check the house before it is finished for safety reasons, but in reality we know why. For that reason i am builing a house myself and the inspectors say i overkill in some cases which i believe should be a standard.
Give your business card? 😂
Amen! I'd never trust almost any modern house construction. I'm on year 3 of overbuilding my new shop. The electrical inspector kinda laughed at me for running the conduit for the feeder 40" deep under my driveway (code is 18"). I used glued mortise-and-tenon joints to attach the studs to the top/bottom plates, glued the 2x6s forming posts on multi-stud areas (next to window/door openings) together, used big glu-lams for all headers, sealed every sheathing seam, used both liquid flashing and Flexwrap on window openings, shimmed windows to drain the sills, installed a real rain screen (using 1/2" plywood strips @ 12" OC) under the siding, peel-N-stick rubber gaskets over every conduit penetrating the sheathing, and 5/8" fire-rated drywall everywhere. The building will last way longer than most. I despise cheap construction!
I'm with you. My land is fairly remote, so I'm doing everything I can to ensure I can live efficiently, with as little reliance on public services as possible. But it is extremely difficult to find builders in my state that want to build a net-zero, passive or even just a highly-engineered home. Everything is about pricing, convenience and time, which in my opinion is what is driving planned obsolescence in the first place.
Americans have lost the will to buy quality products that last for generations because we just assume we will always be able to upgrade in a few years. Well that's just fine...as long as supply chains don't crumble, resources don't run low and pandemics don't disrupt economies. Now we're starting to see the effects of when those things happen. Hopefully, it will cause people to rethink the disposable economy that we find ourselves in.
As someone who doesn't know how to do all that.. am I better learning how to build one or are there legitimate builders out there? I am afraid of having a house built just for it to be trash.
@@muffinbutton1484 Every builder will claim to be a legitimate builder, unfortunately it's up to you to research durable building, have what you want on paper and be prepared to enter the worksite in progress to make sure they aren't cutting corners.
There is a saying about value engineering. Anyone can build something that works. A good engineer can build something that barely works.
Agreed. It's generally not hard to over-engineer something (eg. use 2x thicker slab, 2x thicker steel). The hard part is convincing the clients why they should pay double the price... or in the case of aerospace; convincing gravity to let your plane lift off the ground.
There is a simular saying in my trade;
Any machinist can build your part and solve your problem well.
Only an engineer can design it to barely work for twice the price.
I should note. Machinist, as it was used locally; in the industry has since been separated into three diffrent engineering fields and one "low skill" trade still called machinist.
It was considered too difficult and expensive to apprentice machinists, and there was only about 40% who could pass each skill test that came along.
Out of four.
So I got lucky on that one, last apprenticeship NASA paid for and I just made it under the cut off. Albeit without enough hands on time at the time, but I got all the engineering side of it.
Not a good saying on tectonic active areas…
Great video as always
@@TehlItER You can always move somewhere else.
I'm kinda happy to say that in EU there are more and more laws put in place to offset this. We have mandatory warranty lengths on electrical appliances, a new law called 'right to repair' was instated couple of months back. There was a huge lobbying campaign going on but politicians fighting for this were louder than manufacturers. I was proud of our representatives that day.
Lucky you having politicians actually doing something useful AND doing it in favor of the consumer. Too bad I’m in America where we are free to be exploited and taken advantage of. Best country in the world!
Sadly the American public has been used for decades as the grand experiment in how to rape their hard earned income to be used for buying off increasingly rich politicians, corporate facilitations and endless illegal wars for the profits of the MIC, while they receive absolutely nothing for their tax dollars.... even during a supposed pandemic.
@Skunket It was a engineered virus to be used as a weapon of war on human beings that escaped (called gain of function research) ... which should never have existed in the first place and Fauci founded, knew and backed it along with his bogus solutions that change and fail from week to week.
There was nothing 'natural' about it and yes it caused deaths, less than publicized.... and worse, is now being used as the excuse to literally alter the life humans have known for at least the last 300 years and freedom and democracy will be the biggest victims for all of us who live on this planet... which is the goal of those who want to control and own us chattel. You should fear this virus less than those who pay for it's creation.
@Skunket Well we DON'T trust our government, because nothing comes back to us... no health care even during a pandemic, no health care at all actually...which is the biggest cause of bankruptcy in the USA, while Fauci changes his mind every week about what should or shouldn't be done, while charging you to be tested for covid when he was actually a part of the 'gain of function' research in Wuhan (another word for weaponizing viruses). Every dime we make goes to facilitating the enrichment of corporations at the expense of the citizen and into illegally starting wars all over the world.
I'm glad you can feel that your government is on your side, I would like to feel the same... but that is really not the case here.
@Skunket Here's how they take care of us: th-cam.com/video/bdWpWTwBGZw/w-d-xo.html
I've never been so glad to live in a 180 year old homestead. It may be mostly not up to code, but when your house was built before your state was a state (Michigan), you get a lot of grandfathering. I've put patchwork into just about every part of this building, and some of those
Rossman is great! I know there was a right to repair bill being passed around in Congress but I don't remember how much it changed things
I think the easiest way to address this problem is to require all manufacturers of products to take the product back and dispose of it when it dies. When manufacturers have to directly bear the cost of disposing of their products, they will have much more financial incentive to make products last longer and also be more easily recycled at end of life.
Love this idea
I agree except durability and sustainability don’t necessarily go hand in hand.
@@aayotechnology There are always exceptions, but I think in general they do go hand in hand. Certainly energy consuming devices can get to a point where their efficiency is far enough behind the state of the art to make them worth replacing evening considering the energy required to make the replacement and the energy required to recycle the product, but often this analysis is not done very thoroughly and it can take a fair increase in efficiency to make it worth scraping a product that is still working well and is reliable.
@@LTVoyager so a gas burning vehicle would be considered sustainable in your eyes if it got 100 mpg? Even if it consumes fossil fuels. That’s a pretty big exception to your rule considering there are over a billion out there
@@aayotechnology Sustainable is a red herring term. Is lithium mining sustainable?
I am sitting in my 100 year old house in England, on a chair that I inherited from my uncle, who bought it many years ago from his sister-in-law. In the corner is my 18th century table, and I've a coffee sitting on a table that my father made about 50 years ago. Most of my furniture is inherited, I am lucky. It has all lasted long enough for me to do so, and much will outlive me.
However, in the kitchen it is a different matter, the oven looks odd, there is a gap above it because I could not find an oven and microwave to fit the space where the 5 year old microwave blew up 6 years ago, then the oven stopped working the following year. The fridge and freezer, bought at the same time as the other items, stopped working 2 years ago. The washing machine though was my parents, so is about 20 years old.
I'm watching this on a television that I bought 10 years ago. The screen has not been working properly for a couple of years, but I'm hoping that it will last a while longer.
In my wardrobe I have clothes that I bought 25-30 years ago. Still in good condition because they were well made. Last week I binned some shirts, they literally fell apart, despite being only 2 years old.
Here in England it seems, from my experience, that if you are lucky to have things that are old they are well made and will last, but if it is new, then all of the issues raised apply. However, although companies can be accused of greed, they are providing jobs. If everything were to last and last, then they would need fewer workers. I do agree about government's role. Here they banned incandescent bulbs a few years ago. When replacing bulbs we had to buy halogen. Now those are to be banned in favour of LED. This is all very well, but some of my light fittings were not suitable for the halogen bulbs then available. I had to replace perfectly good lights.
Most people that I know have similar stories. Most of them are also not shopaholics, so are not choosing to throw out and replace. It is being forced upon us. It also is often worse with items that we can no longer do without, kitchen white goods and electronics. As yet the house issues do not apply so much here.
I'm afraid I do get a bee in my bonnet about this issue, hence the essay! However, rant over, and thank you for this video.
I'm sitting in a metal office chair that was built sometime between the 1950's and 1970's. The base sheet metal parts were brazed together with filler/rod that is golden colored. It isn't spot welded. I saw the metal when I sand blasted the chair to refinish it. The only "plastic" is the caps on the ends of the legs, and it is very tough. I have recovered the seat, back, and arms a few times with new fabric. My desk is made from particle board or mdf because it is 3/4" sheet with white melamine on both sides. I built it when I was 18 years old and now I am 40 years old. 22 years isn't bad. My Tig welder is from 1965 and one of my air compressors is from 1947 while the other is a couple decades newer but the same Westinghouse Air Brake Company brand and design, just bigger. The air compressors were designed and built to be used on trains. I found the rebuild parts for both air compressors and restored the one from 1947. The bigger version I have could be replaced with a new air compressor today, with similar quality, but it would cost $3500 or more. They are used in commercial buildings/shops. Industrial quality and size products are still built fairly well, but everyday inexpensive average consumer products are made cheap and to fail. New Tig welders use advanced electronics instead of huge transformers, so they have many advantages, but the price is huge and they can easily fail before the warranty is up. The parts to repair them can cost almost as much as a new machine, when not under warranty.
Aha! Essayists unite! Let's see if I can keep this brief, maybe - But there's an issue you brought up that *I* get a bee in my bonnet about :p
"They are providing jobs". I find this to be a rather limp excuse for propping up an economy that depends on consumerism to force people to depend on jobs to live.
Yes, we are not yet at a point where robots can replace humans in every field necessary for life to continue. We do need things to be made, at some rate, or we just won't have those things. But that observation is a far cry from artificially creating fake jobs that don't actually provide any real value, just so people have SOMEWHERE to turn misery into a pittance of money.
"Oh don't worry, we'll give you a lot of things to do that make us a lot of money, and we'll give you just enough to scrape by in return! Which completely excuses creating a world where you need more and more money just to stay afloat."
Money, or as you pointed out, inherited wealth, in this case in the form of stout and reliable goods. No need to replace your table a dozen times when you have a perfectly good one that will last longer than you will, yes? I would very much like to see a world where people are encouraged to create, hold onto, and acquire those kinds of wealth, instead of being hemmed into this horrible, resource-glutton consumerism.
I have to admit, we really need to solve this problem BEFORE automation can catch up to basic goods like the ones we're discussing here. Because it would be a horrible tragedy to have a system where MORE faulty-by-design goods can be made at faster and faster rates with fewer and fewer human workers involved, and sold to people who have less and less to support themselves with, due to dwindling job opportunities. And yet that's exactly the future we're looking at, unless we start doing something about it... *now.*
Part of that is getting away from this idea that jobs must remain a necessity, and gravitating towards the idea that jobs must be necessary to continue to exist. And creating an economy that is job independent - An economy that, however we might achieve such a thing, does not require every person to work to live.
My take on the job creation idea: if we didn't need to spend so much, families might return to a 1 income household and children could be raised by their actual parent. And a single person might thrive without a roommate.
You are the reason the world is in so much trouble today. Bragging about your fancy brandnew century old stuff and boasting about it. The Terp I live on is at least 6000+ years old.
If people save money from not having to replace their stuff every X years they will spend it on other goods and services, creating jobs in others sectors. There will not be less jobs, just jobs in other locations and sectors.
A perfectly legitimate idea, "planning for when our product becomes obsolete" turned into a not so legitimate idea, "how can we make our product become obsolete faster."
If that's what the market demands then manufacturers have to do it. All manufacturers bend to the will of the market.
In Germany, we have debates, that the warranty required on everything by law should get extended from two years to five years. I would absolutely love to see this happen, but for some products even five years is terrible warranty.
The best recent change in Germany was making sellers responsible for recycling used electronics/large appliances.
The same thing is happening here in Czechia too. With building materials the warranty is usually 10-30 years though.
If the government were to force companies to extend warranties on products, you as a consumer would see the price difference yourself. Government is no the solution.
@@jeremytibbals7057 well it obviously was the solution in the case of Czechia or Germany. Or, most of the EU, which pushes these laws.
@@jeremytibbals7057 I think what you're missing the point, is this goes back to the old argument buy 7 $10 blenders or one $70 blender in the same time frame. The forced warranty would increase minimum costs but the products would be forced to be created better on average. In order for the company to not lose money.
I purchased a 50s ranch house over a newer model home based partially on the construction methods. Also it was observable that the foundation was good. So much stuff from the 40s and 50s seem really solid. Old electric fans from the 40s are the opposite of planned obsolescence. It seems like we crossed some weird threshold in the 90s. I worked in construction then. You could see it happening.
We have a 1954 Ranch. I've never complained about the original build, but the previous renovations...that's another story.
CAD started being used in the 90's
Same here, bought a 1960 ranch with concrete block walls for this very reason. Of course I still got screwed on garbage orangeburg piping they used for the main exterior sewage line and had to replace it. They really began pushing the cheaply built wood frame houses with poorly engineered water barrier materials starting in the 90s.
@@Son37Lumiere I think ours is cast iron but that I wouldn't be surprised if it was terracotta at a certain point. One of the first things I did was remove the trees nearby in hopes that I could table any issues with it. I hope your newer sewage line lasts way beyond your lifetime. It sounds brutally expensive.
Things were made to last, unlike today.
I once worked in construction litigation. I was at a site inspection and we were looking at bathtubs. They were the kind made of fiberglass, molded into the space. They were failing and leaking. The buildings were about 5 years old. I asked the building expert why they failed so quickly and he told me they are only intended to last ten years because people will remodel their baths anyway.
Wow.
We have a "modern" fiberglass kind of bathtub, and it's lasted 16 years so far with a tiny bit of very minor chipping.
I cannot imagine it leaking after 5 years. Like, no.
It is usually some small part that fails. Giants are trying to seed the idea that nothing is repairable and if so, only by them. My dishwasher just recetly stopped working. It was just a burnt end switch, they get tired after thousands of clicks. Don't let yourself be fooled, everything should be repairable.
Should be repariable. Should be.-- but after repeated failure of the warranty repairs, as happened to us, you have to decide it would never happen and had to buy a new washer, giving them the otherwise new washer--who knows what was done with it. We had to get on with our lives --not constantly schedule someone to come to our house waste our time, tell us they fixed it, week after week.
I had that with my furnace. It stopped working and the only solution (from experts was to replace it). Some youtube searches + a whole weekend taking it apart, I was able to fix it for under 50 bucks and its good for another 10 or 20 years.
It was some work but honestly nothing that an average home owner cannot handle.
When I was growing up in DFW in the 1980's one of my parent's friends was a GM Quality Manager. His job was to analyze cars that had survived for more than five years and 60,000 miles to determine which parts hadn't worn out. These parts were then Value Engineered to ensure that they minimized cost while getting much closer to fully wearing out at five years without prematurely failing. These efforts ensured that the initial cost of the vehicle was minimized while also ensuring that all of the car's systems would fail almost simultaneously at five years and 60,000 miles. Our talk was quite enlightening. A few years after this conversation, Japanese car companies moved into GM's turf and were winning consumers over with their 100,000 mileage track record (Honda and Toyota). Soon, GM had to retool their cars so that they would catastrophically fall apart at 100,000 miles.
And from what I understand, they failed at that last one, and are now exiting the domestic automobile market.
I don't think matching the lives of individual components ("catastrophically [falling] apart") and planned obsolescence are necessarily the same thing. The car's target life could be increased by selecting the components that break and strengthening them.
Maybe that part was a joke though?
I own a Piaggio motor scooter and I’d much rather everything fall apart at once than pay a shop $150/hour in labor forever. Factories are incentivized to work efficiently, which benefits everyone. Shops are incentivized to work as slow as possible which only benefits them. If I were to buy a new electric scooter it would use less fuel and also have fewer parts to break.
@@andyb2339 This is where the "dumbing down" of people in general plays in. So many today not only haven't a clue how their vehicles work, and of course wouldn't know a wrench from a hole in the ground, but don't even know (or care about) the most basic of routine maintenance. Shops put out videos of where people have brought in vehicles and have NEVER even changed the oil! As a culture, we've been groomed to be dependent on others for everything. People can't even read maps anymore because they depend on electronic gadgets to verbally tell them where to go.People don't even go shopping anymore - they get somebody else to do it for them!
My brother's 2011 Ford Focus recently had a head gasket go and the shop told him the car wasn't even worth fixing. Meanwhile, my 2010 Pontiac Vibe (built on a joint venture with a Toyota engine) is still running strong. Growing up in Michigan, buying Japanese cars was verboten. When I went to see my mom, my family wouldn't even let us park our 2013 Mazda 5 in the driveway for the first few years of owning it. It's the best vehicle I ever owned. GM is even worse than Ford. My next vehicle will be American made though. A Tesla.
@@Nphen I've got a 93 Exploder and a 97 Camry. Both still run, but guess which one has routinely required more maintenance, repairs, or had parts just age terribly.
You forgot aesthetics. "Modern" buildings rarely look good, and if a building is ugly we tend to not care about it. If we don't care they get neglected and age much faster than if they were cared for and repaired and upgraded.
It's very, very simple really and was perfectly understood a hundred years ago but today it's a concept seldomly taken seriously despite its massive impact.
We're building houses and places that looks like crap and rapidly turns into crap.
That's funny. I feel the complete opposite. Can't stand the look of old homes or buildings
So ugly
Hogwash. People don’t care for things because they’d rather be doing something else or spending their money on something else. It has little to do with the design.
@@seanwhalen5738 Gotta love the stucco and fake brick tile they use. I'll take the design of an late 1800s Victorian home over the crap on the market, anyday.
I kind of agree. The "modern" and brutalist styles we're used to are eyesores. I really like brownstones and gilded age stuff.
Thank you for bringing attention to the fact that manufactures are some of the biggest polluters. I just want a slower life. A house, fashion and appliances that last. I don't want to buy more-more-more. It's depressing, having a house full of flimsy stuff.
A friend's expensive livingroom seating has cardboard in the arms and has had to have major repairs twice in less than a year.
Planned obsolescence for one company is an opportunity for another company. I'm thinking of Honda and Toyota building better quality and longer lasting cars than the Detroit automakers. People switched brands and bought Japanese instead of American cars.
This right here is another reason why planned obselence is essentially just a conspiracy theory and is complete nonsense.
Even the content creator here bought a fridge from a different brand so exactly how did GE benefit from building a fridge that was only meant to last just beyond the warranty?? The old way is still the best way: make your product to last and you've made a customer who will last too.
(I commented about this earlier; but the real reason for cheap parts and products facing early is because they are cutting corners and hoping the shiny advert will still win them customers. )
@@Wolf-Rayet_Arthur it's not a conspiracy theory, we literally study how to do this in college.
It works because people don't switch brands easily in some markets.
HAHAHAHAHAHA keep thinking that. There's a reason why big business ate little business, and it'll stay that way so long as people like you exist.
@@AmandaVieiraMamaesouCult So you're saying that you learn how to cut corners using cheaper materials in the knowledge that the shiny advert will keep people loyal to the brand... and yet you comment to say i'm wrong?
@@Wolf-Rayet_Arthur you claimed it was only a conspiracy theory, whereas he claimed he even gets taught how to do it. So, if we accept his claim as true, I'd say he would also be correct in saying you were wrong.
Honestly, it's a bit more complicated than that. Things are designed with specific scenarios in mind and then build to the specifications which ensue from those scenarios. Many tools for example are designed to last for approximately 100 hours of operation with light loads. Which is totally fine, if they are used once a year for fifteen minutes, as is the case with many tools.
The real issue is that companies aren't required to disclose those specifications. So consumers have no way to tell whether some product will actually do what they need it to do and for how long approximately.
IMO there is only one indication for what a product is actually worth: that's the amount of warranty the manufacturer is willing to grant to its customers and how many strings he is going to attach to that offer.
So, bottom line, I'd say you are actually correct. He isn't learning how to cut corners. He is learning how to design things to specification. Which is totally not a bad thing and also not a conspiracy.
It's consumers buying stuff for it being shiny instead of looking for actual long lasting value which makes it hard for companies with actually long lasting products to compete ...
It's just easier and more convenient for us to blame those companies for catering to our preferences than to change our own behavior and to demand better laws. Right to repair and right to reverse engineer are a thing in Europe, as are mandatory minimum warranties on all technical products. Things aren't gloomy here either, but at least my LEDs don't die in 4 months. I actually haven't had a single one die as of yet in the last 10 years ...
Thank you. I think flip shows contribute to this too. I wish more of the tv home shows focused on a house's bones, instead of using the structure as an inconvenient headache that takes away money from generic design.
I've learned more about homeownership when I subscribed to your channel than I ever did, 1000x thanks!
Even 30 years ago, the best advice when laying any kind of floor or wall covering was to stash away a meaningful extra for eventual repairs, speaking from family experience. Unfortunately this is not new by any means.
Also, those ice-maker integrated fridges (called "american style" here) are just asking for trouble (and if not cleaned properly, basically food poisoning) due to extra parts to malfunction.
For piping without having to excavate the concrete slab: have a cellar. Of course, it's much more expensive at start, but that solves the majority of problems that can arise, and also creates a smaller amount of new ones. But it's expensive.
I loved having a basement in Ohio, but in most of Texas, to my knowledge, basements or cellars are not practical because of the soil. I think limestone is prevalent throughout, but I can't say for certain as I've never done or seen a soil survey.
@@grondhero it's the watertable that is the issue. You can had dig a well in Texas, usually within 10 feet, twenty to thirty feet is a deep well.
Obviously you want to go deeper, but you can dig very shallow and hit water.
Your basement then basically becomes a poorly constructed ship hull, and the house "floats" till it breaks.
Not such a big issue for larger commercial buildings because they have the weight, and money for proper mitigation efforts during construction, but houses are just too light, or the efforts to mitigate it pre-construction are insurmountable due to complexity or practical funding.
And...in Smith County at least, if not state wide, they are banning pier and beam construction for residential use, and mandating slab construction.
Which make access for repairs more untenable.
A crawling space is sufficient for that.
While a cellar is often great, it's also quite expensive.
There's much cheaper, small design changes possible to the same effect.
While pvc is technically to code for all dirty water extraction where I live. I, for instance, will use the municipal sewage type pipes for any parts buried. Adds less then a hundred bucks to the material cost, and is rated for 75 years.
Electrical conduits also get a pipe. Worst case if any changes or replacement is ever needed is then one small access hole in the house, and a little digging in the yard.
@@sigi9669 a crawl space could be a cost effective compromise.
Fantastic presentation, it definitely feels like everything nowadays is deliberately designed to fail, even infrastructure. Northern Virginia is basically is a state of perpetual construction because contractors are being paid just to build things and leave instead of building them to last
it gets even worse when you watch Notjustbikes' youtube channel, most suburbs and towns in America are in the red because of all the incredibly expansive infrastructure they can't afford to maintain, and they just keep taking debt to make more. Giant stroads, unwalkable areas, inexplicable fences so you can't ever walk from a house to a business
@@override367 oh man I’m scared yet intrigued to check that channel out...
Like Lewis Rosman is always saying. Right to repair isn't just an electronics issue.
You mean Louis Rossmann? Haha.
First off, I like your video and the way you lay out information.
Planned obsolescence is absolutely a bane on humanity's ability to progress into more efficient human flourishing, and some of the causes of it that you have already listed are absolutely true... but it is my belief that the consumerist behaviors of the public are merely a symptom of a larger cause. After years of spending much of my free time investigating history and public policy, I believe that this system of cronyism is designed from the ground up to be wasteful, to supply petty conveniences that make people feel good, and to ensure long lasting reliance on the crony system.
First, ill define cronyism. Cronyism is an economic system that looks much like capitalism; in fact, it is extremely often called capitalism by those who dont have an understanding of economics and others who want to hide that we live under a crony system. In addition to facading as capitalism, on the back end a cronyism system the real mechanism that dictate many factors from price all the way down to supply and demand is the governments deep involvement in many, if not most, of the markets. This combination, facading as capitalism while really being heavily influenced and effected by government involvement, is what cronyism is. As an addition, lets define capitalism. A google search will provide this: "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state." Note, that to be a capitalistic system, businesses, and entire markets must lack control or involvement of the state (government).
While researching the history of public policy and economics, it doesnt take very long for one to notice how consistently high-influence individuals within large corporations hop back and forth between being some kind of 3 letter acronym (CEO and so on) and running/winning public office positions, many call this the revolving door of the government and corporate world. It doesnt take a genius to guess that these same individuals, and their government friends, more times than not pass legislation that benefits the companies, processes, and products that profit greatly. As it turns out, a vast majority of these products of course end up being created with planned obsolescence, or lack cost efficiency.
As for housing, this is no different. Government enforced codes force people to build houses within a very narrow window of methodology and many times with specific materials. You mentioned the slab issue, and how post and beam would be a fantastic solution, which was a great example. Another example regards dry laid stone masonry. Dry laid means with no cement or mortar. This technique has been around for ages, and there are still examples around in some places which are great examples of why dry laid stone is amazing, the most obvious reason is certainly that it lasts for hundreds if not thousands of years if done right. Another amazing thing about dry laid stone is that anyone can do it and learn it, yes it is physically involved, but it is simple. It doesnt take investing in thousands of dollars of equipment to shape the stones and put them together, no, just a couple hammers and some chisels, time and a bit of strength and an individual can build a foundation wall, pier, fireplace and chimney, or entire houses out of the most abundant resource on the earth... stone. Whats the catch then? Well, try to get a code inspector to approve your dry laid foundation in most places and your SOL..... I wont even get into the morality of somebody else having the right to tell you how to build your own structure....
Almost every single process of our lives has been monopolized by a cronyist system (the government/big business partnership). This has created multiple generations of individuals who cannot create much for themselves:
-They cant grow their own food.
-They cant build their own houses.
-They cant even entertain themselves.
-They cant catch and clean their own water.
Now, of course people are okay with this because when we let others who specialize in something do it for us, they generally do it very well, and there is a huge amount of convince to not have to do all of the things that are necessities for life, they certainly can add up. But.. there is an extreme on both sides of the spectrum, and right now we find ourselves on the side where almost every aspect of life has become a highly centralized process in which big business and government have taken responsibility (and control) of almost every aspect of our lives. When people stop paying attention to this, which they have for the most part, things like planned obsolescence, money funneling, or probably the worst, that most people have no clue about, a horribly unhealthy centralized food and water production system, can all emerge at the detriment of the majority and the vast gain of the very very few in power.
I dunno Ms. Carr, calling it "planed obsolescence" makes it sound like a conspiracy of bad faith, but from my humble 10 years experience in the construction industry, most crappy homes are a result of a trifecta of client's cheapness and general ignorance, inexperienced and uninterested construction crew, and a greedy contractor. These three always come together and it's a systemic problem in the industry (at least in my country).
p.s. I think it would be interesting for many to see a video about CEB and rammed earth construction. I'm seriously considering constructing my new home from stabilized earth blocks, and it would be very interesting to hear your perspective on this new/old construction tech
Agreed. Planned obsolescence is the wrong term. It really is everyone wanting to do as little for as cheap as possible.
I would argue the consumer is just as greedy, wanting to spend less is basically the same as a contractor charging as much as they can.
@@agisler87 I wouldn't put much guilt on the consumers though, these are mostly normal folks, a lot of times they're in a pinch, but what's worst is that they are not informed and are easily manipulated into believing they are about to save a buck. And you can't blame them, i mean, most of the guys *working* in the industry rarely know anything outside their practice
@@agisler87 Considering wages have barely moved for decades while housing prices have multiplied ten fold how can you possibly blame clients for wanting to save some money?
@@Son37Lumiere I am not blaming consumers. I meant to only point out that an employer labeled "greedy" because they don't want to pay more for labor is doing the exact same thing as a consumer unwilling to pay more for XYZ.
I think the word greed is almost always misused and is never defined by the person who uses it. A greedy person can be doing good or bad. When does someone become greedy? It puzzles me.
@@agisler87
Give me a break. It is not the same thing. Paying your employees a minimum wage or just above so you make millions a year is the definition of greed. One doesn't become a billionaire without screwing others over in one form or another to achieve that wealth.
My wife and I have had this same discussion numerous times. We still have the same dryer we bought in 1998; I have changed the belt and various electronics a couple times, but most of it is the original components. The washer we bought with it finally rusted through just 2 years ago. Meanwhile, the fridge we bought 5 years ago (to replace a 20 year old fridge that came with the house) is already showing signs of wear. We have gone through a few dishwashers, and each one lives a bit less time than the one before it.
I have also thrown out numerous tools and appliances (power drivers, saws, toasters, coffee makers) because one small component failed and a replacement part was either unavailable or cost more than a whole new item. A lot of the time, it’s the add-on bells-and-whistles of modern items that fail early, and I don’t really want them in the first place, but you can’t find a version without them. I think that if you had a store that sold basic, solid products with user-replaceable parts, you could make a killing. But what manufacturer these days would make them for you?
Still have the Maytag washer and dryer my Dad bought in the 70's before I was born...
I noticed that too. The simpler the appliance or tool, the more it lasts. I had a 25 year old washer that finally died and was able to replace it with a model almost exact to it, which is a very simple, no frills machine, and see if it lasts longer than one of those with a lot of add ons.
My appliance tech told me the same, the versions will lots of add ons don't last, unlike models like the one I just picked.
It's amazing how long lasting much of the old appliances were, my toaster is from the 50's and still rivals those made today. The microwave ovens from the late 70's were the peak of build quality.
If something does go wrong with them, it's usually because of age alone more than actually wearing out.
Has anyone owned a speed queen washer or dryer? I like them because they are no frills and pretty durable
@@aayotechnology I never owned one but I too have heard they are very durable.
The Kelvinator fridge my grandmother bought in 1937 still runs. I drive a 1972 Jeep and a 1988 Land Cruiser. My wife's Honda has paint that is scratched and tatty after little more than two years. We built, and I omitted a few touches I now regret, such as solar heated underfloor heating and conduit trunking to allow more cabling to be added. But the second unit we built and sold has now been gutted and rebuilt by the new owners, just because they wanted a different arrangement of the rooms.
Have you ever looked at the energy consumption of this Kelvinator Fridge? My guess is that a new more economic one will pay for itself within a year. If you recycle your old fidge is even more environmentally friendly to replace your old fridge than to keep using a very old one.
@@heelgraag YOU are probably right. My ld Jeep's fuel economy is terrible, the Cruiser uses twice the fuel a friend's modern van uses. On the other hand, the energy cost of recycling, say, the Jeep into a new car must be more than the fuel I waste over the five years modern cars are designed for.
@@heelgraag The compressors on old fridges weren't that much less efficient than modern ones, and R-12 was a highly efficient refrigerant. Also, old fridges didn't have defrost, a big energy hog. So in real terms, the 1937 Kelvinator almost certainly uses less electricity than a modern one. And considering it's never been replaced, it hasn't accrued the carbon emissions to produce new fridges for the 84 years of its existence.
I think it would require an expansion of the EnergyStar concept to cover things like home construction, so the value of trading a couple hundred sq-ft of floor space for heavier insulation and a better foundation for your area are carried over when you sell. Another expansion of the idea would have a "Product Life Star" with ratings for repair-ability and durability along with energy; maybe have a projected annual carbon footprint based on it's prorated life. A problem I had with my older home is that when the old fridge died I had trouble finding one small enough to fit the opening-everything readily available was way too big- an expansion of the Super Size Me idea.
Decent idea. However, energy star has become politicized and useless.
I think the best option is an aware public that demands quality.
When I was growing up in the 60's we had a new refrigerator and a used one. The new one had fallen off the truck and had 2 fist sized dents on the side and my dad got it 50% off, this was before I was born, probably in the early 50's. This refrigerator worked faithfully, without problems until the early 80's. Then we got a new Sears frost free model. It had maybe 1 1/2 inch walls and ran 45 minutes out of an hour/every hour. In 1971 my parents bought a Sears Kenmore heavy duty dryer, which got flooded out when the basement flooded. Replaced the igniter and it kept running years later we replaced the belt and drum rollers. Now 50 years later it is still going strong in my house. Now true they did not have the features we have today, but appliances today are woefully inferior in design and a glaring lack of quality.
There's so many sensors and parts, it's hard for a person who does minor repairs, to fix the washers and dryers built in the last decades
I like Kenmore very much. Older appliances from this brand last almost forever. I have a dryer that is 22 years old and a vacuum that is 20 years old from that brand
Great Video! It always amazes me how bad building practices are in North America especially.
I have to complain about something though.
3:25 That is NOT a difficult repair in any way. Desoldering that would be very easy if you have some experience. The part doesnt look too special either, so finding a replacement shouldn't be too hard either.
Yeah, I was just looking at that piece scratching my head trying to work out how that could take hours to replace. I've got minimal experience, but that looks like an hour at most, all included.
Yes, not the greatest example for those of us who are not scared to repair. Something like a failed IC that has the part number scratched off would be a better example .
Belinda! According to ICC building code 403.1.6 all perimeter wood sills shall be anchored to concrete foundations with min. 1/2" BOLTS. Sections 317-318 require pressure treated wood in contact with concrete foundations. Your example of a random nail in a non-PT board is miss-leading. There are many areas of improvement that should be addressed in the code (such as use of particle board as flooring in home and mobile homes) but this is not one.
In addition, the top wall plate to roof rafter connection must be an approved metal bracket in areas of potential high winds (wind load) such as hurricane alley in the USA. The codes exist, your examples are violations, not standard building practices to insure planned obsolesce.
We talk about recycling,we speak of energy efficient but we fail to improve the quality of homes and products that we produce we unfortunately have grown complacent to the issue because replacing repairing seems to be a acceptable strategy for our economy. I do enjoy your channel your honest opinions
The right to repair movement is gaining momentum. Unfortunately this depends on legislation and the government to fix that problem. It will not work. I believe the market will correct most of this when a companies produce products that are durable and reparable and get rewarded for it in sales.
When have markets ever corrected? If they did the quality would increase somewhere. It is not increasing at all. Food, equipment, houses, cars - the quality is beyond horrible on all fronts.
@@michaelnurse9089 I meant the free trade market. The finical market is not free these days and will not fix anything anytime soon.
I'm a home inspector and have seen many appliances and utilites from pre 1950 that are still operational and were built to such a high standard compared to today's products. We saw a water heater from 1950 made out of ceramic and it was still working!! Today's hot water heaters do not last nearly as long.
I've been saying this to everyone for decades but Nobody will believe me, except for my wife and son.
in my house for years we cracked this joke that appliances contain a time bomb that explodes the day after the warranty expires- this vid suggests that's not too far off from what actually happened.
Sunken living rooms! There are so many design trends that realtors say you need to follow to be able to get top dollar for your home. Colorful wall to wall carpet, sunken living rooms, wall paper of any design from any point in time. The colorful bathrooms of the 50s are now a negotiation point to get a lower price (Because no one can sit on a teal toilet in 2021, apparently) Paint color choices too, to a lesser extent.
In 20 years, people will be digging out those filled in living rooms and installing colorful toilets and carpet because, inevitably, these trends come back around.
I want to know where these stupid "design trends" in the US come from. One current one is painting homes for sale a depressing grey and painting kitchen cabinets white, even when the cabinets are real wood. Realtors tell their sellers to do this, and then they tell their buyers to want this? Is that how this nonsense works? Who is getting the kickbacks from the makers of white and grey paint?
I tried to find the most used paint color ( resale value) and after several Google pages, could only find designated experts and paint companies declaring the best colors to use. No actual data.
@@YSLRD Unless the paint color greatly worsens the look of the home, like a garish color or it makes the home look darker than it is, I can't imagine it matters much. I just hate grey. To me, a newly painted home means 1) they raised the cost of the home to make up for the expense of painting; 2) they might've painted to hide damage, like water spots. Plus, on the most recent house I've saw, they repainted the interior grey, but didn't bother cleaning/fixing the gutters. However, the house is in an excellent location, so there was a bidding war and it went contingent quickly.
I always thought the pastel colored 1950s bathrooms were actually a selling point.
@@redbloodedbutterfly It's not limited to the US. I'm in Australia and just about all volume built houses have a white and grey colour scheme throughout the interior.
Planned obsolescence is the reason i buy older vehicles, easy to fix, easy to maintain. That's why my 65 has been on the road for 55 years. The fact that this is starting to apply to houses is astounding, looks like I'm building my own house now.
I was told to use this strategy when buying my first car. But I find anything old that the 90s it's really hard to find parts for. Alot of my friends followed the same strategy and ended up having to scrap their old cars since nobody was selling the parts needed to fix them.
I think it's a balance. You don't need to buy a fancy new car every year. The car I have now is a 2002 model, and has a wide variety of parts available but also not expensive to fix or repair.
I got a used 2012 chevy volt (plug in hybrid) for $3250 at this point save my so much money in gas that is a "free car", In 2 years I change one $70 window regulator
@@dylantd9189 fair enough, i used rockauto for most of my car stuff. I inherited the pickup, and the tradeoff is big now, most 90s stuff is becoming classic and come with the classic tax
Now i know what to call it when they brick older phones with the new updates hahaha awesome video as always, love learning from ya
An F1 Driver once said: "A good race car falls apart after the race." Because additional durability would come at the cost of speed. Electronics are designed the same way.
While planned obsolescence is a problem the flip side is that we tend to purchase from the cheapest manufacturer. Doing this forces the manufacturer to use cheaper, inferior materials to meet the expected price point. The truth is, their are still great long lasting products our there but most people just will not pay the price.
See computer components. The CPU and motherboard I am typing this on is from 2008 and still works perfectly fine. (MSI X58 Pro motherboard with an Intel i920 CPU) It was built and advertised as a high durability motherboard and was priced accordingly.
@@Crosshair84 You bought based on quality rather than price. I have many items that are 30 - 40 years old and work just fine. Why? because I spend the money up front to buy quality. In the long run it's cheaper than buying based only on price.
New home builders are garbage. You wouldn't believe the amount of day drinking and litter alone. I think they bury the waste under the lawn.
The basic assumption of "planned obsolesce" is flawed. On the engineering side, it's more often known as "design life". When you design a product, part of that process is determining the pricepoint you want to sell it at and how long it needs to last in order to make that pricepoint seem reasonable. You can make a $10,000 refrigerator both repairable and last 20 years, because you designed it to last 20 years and you selected components and manufacturing processes with 20 year lifespans. by contrast, if you designed your $500 to last 20 years, you would end up losing $3,000 per refrigerator because it cost you $3500 to make. Finally, regarding the building standards in texas, they are mostly non existent. You want to live in a "low regulation" area and this is the result, and nobody is willing to pay for quality they don't see.
More people need to read this comment of yours. Thanks to the conspiracy theory of planned obselence (PO), companies are being regulated wrongly - such as apple who have been made to stop throttling their phone performance to protect the battery despite this being the thing they were doing to make sure their phones lasted as long as possible. Instead, they should have been forced to ensure that the batteries they were fitting were either; replaceable, or designed to give a certain amount of current for longer before the throttling technique was used. But people heard about PO and the EU made a law to make that scary myth into an illegal myth.
Meanwhile, people like OP video creator here are making videos that basically make it seem like the consumer has no power and no choice, stuff just isn't made like it was in the old days.
Ok, so what’s your solution to get manufacturers and builders to make better products and houses? Please don’t say “it is what it is”.
@@aayotechnology I think the commenter that you are replying to is already suggesting a fix for building; better regulations.
As for manufacturing I think that regulations and enforcement is actually a better tool than consumer buying power here too. Everyone is looking for a bargain, so the 20 year refrigerator that costs 2000 just won't fly off the shelves when there is an option for 500 that says it's quality-made on the box (but isn't). If consumers want better products they should ask their politicians to put tighter regs on things. This makes sense from a rational angle, and an environmental one.
Please, change the title of this video because is super misleading. You're talking about USA houses and in many parts of the world, people build houses that will last centuries even if built today.
I respect you very very much but USA is not the center of the world.
So deal with it.
With love, from Italy.
Cars that cannot be serviced easy is so maddening.
Ironically, this is sometimes due to the government mandating that pollution controls be difficult to bypass. People want to bypass them because they damage the engine, mainly diesel vehicles. To the point where "DEF deletes" are a thriving industry.
Of course, pollution controls for cars nowadays are beyond absurd. Standards are tightened every few years to justify the budgets of bureaucrats, not because they make any environmental sense. We could probably set the standards back to what was in place in 1990 and not many people would notice. The standards for drinking water haven't really changed in decades and we're doing just fine.
The European law protects consumers in this way. According to EU law the manufacturer of your old frigde is liable for the majority of the repair cost. Because a normal fridge should last 10 to 15 years without issues. This is the responsability of the manufacturer they cannot rid themself of that responsability by only giving a one year guaranty. Ofcours the liability of the manufacturer is bigger after only 2 years then after 10 years. It can be a hassle to claim this kinds of damages especially if the product comes form outside the EU.
The EU is also forcing all mobile phone manufacturers to use one and the same chargers. They gave the market time to solve this obsolencence problem themselfs but the markt said it was impossible. So now it law and they will have to do the impossible.
My moral of the story, in a good political landscape where the intrests of the people is always priority number one, insead of lobbyist and financial donors, these issues can be solved fairly simple and we will all win.
Great video as usual. I am an independent HVAC company and you are correct on the equipment manufacturers. They have a drop in refrigerant for r22 but you need to find and fix the leak before using it. They are changing out 410A refrigerant as well. Neat.
On the ceramic tile bit, you don’t have to use cleavage membrane or Schulter mat. You can use fluid applied crack isolation membrane. Also, that video showing popping tiles was because of lack of expansion joints not crack isolation.
Great video! We bought our first house 5 years ago, and I was so shocked about how little information was available about it. We've had to repair so many things (old house), but in the process I have created a manual detailing products and locations, and was thinking it should be standard to do that. Thank you for bringing this up!
Great minds! I built a rental property and as part of the rental conditions, the house will be visited by a plumber every year and an electrician every two years for maintenance checks. The house have a manual that I compiled and every maintenance checks they have to send me pictures of the parts they changed and write down what they found, and what they did in the manual. I took this idea from car service logbooks!
We should start a trend to base our buying decisions not on the flashy new features but on experience with brands. If the trend spreads the best marketing is to have made solid products 10 years ago. And the best marketing for the next 10 years is making solid products now.
We already do. That's why people say 'Oh Toyota is a good brand' or 'Kenmore is nowhere near what it used to be'. The issue is that the 'market forces' are pretty much what the manufacturers say due to things like ignorant consumers, marketing, cartels or just straight up propaganda.
Is there a real reason solid brick and concrete homes aren't more common in the US? They can be a bit trickier to insulate, but their durability is pretty incredible. I live in South Africa, where at least 90% of houses are concrete or brick - wood framed homes are fairly rare here. Brick costs 5-10% more - really not an unreasonable amount at all.
Well, I live on the West Coast where we have regular earthquakes. So building with brick is considered pretty dangerous here.
I know some people deride concrete as environmentally unfriendly due to the amount of CO2 created in its manufacture. But I don't know if that's why it's not used, or whether it's more an aesthetic thing.
@@oliviastratton2169 brick definitely doesn't stand up well to earthquakes. But reinforced concrete performs excellently, far better than wood framed buildings. Concrete would also be more resilient to those fires you guys seem to have every year. Granted, fire can still damage a concrete building, but they are far more resilient.
@@gabrielfraser2109 Yeah, durability isn't the problem with concrete. Like I said, the aversion to concrete is probably due to environmental concerns and/or aesthetic sensibilities.
It depends on what part of the US you live in. In the Southeast, concrete block or brick homes are very common. Hurricane Andrew forced a complete rewrite of building codes in that part of the country.
Oh yeah, I also should have mentioned that while not extremely common, adobe brick homes are making a comeback in the Southwest.
Consume product, get excited for next product.
Soil heave can be ameliorated by diluting the clay content of the foundation with sand down to the permanent water table. It has to be well mixed though, which is difficult. The large voids between the sand grains allows the clay particles to expand harmlessly into the empty space, if the clay weight percentage is sufficiently low. If the clay concentration is sufficiently high, they will move the sand particles, and with it the bulk soil. This can produce several tonnes of force per square meter. If the overburden structure is simply too heavy, the soil will self-excavate to the sides, undermining the building.
Interesting!
Here we just use pier and beam foundations whenever there's a clay rich soil.
Easily adding 10k to the construction cost.
In recent years I've seen foam concrete being used more and more, mainly for extensions. Which aims to balance buoyancy with building weight.
But if simply replacing the top soil can stabilise the structure, that could be a far cheaper option.
I'm gonna look into that, thanks!
By permanent water level, I assume you mean below the frost line?
If you could do a video on the DFW soils and explain why "most homes have a slab-on-grade foundation instead of a pier and beam one" and why that is bad, I would appreciate it. (Is the pier and beam the one where the foundation looks like it's on stilts and that animals can crawl under?) We've lived in our 1965 home with slab foundation for 10 years now and so far haven't had any foundation problems. But our washer and dryer have to be replaced, which happened a year or two after the warranties expired.
My grandparents bought a home in 1970's and after 30 years, the kitchen appliances were still working. That's not something you find nowadays.
Your channel is quickly becoming my favorite. I really appreciate your matter of fact presentation that holds all parties accountable.
I recall fridges lasting over 20 years.
My dad had one that ran on gas. I think it was from the 40s maybe earlier. It was big and pink with a latch. He had to manually defrost it each year but it was still running when he got rid of it. He only did that because he was worried about the grand kids getting locked in it. That's 60 or 70 years without a repair.
I believe we're to blame for this. We support companies that fight right to repair, we buy electronics with non user serviceable batteries, we buy cars(looking at you German manufacturers) that are not known for reliability and require heavy maintenance schedules(dealers make more money) to keep running, etc..etc.. If we cared enough to do the research and buy only high quality things they wouldn't be able to sell them anymore and they'd stop making them.
I just spent several minutes replying to your comment and TH-cam deleted it because i included a link to video. Grrr.
Basically my comment is that when money is being devalued, it is natural for people to shorten their time preference, and to spend their money sooner rather than later, because the same amount of money will buy you less in the future.
There are many historical examples of how people react when their society's currency experiences hyperinflation.
@@dustinabc interesting. I wish you had been able to post the full comment.
Maybe a lot of what is perceived as planned obsolesence is just stuff build down to a competitive price as consumers are inclined to buy the cheapest product.
This is definitely a factor; you also have to keep in mind that consumer budgets are getting stretched thinner and thinner as wages stay stagnant
Yes, we had to spend thousands of dollars in repairs on our 1985 home in Texas, and we only lived there for 3 years. Water line burst under the slab, the air conditioner went out, the master bath shower was leaking into the closet, and we had a hail storm that ruined the roof. Then we got defective shingles and had to replace the roof again before we sold it. Thankfully the insurance and shingle manufacturer paid for that.
Belinda, this was an incredible video. Thank you so much for saying what needed to be said! Now, specifics ...
Regarding the failure of your newer GE products, they are really no longer GE - the appliance line of business was sold in 2016 to Haier Group Corporation, a Chinese multinational home appliances and consumer electronics company headquartered in Qingdao, Shandong, so while those new appliances might have a GE logo on them, they are now are nothing more than cheap Chinese crap designed to fail early and force more consumption;
I have also noted rapid failure of the so called long-lived LED bulbs - I just had to replace another one yesterday, I will have to pay more attention to this and might have to go back to incandescents for some fixtures;
Regarding cheap home construction, it seems as if the only way to assure durable construction is to build a custom house, which would be prohibitively expensive for most people - developers will build up new subdivisions with THEIR preferred builders and only offer prospective home buyers limited options on models, colors, finishes, etc, resulting in a "take it or leave it" situation for buyers desperate to get into a new home (or at least, the homes that aren't snapped up by large investors to force more and more people into becoming renters instead of homeowners);
Apple is notorious for producing easy-to-fail and unrepairable devices - keyboards on some devices are designed to allow immediate liquid penetration onto critical circuitry in the event of a spill, instead of simply running off a plastic keyboard surface, and documents surfaced years ago instructing technicians at repair sites to either replace entire boards or entire devices rather than replacing individual parts;
Front loading home washers have a reputation for poor performance and development of mold or mildew, I just replaced my old appliances with new high-capacity Whirlpool models, of which the washer features the innovative removable agitator which will hopefully resolve the problems associated with the new machines with no agitators ;
When having new flooring installed, it is standard procedure to order 10% more than the measured area to account for wastage during installation, but I ordered 20% more to insure sufficient material left over should repairs be necessary, though storage of excess material might be an issue for some (I like the AquaGuard brand of laminate flooring);
Unless specified, it might not be "illegal" for customers to shut off water valves in the meter boxes, but if damage occurs, the customer will be liable for damage to the utility's equipment - buy a water key at a hardware store (can also be used to shut off gas supply in an emergency) and use common sense if there is no private water shutoff valve (typically located under a small round cover within a couple of feet of the meter box) by turning the utility valve slowly and carefully, stopping the attempt if the valve seems stuck and won't turn with a decent amount of force;
All-electric homes do not necessarily receive all or most of their power from coal-burning power plants, as the electricity generated by ALL the plants in a transmission interconnect (aka "grid") goes into that grid - you have no physical control where the electrons come from, and only about 20% of them come from coal-fired plants in the ERCOT interconnect;
Regarding old-school appliances, my mother bought a new refrigerator (I forget the brand) back in the 1960's, and at last report, IT STILL RUNS TODAY!
The skin of my house is now about 35 years old (based on records I could find) and the siding is already falling apart, being made of the the notorious hardboard siding that is rotting out all along the bottom;
The idea of an instruction manual for a home is BRILLIANT - I receive countless calls at work from residents who have no idea how to troubleshoot even the most basic of issues, have no idea how their home's utility systems work, and in some cases have no idea what their homes are even equipped with.
Keep up the good work, Belinda. You are providing a badly needed educational service to the public!
I think structural hempcrete block walls with plumbing and electrical chases and with simple plaster inside and out is great on many levels including making repairs or changes very simple and low cost. I think perhaps compacted earth with hempcrete on top for the insulation value leaves our slabs more easy to repair or change. I think hemp or bamboo engineered floating wood floors are a great option, but I do generally prefer floors that can get very wet without suffering damage. Perhaps large floating tiles could be a great option that could be moved and replaced with a simple vacuum handle. I think metal roofs with automated seam bending to help reduce costs is a great, long-term, fireproof roofing material.
Bad:
My 1000€ HP ENVY x360 ("Premium Line") is just over two years old and the screws (cost pennies) that fix the screen to the hinges have failed. For some reason the metal back panel needs replacement, so HP is the goto-repair shop. They've given me an offer over 461€! The laptop isn't even worth 600€ anymore if it was perfect!
Good:
My sound system consists of 30+-years old MB-Quart speakers and a 20+-years old Onkyo Amplifier. Not only is the quality absolutely amazing, the reliability crushes all modern digital sound systems.
I very much agree with you on the "green upgrades" that lead to tons of waste, especially electronic waste. If companies really cared about "being green", they would make it easier for the average user to repair their own products, instead of pressuring people into buying new products.
If you 'really' wish for stuff to last you have to look at Soviet engineering school - they put reparability as primary design requirement. Their Elbrus 8 computer (equivalent of Intel i7) comes with thick manual that includes a circuit diagram!
But then.... Would you 'really' reach into your computer with a soldering iron to repair it? Would you 'really' drive a Soviet-looking car?
There’s a significant consequence to the way our buildings and stuff are being made.
Instead of having 14-17 minutes to get out, more modern homes have 2-3 minutes.
This way of planned obsolescence and cheap furniture is literally costing us our lives.
According to my refrigerator repair tech: "Never buy Samsung appliances." He suggest Whirlpool and to buy the most basic Top Freezer with the fewest working parts.
Interesting that you mentioned front loading washing machines and their bearings. The washing machine at the house died this week and the tech diagnosed the problem as being the bearings. At $250/hr it would cost more to fix than to replace.
So the thing is bearings fail, there is no way you can make a bearing last forever. this applies to top loading too, or anything that has a bearing. Expecting a bearing to last 100 years or even 25 in a washing machine is not realistic, they do after all spin at up to 2500 rpm with uneven loads.
You can replace the bearings. You can also prolong the life by lubrication. It takes time and tools but it is doable by a home mechanic.
@@user-by7hj4dj9s Industry standard bearings are not expensive. The problem is that items are built with specialized bearings which are expensive or unavailable and not designed to be easily changed out. I don't think it would be that difficult for a company to use standard parts and make it easier to change wear items, but there is no incentive to do that. They make more money if they can save a little by using lower quality parts that snap together easily when built and require the item to be replaced sooner rather than later.
@@user-by7hj4dj9s Bearings have factors of safety. You can increase the life of a bearing by choosing one made for a higher load rating. Manufacturers just refuse to do so. I have seen 70 year old washing machines on the original bearings. I have seen hundred year old motors and dynamos on the original bearings. We need minimum quality standards enforced in law. Planned obsolescence is a human and environmental disaster.
Not to mention that most modern washing machines use non replaceable bearings.
So when before we could open the drum and replace the bearing, nowadays you usually have to replace the entire drum.
Which just happen to be priced at exactly one buck over the machine's value at the time of failure..
2:16 - FYI, my Phillips LED bulbs have lasted me 6 years so far. So yes, LED bulbs _can_ last much longer, which I already knew from previous tech experience. Phillips products in general seem to last longer than average, and are often cheaper too, so I buy their stuff whenever I can. Just stay away from _anything_ made by GE!
This reminds me of a situation my dad witnessed in Pakistan. He visited his brother in laws house and the brother in law complained that something was wrong with the water tank (I think it kept leaking), so he had to call a repair man every few weeks. One day my dad checked the tank and realised that he simply needed to replace the washer and it would be fine. He also noticed that instead of replacing the washer cheaply and efficiently, the repairman had wrapped the washer in some sort of cord or duct tape or something, so that it would stay in place and still work for a few weeks, but then it would start leaking again.
So my dad fixed the washer and then he saw the repair man and asked why didn't he replace the washer in the first place? The repair man said: if I fixed it on my first visit, I wouldn't be called back again, I'd lose out on the extra income from call out charges every few weeks. It's common to come across such cowboy handymen over there, but in more recent years, it's become an increasingly common phenomenon in the West as well. Dad gets frustrated that electric appliances don't let you open the back with a screw driver and replace simple parts anymore like he was able to do when I was a kid. I think the old local shop that sold spare electric parts doesn't even exist anymore- last I heard it was converted into a grocery store.
Unfortunately, Samsung appliances are notoriously unreliable (despite them having a solid track record with mobile electronics and other divisions do pretty well). The 10yr warranty is in response to that reputation problem. Most people do not leverage manufacturer warrantees, so long warranty offerings are good business strategy.
It annoys me that pundits continuously blame consumers when we could regulate industries making high impact electronics and machinery so they have extended service lifecycles.
I've fought tooth and nail to extend my IT installations to 5 year service contracts when the standard is 3yrs. Why? Because the tax code has amortization plans bound to a 36mth cycle. That's not the client's fault at all. Lawmakers are corrupted by corporate cash.
Really enjoy this view on things. Idk if it is always planned but it is often going for a cheaper option.
Your example about the fridge has nothing to do with planned obsolescence. Why would GE on purpose build a low-quality product? That would only drive costumers to their competitors. With so many moving parts and complex build, of course something will break eventually.
That is not planned obsolescence. It’s consumers that demand cheap products, and the manufacturer does what it can do while still maintaining a margin. Do not buy cheap products if you want something with high build quality and that lasts.
They should force all manufacturers to offer at least 7 year warranty. I'd pay more to be sure things don't die on me when unexpectedly
New Zealand has consumer law which means the retailer must repair manufacturing defects, and if it can't be repaired in a reasonable time frame then they must refund the consumer. The consumer guarantee lasts for the reasonable expected lifetime of the product. If a retailer doesn't repair or refund, it only costs around $10 to take them to court, lawyers aren't allowed either. Research this law, and push for your politicians to copy it.
you can buy the extended warranty today. but nobody does
@@gsabic extended warranty is toothless compared to good consumer law. You can also buy extended warranty in New Zealand, but only an idiot would pay for it because consumer guarantee covers you for longer and for more.
@@nameberry220 nobody buys an extended warranty in USA because doesn't make economical sense.
there is not free lunch, if you change legislation to force products to include a longer warranty you will pay more for those products.
@@gsabic Not true. Did you watch the video? Planned obsolescence is about products being designed to fail. The consumer will always pay less when they're protected by good consumer guarantee law.
Can't agree with 6:35
It's not fault of consumers for believing authority / experts and falling for psychological marketing traps.
Common thing companies do is place the blame on consumers.
But the fault lies within them. We should first fix the source of the problem not the consequences.
(I guess fault of consumers is not demanding regulations.)
Good video otherwise
Natives in Costa Rica built monumento Guayabo that purifies water using sunlight, more than 2000 years ago.
Roman concrete of roads have lasted more than 2000 years. Our concrete could last 200 years at most.
Not a single modern construction or product wll last that long. And we are told we are "advanced" civilization.
Future archeologists will say our culture was supersticious and worshipped an invisible god called "electronic money". There were tokens of bliss and grace called bills and coins, but most of its power was invisible. Rulers bow before that god. The money Olympus had many currencies to choose from, and dollar was the Zeus of all. Bank priests played games of grace and allowed crisis to make some god favorites to get more grace while others were sacrificed into starvation.
I've was told by a plumber who came to fix the dishwasher in my condo, that very basic, inexpensive American home appliances such as Frigidaire and Whirlpool, tend to last many years longer than more trendy but complicated Japanese and European appliances. It turned out that my dishwasher, a cheap Frigidaire commonly found in apartment complexes, was not broken at all. The problem was a plastic shipping plug left in the new disposal, installed by the realtor. Total cost of repair, less than $70. Basically the cost of the service call itself. That was three years ago, and the dishwasher still works perfectly.
Ironically, I had also purchased the same model of Frigidaire dishwasher, eleven years earlier when remodeling my last house. It too lasted the entire 11 years I was in the house. In fact most of the American manufactured appliances I had in that house worked perfectly over the decade I lived there, including the cheap used washer & dryer I had in the garage. The sole exception was the Frigidaire double door refrigerator, The water & ice dispenser stopped working after 10 years. The lesson I guess here is that sophisticated and trendy are not always reliable, at least in terms of home appliances.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said about my old house. A Fox & Jacobs early 60's track home that had a slab foundation that crumbled like a graham cracker pie crust.
Belinda I absolutely adore your content but the basis for this video isn't true. I get your argument about planned obsolescence especially with respect to big tech companies, but I feel like you simply made this video as a result of being angry about your fridge and contradicted yourself as a result.
What actually happened is that a compressor failed. Was this compressor "planned" to fail? No, it was the most reliable it could be at the price point it was sold at (including the profit the manufacturer can tolerate). That is to say it was cheaply made. Manufacturers are competing with each other at every budget, so if one does it they all have to. If it was a more expensive fridge they would have used higher quality parts. You could have replaced just the compressor for I'm guessing 1/3 the cost of your new Samsung fridge (the price of compressors is high due to the tolerances and mechanical complexity), but you CHOSE to replace it. In doing so you perpetuated your argument of planned obsolescence by throwing away an otherwise functional fridge for the perceived benefit of "features".
Here is the hard truth that nobody wants to hear: stop buying cheap products that are poorly made. The reason your fridge was "doomed" to fail isn't because someone had a board meeting to make their products fail past a certain date... it was because that fridge was so cheap that it was barely functional to begin with. Spend more, get a quality product, and then manufacturers won't have a reason to cobble together products that fail quickly.
I have made a second career out of repairing appliances with obsolete or ridiculously expensive electronics modules. (All my appliances except the microwave have mechanical controls.)
I have always wondered what would happen if manufacturers were responsible for the end of life costs of a product. Would parts be available for a longer period of time? Would there be a more robust market for used parts (specifically cosmetic parts that are typically not stocked more than 1-2 yrs after a product is discontinued.)
Engineers will build to the product specifications provided by management. If product cost if prioritized over reliability and serviceability, the consumer will receive a product that lasts only to the industry standard “generally accepted life” for a basic product. (5 yrs for most large appliances)
I think two other areas that could be touched on with planned obsolescence have to do specifically with the suburban housing typology.
One way is the nature of how suburban tract homes are increasingly built from cheaper materials and intended to last considerably shorter amounts of time before a critical failure or condition that requires replacement. No state is a worse offended than Florida, which continues to build in OSB and other engineered wood products, despite the local climate causing those materials to rot and fail in 20-30 years. (Additionally as a hurricane zone, those building's being weakened poses a risk to life/safety) This is instead of more sustainable or more durable materials like rammed earth, adobe, or terra-cotta and stucco, which in that climate might last closer to 100 years.
The second is the ephemeral nature of "commodity grade" tract development, and it's relative short useful life. In an urban context, buildings are built to last 80-100 or even greater time scales, and are intended to be adapted to reuse throughout their life. Suburban homes, are often built with a single use, single internal configuration, and instead of refurbishing at the end of life, wind up being demolished and replaced with new construction. That uses a large amount of resources to perform a task that a marginal increase in cost would greatly extend it's useful life. Or a change in zoning and/or development typology, would increase the useful life, and reduce the carbon footprint of a house, say in a duplex, attached housing, or small apartment or condo complex.
Which I guess gets to the point, that our building and zoning codes encourage single use zoning, and automobile dependance which pushes on us buildings as commodities instead of buildings as long lived infrastructure designed for long term adaptive and mixed use.
American LED light bulbs also have planned obsolescence. They are purposely designed to over use current that shortens the life of the LEDs. Look up Dubai LEDs which are designed to run for the 30 years life of the LEDs. They are legal for use but extremely hard to get ahold of outside the Mideast.
Used to work in a rack and pinion steering rebuild factory. We refurbished them. They were designed to fail at about 50000 miles when the seals would wear out by grinding themselves into the aluminum casting and causing internal leaks. All we did with them was rebore the casting and insert a stainless sleeve. The warranty’s on cars in those days was 30 to 40000 miles. Our used rebuilt units would way outlast the original. Designed specifically to fail no doubt. Love your channel Belinda!
I have been enjoying your videos but I'm afraid in this case I'll have to call you out. Planned obselence is basically a conspiracy theory in most cases, and you are repeating several of them here. While it might seem convenient that manufactures use inferior methods or materials in their products, it is important to remember the old saying: never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. In this case, stupidity is built into the system. Where many companies spend twice as much (or more) on marketing than R&D, and when it comes to making more profit year on year to impress shareholders, it's easier to cut a buck than make one - the result is that companies will buy cheaper plastic fittings and parts instead of expensive but long lasting ones in order to make their products for as cheap as possible. They will then send the marketing team out to promise that the product is made of the best quality available and hope that people believe it.
They don't "plan" obselence they just build it in so they can save a chunk of money on the manufacture while knowing that the consumer will buy anyway because they like the brand or the advert.
When it comes to enclosed unit design though, this is a real issue. The right-to-repair movement is fighting against companies that do this as their main business model, but even these companies are generally not trying to force people to buy new stuff when the old device breaks down - they are trying to ensure that they are the only available option for repair.
The last half of your video is basically a complaint about hiring bad builders and states having lax building regs, so not relevant to planned obselence.
The whole issue can be solved with better regulation of the consumer goods industry. Forcing them to advertise more honestly, or manufacture to tighter standards. People resist this because they think the price of goods will go up - which of course it will, but buying a freezer for $450 every 4 years is still more expensive than buying one for $800 every ten. Regulations could even those two equations out; turning a 4 year freezer into an 8 year one for the same overal cost. The result of that would still be $900 for 8 years of home food storage but the environmental cost would be lower! It's about how people want to demonstrate their control... And spreading the myth of planned obselence is only muddying the waters and preventing people from uniting to solve the correct problems
I think a good way to combat planned obsolescence would be to document it online in a wiki, compared alongside documented best practices and the products that use them.
I've been dreaming of a "methodology" wiki for a while now, like a much more in-depth engineering & construction "wikihow", but sadly I don't think I have what it takes to become the man to build it. I hope either someone else builds it, or that I can overcome my depression and prove myself wrong. I think the former is most likely, however.
Mrs Carr this is all because of easy come and easy go. People make money without breaking a sweat. There teenage millionaire now. Long story short. Na this not gonna stop unless some guy like Thanos shows up and make the balance, I'm just saying 🤔😂
It’s no secret that all efforts towards sustainability are partial fixes without a fundamental change to our economy. The lightbulb conspiracy is a good example whereby long lasting bulbs, despite being invented, simply would not sustain a business model in the capitalist economy. So long as profit & growth is the name of the game the economy requires planned obsolescence or businesses fail. As individuals we must simply consume less, fix more and build local resilience.
Honestly most of what you describe is more excessive corner cutting facilitated by very weak legislation in the US.
European homes are mostly build to last and yes they are significantly smaller but I also don't get why you'd need five bathrooms in one house.
Recently purchased a new Whirlpool fridge (plain white/top freezer). The thing made a gurgle sound about 50% of the time. I called the vendor (Lowes), and asked them to send a tech to check it out. They said rather than send a tech they would prefer to simply replace it, which they did under warranty (new one works fine). Don't know what happened to the fridge they hauled off, but it made me think that they must build them so cheaply they're 100% unconcerned about any salvage value.
We had a fancy shmancy samsung 4 door fridge that we splurged on. 3 years later it died. In our area there are zero shops or techs that work on samsung appliances. I contacted the upper management at samsung, long story short, they bought our fridge back. Stay away from samsung unless you know someone who can work on them.
except the ones built for the former and current robber Barron's. believe me as a builder in Seattle for 30 yrs there are homes i have worked on commissioned by the tech Oligarchs that will last a century or much longer and have design in place to facilitate future upgrades minimizing invasive demolition
Please make videos about the crazy house rehab culture that encourages ripping out perfectly fine parts of a house and replacing it with trendy new stuff. So wasteful, so foolish.
I haven't seen a house in the US or Europe collapse.
But I have seen a ton of buildings in China collapse...
When it comes to homes, the problem lies with the legislation. There is so much of it at so many levels of government that its impossible to build anything other than cheap shitty houses. In the UK we have 11 sections to our building regulations and within those sections normally only 2 to 3 lines. In america you have more detailed requirements for the size of the lettering on the front of a house than we have for the structural loading requirements. " The building shall be constructed... so that loading... is transmitted to the ground safely... without impairing the structure of any other building." Thats it, thats all we need to do. How we do that is down to us, and we are trusted to build those houses to meet those requirements. What more do you need from legislation. Meanwhile in America you have a million words to tell you how many light switches a room needs. Then you complain when everything is built shit and cheap and falls down all the time.
The thing I see in the US housing market is houses are valued based upon how they look, their location and square footage. The price of a house is not based upon the quality of materials, design or inner working. Which makes it a bad investment to renovate a house above code, that an owner might not live in for life.
Dyson vacuums does this by designing a trigger switch that breaks over a few years. I opened one up and found the trigger was made if plastic and very thin in areas where it should be thick. I ended up fixing the cracked trigger by plastic welding and embedding a metal rod into it.
I plan to hire a builder in the very near future so I'll be having very frank discussions on this topic with them. I'm willing to spend a little more if it means I get electrics, plumbing and flooring that are so solid they wont need replacing and I won't have to tear up the building to get to them for repairs. Currently got an offer accepted on some land.
The best building material on the planet is pumicecrete
Pumicecrete is a mixture of pumice cement and water mixed and poured into a set of reusable forms walls are poured from 12" to 24" thick pumicecrete is fireproof termite proof rust rot and mold proof and has a high R value and good sound attenuation solid poured walls means no critters can live in your walls If you would like to build a house that will last forever pumicecrete is the material you want
I don't actually believe this is planning. Instead chasing profit right now. Anybody who can plan that good would come up with some better ideas how to make money not harming the env along the way
You leave out one huge factor. Consumers drive the price point, they will go for the lowest price often without considering quality so the retailers pressure manufacturers to reduce prices and quality suffers. Consumers are just as guilty as the manufacturers for our predicament, it is just easy to blame the manufacturer.
I do not feel this supposed dopamine kick. I want to cry whenever I have to buy something new. I tear out my hair and rend my cheap foreign made clothing because I know I am being raped by the mark up and will be do for another raping in a few years time.
Products are disposable because consumers prefer cheaper products. Generally the corporations have both good and cheaper product and the cheaper sells way more.
This will continue as long as consumers remain either, addicted to buying into stupid fashion changes or wake up to how they are being screwed by the system.
A rew years ago the only fridges/freezers found in the landfill where because the plastics inside failed - compressors used to last longer then the purchacer! - 40 years was common , not uncommon.
Decades ago washing machines and refrigerators would last for decades. Now they last for 2 years.
I am on my 3rd stove in the 29 years I have lived in my home. It is always the circuit board that goes bad. I would like to be able to buy a decent stove that has NO electronics. My grandmother's stove lasted her a lifetime. It was so old it did not have a pilot light and she lit it with a match.