Stupid Designers

Why do you need heating in mid-summer when outside is already too hot?

There usually is but it is known only to their field engineers and consists of some unlikely combination of keys all at once for a specific time period. Much like resetting Android devices only cruder.

They do that so that they can market after sales support contracts to the unlucky purchaser.

Our customer care department was a huge profit centre in its own right.

Making dinner. I.e., ovens were warmer than ambient so some sort of of heat was being created -- but, not the 400F I had sought.

Nothing is present in their (factory) service manual. So, it must be REALLY secret! :>

It is "smart" enough to note when mains have been improperly connected, when it is getting too hot, too fast, etc. It has a "screen" on which to convey messages.

But, fails to notice when it's not heating AT ALL! (you THINK the door is closed, you KNOW you are engaging the heating elements, you are not seeing an expected temperature change --> the heating elements aren't operating properly OR your sensing of the environment is incorrect. In either case, your expectations of The World aren't consistent with what you're being told (so, something is wrong).

A *service call* would generate income (and, bad feelings!). But, a call to "support" comes out of profits -- which is why these avenues are increasingly automated.

Regardless, you don't want to be "known" for s***ty products, especially those with big price tags that are hard to just "swap out" (like a major appliance)

Kitchen appliances should be simple. Our oven has a electro- mechanical clock and a bimetal thermostat. It is used daily and has been going for 43 years. You'd be lucky to get even a third of that with a modern 'smart' appliance.

And in practice, we always run the same program, so what good are the smarts?

Our first dishwasher, 1980's issue, lasted twenty years. Our newest electronic marvel, barely five years old, has needed repairs twice already. Each new one seems to have a shorter lifespan than the one that came before it.

Jeroen Belleman

It should alert the user to that "observation". If the user acknowledges it, then, at worse, you have annoyed the user momentarily. (the user's acknowledgement can also act to silence or delay additional indications)

"So, if the temperature sensor fails and the oven is now at (or above) it's high temperature design limit, it should NOT error out?"

Software should always try to verify it's notion of reality. If you engage a motorized mechanism for 2 hours and the normal extent of travel is covered in 20 *seconds*, wouldn't you expect SOMETHING to be wrong? Or, should you just gleefully continue with the expectation that, sooner or later, the end-of-travel condition will be signaled?

There is a reason we use invariants in writing software: Because they ARE invariants!

Customers were usually very keen to get it back working again.

Or pass you from pillar to post in the hope that you will give up.

Ovens used to be huge immovable objects with insane power requirements permanently wired into a fat cable on their own circuit. But a modern combi microwave can easily run off a 13A socket no problems.

Much better insulation, recirculating the hot air, good airtight seals and double glazing makes a big difference and you can use any combo of grill, oven microwave to get the desired cooking effect.

Air fryers are all the rage over here in the UK with even lower power requirements and work pretty well.

Error codes? A stove is the worst imaginable place for electronics. Especially for cheap electronics.

We have gas stoves with knobs turning gas valves.

They have electronic igniters (which cause troubles now and then) but you can unplug that and use a match.

Yes, but few folks EXPECT things to break and tend to be annoyed that they have to PAY to get them repaired. Whether it's "right out of the box" or has been in service for decades.

But that also works against you (the manufacturer), in the long run. Whether it adds a subconscious bias that causes you to buy a competitor's product... OR, causes you to actively advocate AGAINST the "offending" manufacturer.

They are now made out of considerably flimsier materials (the 30" side-by-side oven I grew up with would be a chore to move). But, still require a heavy, dedicated circuit (this 50A @ 220VAC for the two ovens and 4 stovetop burners)

It was purchased to allow us to eliminate the countertop "toaster/convection" oven -- which competed for space with the microwave oven, etc. (this oven consists of two "half ovens" that can each operate in convection or radiant mode and be combined to form a larger oven; so, most of the time we use one of the smaller half-ovens instead of the countertop unit)

Depending on which of the two half-ovens you select -- or, the FULL oven -- there are different cooking modes available: dehydrate, convection, broil, roast, bake, air fry, bread proofing, etc.

Sadly, the controls were designed by the same "stupid designers"; you have ONE set of controls that has to interact with three different "primary processes": two independant ovens, each with temperature, time and mode controls as well as a general purpose timer. So, if you are interacting with one of these and another clamors for attention, everything gets f*cked up -- sort of like the W3.1 days where an out-of-paper error on a printer was deemed the most important event since the coming of christ! (i.e., a modal dialog overlaying and overriding whatever you may have been doing at the time).

We tend to live with a "half oven" *when* we use the oven. Many things are stovetop preparation and/or microwave reheat.

The full oven has usually only used for baking.

Too many products show an absence of domain experts in their design. As if someone (likely an engineer tasked with designing the device!) just put their own ideas into the design without consulting folks who might actually USE it!

What's most annoying is that it's probably a one week design problem... to get it RIGHT! I could probably buy a house for the monies they likely pissed away on *this* design!

Ditto the microwave oven: if you are cooking something (and, thus, most likely relying on *THE* timer), you can't use the general purpose "timer" feature in the unit. (really? can't walk and chew gum at the same time???)

Not if you put the electronics where they won't get hot.

If the igniters don't work, you kitchen can fill up with unburnt gas and turn into a fuel-air bomb.

Have that happen somewhere well up a multi-apartment tower block and you can kill a few people. It has happened.

You've lost a phase. Your circuit breaker has gone bad, or your receptacle at the oven location has gone bad. It could be other things such as a rodent chewed through half the cable between the panel and the oven, double pole tstat switch has failed on passing a single phase, etc. lots of possibilities.

It is possible to overstress the CB without making it trip, accelerating its failure eventually.

AI:

The National Electrical Code (NEC) governs the sizing of wiring and circuit protection for household electric ranges primarily under NEC Article 220 (Branch-Circuit, Feeder, and Service Load Calculations) and NEC Article 210 (Branch Circuits).Unlike many other major appliances, the NEC does not treat a household electric range as a continuous load, nor does it require wiring to handle 100% of its total maximum nameplate kilowatt (kW) capacity. Instead, the code implements a demand factor system because a standard household range rarely operates all burners and the oven simultaneously at maximum power.

For standard household electric ranges, the minimum circuit and wire size are calculated using the demand factors in NEC Table 220.55 (often referred to as Column C for standard ranges).1. Ranges Rated Between 8.75 kW and 12 kWFor any single household range rated between 8.75 kW and 12 kW full capacity, the NEC sets a fixed demand load of 8 kW.You do not calculate based on 12 kW; you calculate based on 8 kW.Amperage Calculation: 8,000 Watts ÷ 240 Volts = 33.33 Amps.2. Ranges Rated Over 12 kWIf a range exceeds 12 kW, the demand load increases by 5% for every additional kW (or major fraction thereof) above 12 kW.

My new washing machine failed at the first wash Repair man came under guarantee, had a new control board, used my laptop to program it... Let me keep the defective board, found it could not hande mains spikes (plenty of that here) Got some of the relevant chips from ebay, and for sure it blew up again after a while (the new board). Replaced the chips... So... added a cheap spike protector in the mains been woring now OK for more than 10 years.

The Whirlpool washer designers should have done better. But the repair shops have work to do.,,,

Or damp or greasy. Where is that?

There are people cooking with 100-year-old gas stoves. In fact I've seen them on sale. No electronics in a stove is going to last even 50 years, and good luck fixing it.

There is a procedure that I will reveal for the first time here:

Turn on the gas

Light the burner

Cook

Turn off the gas.

That works with electronic igniters or with matches.

"The gas leak was determined to have been caused by a cracked nut connecting the building's gas line to Hodge's stove, which was believed to have cracked due to being overtightened at the time of installation."

And the Ronan Point disaster happened because Ivy Hodge hadn't been able to turn off the gas, though she had every reason to believe that it hadn't been turned on until she tried to light it

Unless something has gone wrong, as it did at Ronan Point.

In California you could have invoked an earthquake. Disasters happen despite well-thought-out procedures set up by people who were a bit short on imagination.

Right. Shoddy construction and bad plumbing. Not a stove valve problem.

We have friends moving in together (cute couple) and smell gas in their new apartment. I sent them your Ronan Point link, to show the landlord.

There is usually a corrugated flex pipe between the wall and the back of the stove. Older ones are notorious for cracking and leaking.

We didn't have many (or any?) gas explosions in the 1989 quake. The big killer in East Bay was the stupid stacked freeway that collapsed and squashed cars on the lower deck. In San Francisco, most people were killed by falling bricks. A section of the Bay Bridge fell out too.

My old Victorian was built in 1892 so survived 1906 and 1989. We had cracks in some lath and plaster walls, and a brick chimney broke up.

The construction wasn't seen as "shoddy" when the building was put up - the gas explosion did expose a weakness in the design concept.

And over-tightening a connecting nut is bad workmanship, not bad plumbing.

The problem with gas stoves isn't in the valves, but in the concept of delivering gas to a kitchen where it can accumulate without getting burnt until you have a fuel-air bomb.

They didn't smell gas - we don't have receptors for the combustible components of petroleum gas. What they smelled was tertiary butyl mercaptan whose odour we can detect in quite low concentrations, which is added gas supplies to make leakage detectable.

There are better ways of accommodating movement between the wall and the stove. A loop of copper pipe can accommodate quite a lot, but copper pipe is priced by length. Thin-walled bellows incorporate less copper, which makes them cheaper.

But the gas pipes survived untouched? Lucky you.

PG&E sells us "gas" and we can smell it.

I've always been lucky. How about you?

I'm still alive at 83, so I'm clearly tolerably lucky. Life expectancy for male Australians is currently 81.1 years, so I'm not all that lucky. I never smoked and I completed a post=graduate university degree, both of which add to your life expectancy, and aren't figured into the easily accessible statistics, so in a sense I've made some of my own luck.

Not smoking was a conscious choice, but heavily influenced by my father's example - he smoked like a chimney until after he turned 60 and it caught up with him. Getting the post-graduate degree was matter of living up to my parents expectations - they both had university degrees at a time when this wasn't all that common. Now all my nieces and nephews have them.

The building was in fact collapsed by a minor pop of gas ignition that didin't even exceed a 10 psi overpressure. The woman did not even suffer hearing loss. The fitting used was brass compression nut on a flexible gas tube connecting the mains to the stove. A neighbor installed it, not the construction crew. The brass nut was defective and substandard, it probably came with the stove. Speculation is the gas accumulated at the ceiling, and that is why the odorant was not detected.

Bottom line, the collapse should never have happened. The stacked concrete panel system, known as Larsen-Nielson, was originally intended for buldings of 6-storeys or less, and Ronan Point was far in excess of that. Of course, the entirety of the project was comprised of defective panel manufacturing, defective panel installation, defective worker supervision, defective or nonexistent inspection, defective engineering of everything.

"It was concluded by the inquiry that the codes governing construction and design methods needed immediate reevaluation."

You don't think about what they are actually selling you, and it does show. You don't seem to have thought about why gas leaks ought to be detectable - the kitchen-sized fuel air-bomb - and you are correspondingly casual about using gas for cooking.

Gas-fired barbeques are safer, as long as they are outdoors.

Some clown will work out a way to make them dangerous too, and maybe win a Darwin Award in the process.