Asklemmy

Fuck modern appliances.
I'm lucky enough to have bought both washer/dryer almost 20 years ago. Both of 'em for $600 at Future Shop, which now ironically only exists in the past.

I never really think about these appliances, which is the nice part that I realky love about them.
They don't remind me they exist with beeps or phone notifications. They just do their thing.
Anyway, the washer is an old, cheap top loader, that can also periodically be used to tamp the soil beneath your foundation to make sure your house is stable. You activate that feature by bunching the bed sheets all wrong on the same side of the drum.
That's a nice feature that's been deprecated in newer models.
It's an overall easy model to repair because it's mostly just an oversized salad spinner with 2 water valves and a pump.
The dryer is like the quiet nephew that you like but never hear much about, nothing much to say really, but it works.

Anyway.
When the temperature dial on the washer broke 15 years ago, there was no way I was paying $90 to buy some complicated part that would break again.
So I just removed the knob and twisted the stranded wires to a dumb switch that you could reach by putting your finger in the knob hole as a proof of concept, left for the cold valve, right for hot. Sketchy? Sure. Warm? I don't know? Use a bit of both, or whatever.
I never even got around to actually solder it, which is weird because I've soldered lots of electronics. It worked, I guess I forgot, so whatever.

Until it stopped working a few months ago, having finally shaken itself loose and I opened it up again, only then realizing I didn't solder it way back then. Oops.
This time, I ordered a proper 3 position rotary switch, which I did solder. Left for the cold valve, right for the hot valve, and amazingly: middle for both, which is how warm water is made.
I also 3d printed a knob to fit the new switch.
Fancy right? but my last repair is still nowhere near as complicated as the original broken part was and we still only ever use the cold water setting.

Now, it turns out the reason the original part is complicated and expensive is that in normal washers, the temperature selection thingy only ever changes the washing temperature and not the rinsing temperature.
This means which valve needs to open has to change depending on where it is in the wash cycle, thus the more complicated part.

Anyway, technically, my washer now has more features than before it broke in the sense that we could theoretically now rinse with hot or warm water, which y'all plebs probably can't. Not that we ever use anything but the cold setting, but we could and you can't.

The dryer? It has just kept working.
Now and then we'd feed it something wrong like a bunch of loose balls from an old bearing that was sitting in a pant pocket or a set of lockpicks or whatever and I take the back panel apart to retrieve the stuff stuck in the back elbow somewhere. When that happens, I also vacuum the lint that is stuck in this quantum realm of not being caught in the lint filter, but also not expelled out, just caught in that same hungry void elbow.

Both have no music, no tunes, no beeps, no capacitive buttons that you don't quite know if you pressed or not, no lockout, although there's a safety switch that stops the drum from turning if you open the lid. No wifi, no app, no mold.
There's no soap dispenser, although I do have a peristaltic pump and tubing so I could easily enough just drop that in a jug of liquid detergent and time how much to use... but... we prefer powder detergent anyway because shipping water around is just dumb when I can get the same shit in concentrated powder and add water myself, which washing machines conveniently already do.
A bucket of the stuff lasts several years too.

They're old and all that, but these things keep on doing what they're made for while friends have gone through 3-4 sets in the same time line.

Fuck modern appliances.