The appliance that elicits anger and frustrated at it’s mere sight. The treacherous device that never worked right.
The ice compartment of our fridge. It’s always a fucking compressed block that needs manually smashing up. I fucking hate it so much.
Maybe you need to feed your fridge more fibre or have it drink more?
This is such a funny visual I’ve never heard of this happening
Dishwashers.
Do printers count? I fucking HATE printers.
After some half a century of existing they are somehow still annoying to use.
Try industrial label printers. They are like printers on hard mode.
I got a Brother printer. I hate it less than my HP and Cannon ones I used to use but it’s still a printer. A sin which cannot be redeemed
I’d enjoy my Epson Eco tank printer more if it wasn’t trying to constantly update firmware, apps, drivers, etc.
I’m not setting up faxing. Stop asking.
Stop buying shitty ink jet printers and get a laser printer. Pretty sure the Brother MFC my dad purchased a decade ago will outlive him.
I do think that most people would be happier with lasers, especially on the “clogged nozzle and requires regular use” front (though now there are also lasers that also do the “razor and blades” sales model, with a cheap printer and more-expensive toner).
However, there are legitimately some people who do need inkjets for one reason or another.
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Lasers, and especially inexpensive lasers where the manufacturer wants to shave down power supply costs, have a brief period of very high electrical draw when they are powered on. This is why you’ll typically see UPSes with warnings saying “don’t plug laser printers into this device”. This probably isn’t more than a minor irritation for most people, but I bet that it can overwhelm small inverters; there are probably people living full-time in RVs or something for whom this a problem.
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Even relatively-inexpensive inkjet printers today can produce what I’d call pretty impressive photograph prints if paired with fancy photo paper. Color lasers — and I’ve never bothered to even get a color laser — do not print photos that look remotely as nice as inkjets do. I don’t print photos — I have screens that can display photos perfectly well — and if I really wanted to do so, I’d go to one of the many stores around that do have the ability to do really fancy photo prints. But if someone were into that, they can’t really substitute a laser printer or most other types of printers for that. Maybe dye-sublimation printers, if those are still a thing. kagis Appears so.
Yeah some laser printers can for sure pop a circuit breaker in older houses
hPLJ4 gobbled 600w when firing up. You better believe it popped some breakers.
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Printers are a given, I figure.
I have a black and white samsung printer that is like a decade old with the only maintenance being adding the powdered ink and replacing the roller thingy a couple of times. Always works, never had an issue, printed thousands of pages over time in spurts of hundreds at a time and even not printing for like two years.
On the opposite end inkjet printers are the fucking worst computer accessory I’ve ever dealt with. They have always been a shitshow even before they started the ink pricing shenanigans because they are finicky and unreliable to start with.
mine has said that all the ink is critically low and I’ve just ignored it for the past few months and it just keeps going.
Nearly same here, but mine is from 2010 and all I’ve ever done is replace the original starter cartridge of toner with a generic one once, and that was 12ish years ago and 2 cross-country moves. I’ve maybe printed a thousand pages ever.
Came here to say this. F all printers ever made.
Inkjet printers clogging and requiring ink refills aside, I don’t think I’ve ever been unhappy with (2D) printers. I’ve used…continuous-feed dot-matrix printers, a thermal wax printer, laser printers, a text-only line printer, and a continuous-feed plotter. They all worked pretty well.
And honestly, I’m still kind of impressed at what inkjet printers can turn out on photo paper, even if I wouldn’t buy one for my own uses.
I had one very elderly Apple laser printer that I picked up once that someone was throwing out. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, laser printers were wonder printers that business users might have, but few home users mostly didn’t have in their price range — fast output, sharp text, but expensive; always wanted one, but I wasn’t going to buy one. It didn’t have much memory, so there were some limitations on the complexity of what it could print. I rigged up the
lpdon my computer to do all the rendering of vector Postscript images and convert it into a fax-compressed raster image and hand it off to the printer, so aside from taking a while to transfer the resulting image to the printer, it could pretty much handle anything. It served for something like ten years, with the remainder of the original toner cartridge lasting something like five of that, and I only tossed it because I wanted a higher-resolution printer, not because it had any problems functioning. I could probably still be using that thing. Kinda have some warm fuzzies remembering that ancient thing still soldiering on.
Dishwashers
Modern ones have too many features that can break and brick the whole thing and the cheap ones never get good powerful pumps so they spray like shit. Just make a basic mechanical timed dishwasher with a super powerful pump and I will be all in.
This is what I want for the vast majority of appliances. It just needs to do the basic functions reliably and have a few adjustments that I can fiddle with.
I got an inkling that it just isn’t profitable to make quality appliances anymore. Why make something that can last for decades when you can sell people a new appliance every 5-10 years with cheaper parts?
It could be profitable, but it isn’t as profitable as making an unreliable and overly complex piece of crap that increases sales totals which jack up stocks.
Hell, being profitable isn’t even important for lot of businesses anymore, they just want growth.
I think this is recently apparent with Instant Pot. Their first model was phenomenal, and if you have one, you probably still do. The newer ones are still pretty good, but they come with small issues, don’t work as well and need more maintenance. Plus, Instant Pot now offers a host of bullshit add-ons to round out the sales line-up.
I had heard they were considering bankruptcy at some point prior to their recent line of products.
Think it was something about being bought out by private equity, and being run into the ground. I’ve loved all of the instant pots I’ve owned, only have had more than one because I needed a bigger one.
Being bought out by private equity is a massive red flag for quality, they always go cheap and ride the brand recognition as long as possible.
I’ve seen products like appliances go to hell in my lifetime. There are several issues besides planned obsolescence.
Used to be, you only had 3 or 4 refrigerators to choose from. They had to be close in quality and everyone knew what order they fell in for quality vs. price. People talked about their experiences and with a limited range of choices, it was easy to know what was best and what sucked. Hell, Lowe’s sells so many different fridges that finding the “best” is too hard to figure. Now I see people talking about manufacturers I’ve never even heard of. Does that make sense?
Another problem is low prices and will to repair. Stuff is so cheap now, relative to decades ago, that people simply throw stuff out and buy new rather than attempt any sort of repair. Our TV tubes would occasionally burn out. Dad and I would go to the store and consult the kiosk or, at worst, call a repairman. TVs were too damned expensive to not fix. Now people throw out TVs that only need a $60 board off eBay. I find and fix tons of stuff off the side of the road.
That’s the thing–the actual purpose of the appliances hasn’t changed at all. Every “advancement” is typically proprietary tech made to help comply with energy and water/gas usage standards–or to add perceived value through some half-baked gimmicks. For instance, dishwashers use smaller pumps run for longer periods of time to perform the same amount of work a larger more powerful pump could handle (in many cases a single pump sufficed for a dishwasher–one rotational direction for wash, opposite direction for drain)… I’m totally on board with energy efficiency but the laughably cheap/shitty tech they use to those ends kinda blunt the effectiveness of the energy saving measures (since replacing parts–or more likely entire dishwashers when those pumps fail–is a less energy-saving process than having a stronger, more durable pump that draws an extra amp or 2)
Yeah, saving $40 a year but spending $500 every three years instead of ten isn’t saving money.
Anything made by Samsung.
Appliance-wise at least.
A refurbished 2019 tablet I got from them that is supported by LineageOS has been giving me trouble on the flashing side of things, so I’ll second this.
Samsung SSDs are great and industry-leading in terms of reliability
Gas stove. Literally playing with fire every time I need to light the front left burner. Usually I have to let enough gas come out to have the neighboring burner’s igniter light it up. I keep my distance just in case.
And it slowly poisons you!
For me, the “power burner” is so weak it can’t bring a pot of water to boil or properly saute anything. Everything online says that it must be because the gas outlets are dirty, but they are spotless.
Just get a long refillable butane lighter? Or one of those electric arc lighters? (Some of those have a long extension)
I have to “prime” one of my burners. I’ll turn it on the power boil setting for a second or two to let gas out and then back to the ignite setting to spark it
…and once it’s ‘fixed’, it starts doing it again within weeks. Always the same one…
I have a camp stove that I got for really cheap because someone returned it because the igniter didn’t work. The spark gap was too high, so all I had to do was poke the wire over a little, and it works perfectly now.
Microwaves are allowed one proud “ding” or three “beep” before they are on my hate-list.
Microwaves are the penultimate Norman Object (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things). They could have a standardized UI (cue up obligatory XKCD “Standards”). Instead, every manufacturer does it differently and usually in obscure, unintuitive fashion, often differently from the same manufacturer. Do you enter the time or power setting first? Oh wait, pressing a number launches it straight into running. That part that looks like a door handle is not how one actually opens the door; press the door button first. So. Much. Hate.
You know, the worst part is, they intentionally make the interface shittier on the cheap ones. I’m very convinced of this.
Yeah, I can see what you mean. Generally, they’re similar-enough, at least in basic functionality, that I don’t have an issue using someone else’s microwave though. The advanced functionality can vary a lot.
What does kind of annoy me is that they’re basically the one device — VCRs used to be the stereotypical holders of this position — that has a clock, but also is a device price-sensitive enough to both:
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Lack an internal battery to keep the clock powered when power is lost.
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Not have a network link, cell link — not that I really want those — or radio time signal receiver to automatically set the clock.
The result is that every microwave I see seems to wind up showing an unset clock.
I get irrationally upset over microwaves that don’t let you use the timer and cook functions simultaneously
looks puzzled
Hmm. What are you doing with that? Like, you want to be cooking for a certain amount of time, then after the cooking completes, have a timer trigger to start a second cooking period?
More like, I need to heat this frozen thing for 4 minutes. Also while that’s going on, I want to set a timer for my pasta which is cooking on the stove for 6 minutes to remind me to check it.
Exactly. I have a batch of cupcakes in the oven so the timer is set for 12 mins, but I also want to melt some chocolate for the ganache while that’s going.
Luckily, my microwave supports doing both, but I’ve cooked at other people’s houses and their microwaves are essentially bricked while the timer counts down which is so crazy to me it’s like they’ve made this appliance worse on purpose.
Oh, so this is like, a timer for an alarm rather than to control the microwave’s operation. Gotcha.
Didn’t they somehow send time info down the power line in some places? Or maybe I’m just misremembering this?
I can’t think of anything that quite fits that off-the-cuff, at least not in the US. A quick search doesn’t turn anything up. I can think of some related things:
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The AC signal is used as a clock in a number of devices. This isn’t a “clock” in the common-language sense of the word, but in the electrical engineering sense – it provides a reliable frequency over the long run. Some (common-language) clocks and timers have used this to keep them running at a steady pace, but it’s not really a time signal, wouldn’t help restore an on-device clock setting after power loss.
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X10 is a low-speed networking protocol that runs over local power circuits for home automation. I’m sure that at some point, someone has made some product that permits setting a clock with it. The limitation is that your signal doesn’t span across household circuits, which I suspect one would want for a “whole house time signal”.
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There have been powerline-based ISPs, where the power company shovels data over the line using high-frequency data. In theory, you could use one of various Internet time protocols over that. I think that that was kind of a dead end, technology-wise — there’s just not that much data that you can push over an unshielded, non-twisted-pair, metal power line.
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I would not be surprised if there’s some data protocol that power companies use to talk to smart meters that includes pushing a time signal out specifically for them – they do push and pull data over that – though I don’t think that that’s accessible to other devices.
That being said, could be some company out there that did that locally. Not technically impossible.
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My microwave thinks it’s a regular oven and keeps beeping if you don’t open the door. It doesn’t seem to understand it has stopped on its own and can shut the fuck up now.
I want to open up my microwave and rip out whatever device makes the beep. Who has ever forgotten they have food in the microwave? I was hungry 3 minutes ago, I haven’t forgotten, and it’s not going to burn.
My parents used to have an old Amana Radarange. Built like a tank, wood paneling and chrome, warm incandescent lighting…I miss it. It didn’t have a beep or a bell or anything. Once it was done it would just…turn off.
My microwave has an un-interuptable 6 shrill beeps, that then repeat if the door is not opened in 10 seconds. There is no mute option, and it can be heard everywhere in the house. I have seriously considered just ripping the speaker out of it. It is, without a doubt, the appliance I hate most in my house.
Open the door to your microwave and see if it has instructions for written on its body. Mine has a secondary menu where you can turn it off.
Checked there and searched online for any demo modes/ testing codes that would allow me to mute it. Evidently, a lot of folks online absolutely hate my microwave as well, because no one can mute it. That said, the community of microwave haters has provided me with instructions to rip out the speaker if I choose to silence the wailing banshee for good.
What microwave and model is it?
Frigidaire FFMV164LSA MFG in 2012
Mine is not nearly as bad as yours, but it is loud and doesn’t stop beeping when you open the door, just continues until its preprogrammed three loud beeps are over. I muted it when my kids were babies and have never looked back. I think a lot of people worry about muting their microwave because they think they won’t hear when it’s done or something. I’m here to tell you that you won’t miss it. Go forth and rip that speaker out with no regrets.
One thing you can do if you’re not fully prepared to remove the speaker is to cover it with several layers of tape. It will muffle the sound and is somewhat reversible
Perfect this is the type answer I was looking for!
I moved from the US to Europe and I keep joking that the largest QoL upgrade has been my unbelievably dumb microwave. It has a power knob, a timer knob that is spring wound, and when it hits 0 it physically hits a bell like an older toaster.
I fucking love it. It was like 20€
Wait what do US microwaves do? Play the national anthem?
Newer ones have way too many digital buttons and a loud repeating beep when finished. Even newer ones, probably Bluetooth or something
https://homemicrowave.com/microwave-with-alexa/
Want to set up your microwave with Alexa for plenty of cool tricks, but didn’t know how to pick the best microwave that works with Alexa?
Having an Alexa compatible microwave in your kitchen, you can control the microwave and adjust the cooking setting simply via Alexa’s voice control feature.
Speaking for myself, I don’t really want Internet dependency, much less a microphone sending data to it on my appliances.
Yeah, you still have to put the food into the microwave, might as well just press the button there too.
Sounds like mine. Shrill beeps that can’t be cancelled, muted, or interrupted, although I think mine is 30 seconds before the reminder beeps.
My favorite part, though? It beeps when you open the door. Like, just as a sound effect. I, the user, your god and your master, am the one who opened your door. There is no status to notify me of, there is no input to confirm. It’s just useless racket that can’t be eliminated without hardware modification.
And any remaining time on the cooking timer should automatically clear after say 10 minutes. Too many people that love leaving a few seconds remaining when retrieving their food. Then the remaining time stays there forever until someone comes along and clears it.
I have a similar short fuse for microwaves but for the +30 seconds button. If the microwave doesn’t have this it should get tossed in the nearest dumpster. The +30 seconds button is the pinnacle of human achievement.
My partner took our microwave (an obnoxious thing I bought at a charity shop for $15) apart and wrapped the dinger-thing in a thick rubber band to muffle it, then put it all back together. It sounds so much more polite now, and he didn’t have to cut any wires or otherwise fuss with the basic function.
I have to try that, thanks for the idea!
i muted my microwave, almost every microwave i’ve used has been mutable
Samsung Fridge (don’t judge me, it came with the house).
I knew it was a “when” and not and “if” it would start having issues, and it finally showed its colors last month.
Front panel buttons either refused to work at all or would cycle through every option continuously and randomly.
Want water? Sorry, only crusted ice today. Want ice? Sorry, just water today. Oh, I actually did want water (starts dispensing). PSYCH! Now I’m going to shoot ice at you and splash water everywhere.
Was about to just toss the thing and get something dumber and more reliable, but decided to roll the dice with a replacement control board from ebay. Thankfully, that worked and I’m only out $80.
I used to really want an icemaker for convenience, because invariably I’d run into a mostly-empty ice cubes tray when I wanted ice cubes. Or I’d fill the ice cubes tray before it was empty, but then I’d partially-melt the ice cubes there and make them unusable until they refroze.
I didn’t care that much about chilled water, because I can throw ice in it. But the ice cubes were a pain.
I even got a dedicated icemaker at one point, when I wanted softer ice to run a small shaved ice machine.
But…finally I figured out what I needed to do differently. Instead of freezing water in ice cube trays and taking the ice cubes directly out of the tray, just go stick a container in your freezer. Whenever you get ice cubes, if the ice cube tray is full and there’s space, just dump it into the container and refill it. Now you have a big container of ice cubes that’s always full. Just replicates what freezer-integrated ice cube makers do. Haven’t had any issues since. Maybe this is obvious to some people, but it wasn’t to me.
You can get little containers that will fit into the door shelves if you want to stick them there:
Oh, I absolutely love my ice maker. Didn’t think I needed one until I replaced the fridge in my old house with one that had one. Now I can’t live without one (except in the dead of winter when I clean it and just turn it off for ~2 months)
Dogs love chewing on ice cubes, especially in the summer. Between keeping bowls of ice cubes out for the dogs and me making margaritas and slushy cocktails all summer, I’d never be able to get by with ice trays.
Dogs love chewing on ice cubes, especially in the summer.
Just as a warning — I don’t know if it’s an issue for dogs, or as much of an issue for them — I once chipped a tooth by chewing on ice. I liked chewing on ice too. Would sometimes put a little black pepper on it. The dentist told me to knock it off, not good for teeth.
That being said, at least the icemaker ice I had was softer, much easier to crush, probably would have been much less of an issue, so if you’re giving 'em ice from one, maybe that avoids any potential issue.
Dogs chew on bones which are much harder, and other than potential for bone fragments/splinters, they’re fine. But for good measure, I asked their vet a good while back, and was given the green light.
Are you sure someone wasn’t pranking you? Cuz that’s hilarious.
Lol, if only. It’s not a “smart” fridge, but it does have a lot of, frankly, unnecessary electronics for what it does. Electronic components that, as any internet search for Samsung appliances will confirm, can and do go bad and are a pain to repair.
Air Fryers.
It’s a tiny convection oven.
Yeah, but it has its use. I make tofu nuggets with mine almost exclusively, can’t really do it with a normal convection oven in my experience.
I love air fryers. I would absolutely get rid of my toaster oven/conventional oven.
I’m not here making giant roasts or pies. I’m just trying to heat up some nuggies and fries.
They cook so much better.
Technology Connections has shown me that air fryers are just a glorified toaster oven. They don’t do really anything better, so just stick to a toaster oven.
Yes, and it’s glorious.
I don’t have space for a full sized oven, and I am also convinced the little guy turns out better results than the proper convection oven my mom used to have.
Convection toaster ovens are the best though. They let you “air fry” in a far better form factor, and you can also toast and bake in them.
I keep trying to use my convection toaster oven as an air fryer, because goddamnit an air fryer is just a small convection oven and so is this!
It never turns out well and then I say, see? Air fryers are stupid.
I suspect the 10x larger fan on an actual air fryer makes a difference, but I’m not willing to give up the counter space to try.
Hm. Whoever made microwave ovens with an impossible to clean exposed resistance that for broiling in the off chance you felt like making lasagna in a shoebox should be shot into space.
Everybody below pointing out that repeated beeping noises are unacceptable is also not wrong. It’s gotten to the point where half a dozen different things may be beeping in my kitchen, nobody knows which one it is and everybody is in a reverse-race to ignore them to see if someone else goes to deal with it.
I once had a dishwasher that opened the door by itself using magnets instead of nagging you like a needy cat and I miss it every day.
Magnets are brilliant. I had to go really high up the range for mine to have a motor that opens the door at the end of each cycle. It has good energy ratings too but I’m not sure the extra cost will be worth it in its lifetime because the “eco” cycle is like the cheating on the homologation run of cars: it uses so little power and heat nothing gets clean enough if it’s full.
The hvac control panel.
The furnace and ac units are both great, but the control panel will sometimes just, idk, dissociate. I can change settings and it displays them, but they don’t “take”. It won’t relay those changes to its bigger brethren. In order to snap it back to reality, I have to go out to the garage and flip the breaker because there’s no other way to power cycle it.
There are spiders in the garage. And they are prolific with their webs, especially where I need to walk to get to the breaker panel.
So when the hvac panel glitches, it’s a whole ordeal to fix it.
There are spiders in the garage. And they are prolific with their webs, especially where I need to walk to get to the breaker panel.
https://old.reddit.com/r/homeowners/comments/tqpqjh/how_to_keep_spiders_out_of_garage/
bugs such as flies , gnats, mosquitos, beatles, etc. are attracted to the light and just fly in when the garage door is open. Spiders are just a natural consequence of having bugs there.
I don’t know to what degree that light attraction is the cause, but if they’re eating light-attracted bugs (which I think would really be moths), one solution might be leaving a bug zapper in the garage. If they’re getting fried by the bug zapper, they can’t be food for spiders.
I’ve had issues with moths getting into the house. I had a tiny zapper that ran off UV LEDs; those faded and became less effective in a few years; the device was clearly overdriving them. But I’ve been pretty happy with a larger one that has UV fluorescent tubes that just keeps trucking. I set that up on a (battery-backed, so doesn’t reset on wall power loss) timer to only run at night. Seems to work well enough for me.
I live next to protected wetlands and in a generally swampy area. Yes, there are clouds of insects.
I’m not a fan of spiders and dealing with cobwebs, but since moving here, I have declared a truce with them. We try not to keep any lights on near doors to minimize bugs getting into the house when we come and go. And UV sticky traps are very effective and always shock me with how many they can accrue overnight. We have a regular bug service coming too. Creepy crawlies are just part of life here.
If it needs an app or internet connectivity - it can go fuck itself.
We’ve gone nearly a century of appliances that didn’t need this shit. Apps or the Internet itself will not and never will, make things easier to do tasks than they already were easier to do before.
Aside from security and privacy issues, and the issue of dependence on cloud services, a lot of those go obsolete. Like, a fridge from 1950 is still gonna work pretty well today. Networking has changed a lot more quickly, and I suspect will continue to change quickly.
I’d be okay if they want to have some kind of simple, industry-standard interface that lets me expose it to a computer’s control. Like, furnaces have that standard four-wire interface, and then you can just replace an (inexpensive) thermostat with a newer one as technology marches on, leave the furnace in place. But I don’t want a lot of short-lived technology being baked into longer-lived appliances.
Most modern refrigerators. They have tons of features (ice makers, water dispensers, screens) that are unnecessary.
But what gets me really going is the shelving, specifically door shelving. Most manufacturers have moved to clear polycarbonate for the “wall” around the shelf which is specifically not recommended for shock loading. For example, the load that is applied when the door closes and the condiments slide into the retaining piece. To get a fridge with metal means upgrading to a luxury model.
And don’t get me started on the fact that door shelving overlaps with interior shelving. Go look at a 1940s Shelvador and learn how to build a proper appliance.
Frankly, most appliances bother me:
- microwaves have UI issues, but I do like Panasonic’s genius inverter line.
- stoves have too many features and electronics. A true commercial style stoves without gadgets and gewgaws to break is hard to find for home use.
- so many dishwashers simply don’t clean dishes. Modern ones (imho) get too hot
- Most washing machines are way too rough on clothes.
- what the fuck is even with dryers? If people in the UK hang their clothes to dry, you can too (tropical climates may be an exception). Thankfully heat pump dryers are becoming a thing.
Yeah one can’t hang clothes outside to dry here, since it’s not dry outside, and line dried laundry is stiff and wrinkled, dryer laundry is soft and smooth. But I still pull half my clothes out and hang them inside to dry because oof dryers sure do wear them out faster.
I discovered that a dehumidifier is really good at drying clothes cheaply. The one I bought has a specific button for laundry.
I’m not up for hanging wet sheets and towels throughout my condo, much less clothes. And my HOA would fine me exorbitantly if I hung laundry on my balcony. I’m seriously glad ther are washers and dryers in the basement and that, after constant issues with frontloading washers, we went back to toploaders.
Do most fridges not have shelves that can be put practically anywhere?
The key with the shelvador is that there’s no overlap between door shelves and interior shelves. You can stuff the fridge right to the brim and close the door. Too many refrigerators now have an overlap, so you need to reserve space from the fridge to allow the door shelves space. It’s not a matter of placement, just the door shelves are too deep (or interior, depending how you look at it).
If people in the UK hang their clothes to dry, you can too
This is something of a thing in places in Europe, though not much in the US today.
I don’t really like line-dried clothes. I’m sure that it’s gentler on the clothes, but in addition to the convenience, machine-dried clothes are considerably softer; line-dried stuff is stiff by comparison.
I prefer line dried as they are way less creased than when they come out of the dryer.
I mean I like microwaves but it pisses me off it wants to know the date and this goes for any item that wants internet access. Time I get. Its sorta convenient to have it show it when its not doing anything else but why the F do you think you need to know the date. Im not setting you to go cook something later. Really it comes down to it refusing to work after power loss until you put in time and date. My microwave always thinks the days start on november eleventh two thousand eleven.
11/11/11 is the Skyrim epoch
I encountered a gas stove that wouldn’t work during a power outage. It had a valve that shut off the gas if electricity wasn’t present. Way to intentionally sabotage one of your biggest advantages.
haha… yeah. We have a tankless gas water heater that requires an electrical connection. We live in hurricane country so going without power for days/weeks at a time is something we’ve lived through on several occasions. Having a hot shower during those times is the one thing my wife really appreciates. Fortunately, it’s just a 110 connection and we can plug it into a generator or battery back up…
I’m guessing a tankless water heater involves some electronic controls. It probably could be designed to use low-voltage DC with a battery backup, but that would be fancy.
A gas stove should never need electricity for a burner to work if the user supplies another source of ignition like a match. This is surely a “safety feature” to prevent people from leaving the gas on when the electronic ignition is unavailable, but nobody with half a brain and a sense of smell would do that.
I’m guessing a tankless water heater involves some electronic controls. It probably could be designed to use low-voltage DC with a battery backup, but that would be fancy.
It definitely has to if it doesn’t have a pilot light, else its electrical ignition won’t work, but if it has that, there are various ways you could make it work, including just using the heat from the pilot light to drive a thermoelectric generator to get a small amount of juice.
