A Pioneer Daughter’s View On New vs. Old
I have a washing machine that is fairly new, under a year old and I hate it! It is a top-loader, no agitator, , high efficiency and it sucks! These new washers have fancy tubs that move all around and supposedly do the same thing as an agitator, so you can do larger loads with less water and energy but guess what, they don’t wash well! I can’t do a really large load because if I do, not everything gets clean and not everything even gets wet!
I’m finding all of these new appliances that are supposedly new and improved, high efficiency and environmentally friendly seem to be anything but! When you have to wash and re-wash a load of laundry repeatedly or load and reload your dishwasher to get clean dishes, then you are not very efficient. When your dryer goes on the fritz, your vacuum spews instead of sucks or your microwave melts down it’s rare that you can get them repaired. You’re usually told it costs more in parts and labor than a new one, so just trash it. Not very environmentally friendly. I literally had a salesman tell me when I went to buy the offending new washer that I would never get 20 years out of a new one like I did my old one. He said I’d be lucky to get nine or ten! Wow, talk about built in obsolescence!
Speaking of obsolescence, technology is in a whole different realm! It seems like with new tv’s, phones, home entertainment systems, computers, the minute you get them they are outdated!
All of these things got me thinking about when I was a kid, when my parents were kids, when my grandparents were kids and how different things were. Not only did appliances have to last but even if you needed a new one, you rarely could afford it. You had to fix what was broken. You had to take care of things and make them last. Products were built well and they were made to last. Maybe they weren’t the most energy efficient but in the end they were well built, could be repaired and did the job the first time! To me that makes an appliance energy efficient and environmentally friendly.