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Rude and Offensive

Ours is 25 years old. It washes clothes well (at least one load a day) - with no display or CPU or other crud to worry about going wrong. Sometimes simplicity is good :-)

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson
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The US market seems to favour top loaders which use vast amounts of both water and detergent compared to the normal UK front loader. That would make the running costs excessive over here.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

About =A380 - which was a shock when we had bought the cooker for =A3100.

OTOH, that =A3100 from Gumtree and the original owner had probably paid more like =A32000

Reply to
Martin Bonner

iNTERESTING. I've just been on the phone to Domestic & General. I had paid =A3120 for a repair to a Liebherr freezer. The Technician came 3 weeks ago, broke some bits on the back of the freezer trying to get access to the PCB and left, telling me he'd ring back. He didn't.

I dismantled the front of it (there is no access through the back), measured the resistance of the thermistor temperature sensors, got a replacement for one from Liebherr (=A330!!!!! Next day delivery.) fitted it, fixed freezer. And no bits broken on the front access to the PCB

I asked Domestic and General to replace the bits that were broken and a call-centre chap rang me today to tell me I'd have to ring their sub- contractors/service agents. I wouldn't do that, I said, my contract is with Domestic and General, so you arrange it, you recover your costs from whoever you sub-contracted the work to. He refused to ring them. I refused as well. This went on for half-an hour, like the Dead Parrot sketch.

Can I speak to the Customer Service Manager? No, he doesn't answer phone calls. Can you put that in writing to confirm what you've said. Yes, but then I have to close the complaint.

They rang back some time later. They've been told my freezer is beyond economic repair, but the repairers have also ordered a replacement fan and thermistor and the repair is still in progress After 3 weeks? And they didn't tell me that?

Besdides which, the visit was arranged for a Tuesday, Technician rang on Tuesday morning, said he wasn't coming and re-arranged it for Thursday. I'd also rang Domestic and General 2 weeks ago to tell them I was making other arrangements and that their man had broken some parts; they said they'd ring me back; they didn't. The worst customer service I've ever had the misfortune to be messed about by, awesomely bad.

Reply to
Onetap

I'm not certain on the detergent as I always had power in the UK and liquid stuff over here, but it normally takes approx 30ml of the liquid for a single full load (I just checked the detergent container - 2830ml and around $9, so it's roughly 9.5 cents per load, or 6p)

Water consumption is definitely quite a bit more, granted - although personally it's really not an issue because our house is fed from a private well out back (houses in the nearby town are metered, but I'm out of touch with what the rates are like). I just ran a quick back-of- envelope calc on the electricity to run the well pump during a wash cycle, and it's somewhere around 4 cents - i.e. about 2.5p. Working out the "true cost" for the well is more tricky, of course, because simple age seems to play as much of a part in their demise as silting up does.

I've got no idea what the washing machine itself draws during running I'm afraid - the motor in it is pretty heavy-duty.

But it's more about simple technology than it is about top vs. front- loading anyway, I think; yes there's more sealing to worry about in a front-loader, but I don't see why the drums and motors can't be built to do 25 years too, or why it *has* to have a CPU and an electronic display.

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson

The type of washing machine I would dearly love, but unfortunately, I may be wrong, but I don't think they make them like that now. Nowadays it is all bells & whistles a repairs money machine.

Jim G

Reply to
the_constructor

iNTERESTING. I've just been on the phone to Domestic & General. I had paid £120 for a repair to a Liebherr freezer. The Technician came 3 weeks ago, broke some bits on the back of the freezer trying to get access to the PCB and left, telling me he'd ring back. He didn't.

I dismantled the front of it (there is no access through the back), measured the resistance of the thermistor temperature sensors, got a replacement for one from Liebherr (£30!!!!! Next day delivery.) fitted it, fixed freezer. And no bits broken on the front access to the PCB

I asked Domestic and General to replace the bits that were broken and a call-centre chap rang me today to tell me I'd have to ring their sub- contractors/service agents. I wouldn't do that, I said, my contract is with Domestic and General, so you arrange it, you recover your costs from whoever you sub-contracted the work to. He refused to ring them. I refused as well. This went on for half-an hour, like the Dead Parrot sketch.

Can I speak to the Customer Service Manager? No, he doesn't answer phone calls. Can you put that in writing to confirm what you've said. Yes, but then I have to close the complaint.

They rang back some time later. They've been told my freezer is beyond economic repair, but the repairers have also ordered a replacement fan and thermistor and the repair is still in progress After 3 weeks? And they didn't tell me that?

Besdides which, the visit was arranged for a Tuesday, Technician rang on Tuesday morning, said he wasn't coming and re-arranged it for Thursday. I'd also rang Domestic and General 2 weeks ago to tell them I was making other arrangements and that their man had broken some parts; they said they'd ring me back; they didn't. The worst customer service I've ever had the misfortune to be messed about by, awesomely bad.

As the original poster of this thread, although it saddens me to hear of your plight, I am happy to hear that it is not just me who thinks this company is a pile of doo doo and it confirms what I posted

Jim G

Reply to
the_constructor

A well designed ECU and electronic display should be not only more reliable than a click round timer switch, but cheaper to make too.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Same here. And Australians are horrified by the British habit of mixing food and dirty clothes in the same space so even a modest unit (bungalow) will have a separate laundry with deep sink and w/m plumbing.

Reply to
Tony Bryer

Yes. CPUs powerful enough to run a washing machine, even with the displays and stuff they have these days, have been around for years.

More than 30 years ago I had a year off from my CERN job, and went to a similar lab in the States. I learnt a little bit about hardware while I was there. One project was this: a hardware student had mostly completed a Z80 single board computer, I had to debug it, get it working, and hook it to a voice chip we got from a calculator for the blind (which spoke the digits). The bloke I worked with hooked the board to the building's phone switch, and the audio from the chip to the building's PA system. I then programmed the board so that when someone's phone rang, the number was broadcast through the building on the PA system.

Point is this. The hardware student had allowed something like 8k or ROM for the program, and 2k of RAM. I ended up using about 1k of ROM and 100 bytes of so of RAM. Next to nothing. Probably more than that needed to run a washing machine but not all that much. One chip would do it and to spare. And, as Dave says, in principle it's much more reliable - fewer mechanical parts.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Well, no shortage of space, is there.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Not all Australian homes are McMansions. The unit I was looking at this week as a potential investment property is a 2-bed bungalow,

76m2 internally, with the laundry taking 2.8x1.8 = 5m2 of this. Not only does it take a significant area, but its door off the kitchen area makes a decent kitchen plan hard to achieve.
Reply to
Tony Bryer

Do Aussies cook when they're naked then? If not, it would seem that the clothes that they're wearing are present whilst handling food.

Reply to
PeterC

Companies can 'close the complaint' if they want, but that doesn't mean that your right to complain stops.

I pursued a complaint (with easyJet) for a period of about 18 months. Quite early on their customer services people 'closed' it. Not once did their successively more senior representatives say either to me or Consumer Direct or Trading Standards or the CAA/ATUC (as it was progressively escalated) that the complaint, being 'closed', could not be re-opened.

Reply to
Jeremy Nicoll - news posts

I agree completely that it *should* be, but in practice they often don't seem to hold up that well; I don't know if it's the environment (vibration, potential for moisture ingress etc.) or the build quality (PCBs made from poppadoms, solder joints done by a five year old, and sub- standard components).

Sadly machine reviews seem to concentrate on features alone and don't involve someone pulling the thing apart to see if it's reasonably well made under the covers :-(

cheers

Jules

Reply to
Jules Richardson

And a modern motor driven rotary switch is just as likely to be made from toffee. On a cheap machine.

Indeed.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

It might have changed a bit now but in the past that was due to the Australians buying huge (think the width of an American Fridge and a metre and a bit high) twin tub washing machines decades after everyone in the UK had switched to front loaders.

While there were an odd few front loaders in the shops in the mid 90's (they were silly prices), the first I saw in use in Oz was in 2005.

Reply to
The Other Mike

Quite. It's one of the many "fobbing-off" tactics that companies use to try to get you to give up. Another one is that they pretend they have no record of your case and you have to explain it all again every time you call. They will also make sure that you can never speak to the same person twice too.

Reply to
Mark

I know. I don't think complaining to Domestic and General will get me anywhere, so I'm planning to just go down the County Court route after a very little more messing about. =A0I just want them to sort it out.

They've managed to waste a huge amount of my time, even before this had even become a complaint.

They haven't done that, to be fair. They have a reference number and have some idea (albeit a rather confused one) of what has happened before.

Reply to
Onetap

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