So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[tonyb]

I could see myself buying a door-in-door “smart” fridge that makes “craft” ice and has an ice water dispenser and all that *IF* I trusted it would last at least 20 trouble-free years. And even with such an assurance I might still hesitate. Refrigerators used to be good for a lifetime or more. Used to be.

As I said before, my 1920s-vintage GE monitor-top fridge was still working fine when I sold it (wish I hadn’t) and I trust it’s still chugging along. It’s now older than about 99 percent of the human population. It ain’t got squat for “features” — a freezer section big enough for a couple ice cube trays, no drawers, no shelves in the door, pretty much just an icebox with a refrigeration unit on top. But I’d wager it will still be working when those new smart fridges are reduced to scrap.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In the thirty-two years I've owned my Kelvinator -- and it was forty-three years old when I got it -- my mother has gone thru four modern refrigerators. It's unconscionable.

 

[Trenchfriend]

my mother has gone thru four modern refrigerators.

Please, not so loud! My fridge is 10,9 years.

 

[Zombie_61]

Pfft, craft ice. How petit-bourgeois. The real conoissieur uses only natural Llanquihue glacial ice gathered from the Patagonian Ice Fields by indigenous ice-gatherers. Its aged and mellow flavor accents any upscale beverage and reveals the imbiber as a First Worlder Of Distinction.

Oh, sure, it's all fun and games until one of these geniuses thaws out a chunk of frozen space debris from XMM-2599 that landed here a bazillion years ago and the alien DNA it contains mixes with our own and turns every form of life on Earth into an Asset Protection Associate.

In the thirty-two years I've owned my Kelvinator -- and it was forty-three years old when I got it -- my mother has gone thru four modern refrigerators. It's unconscionable.

As one of my former bosses used to say, "If it was made in America it was made to sell, not to use."

 

[tonyb]

In the thirty-two years I've owned my Kelvinator -- and it was forty-three years old when I got it -- my mother has gone thru four modern refrigerators. It's unconscionable.

The big downside of old (real old) refrigerators is the need to defrost them. If you let it go too long between defrostings (as was the habit of just about everybody I knew back then) you had a bit of a mess on your hands.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I do mine every six months or so, whether it needs it or not. It's actually pretty easy to do if you work around the ice compartment with a hair dryer to the point where the frost drops off in one big chunk you can just pick up and throw out the back door into the driveway.

The Auto-Defrost function is a convenience, but it's also the reason refrigerators from the late fifties to the early nineties were such power hogs. As long as the gaskets are good and you don't overfill it, a manual defrost unit from the 20s thru the early 50s is as cheap to run as a modern "Energy Star" refrigerator.

 

[Hercule]

I do mine every six months or so, whether it needs it or not. It's actually pretty easy to do if you work around the ice compartment with a hair dryer to the point where the frost drops off in one big chunk you can just pick up and throw out the back door into the driveway.

WHAAAT???!!! You mean you DON'T hack away at it with a steak knife???!!!!!

 

[Tiki Tom]

Don’t remind me. We are over due to de-ice the fridge.

But you had me laughing about the craft ice. Thirty years ago, when I first became conscious of bottled H2O, I used to crack jokes about designer water. I knew it was time to stop cracking that joke when the local Safeway had a whole aisle of bottled water. Mountain spring water from Fiji, anyone?

oh, that reminds me: the other day I was watching some Netflix series and they were talking to a water sommelier. (Takeaway: never buy purified water, so he said.)

 

[tonyb]

WHAAAT???!!! You mean you DON'T hack away at it with a steak knife???!!!!!

I used a hammer and a screwdriver. Lucky I didn’t break the thing.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If you read the owners' manual it tells you specifically not to use pointed tools -- no ice picks, no awls, no screwdrivers. If you punch a hole in the evaporator (which is what the aluminum thing where the ice trays go is called) that's all she wrote.

Ice picks and awls were still everyday household items in the 1940s, but I doubt one home out of ten has one in the junk drawer today.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Don’t remind me. We are over due to de-ice the fridge.

But you had me laughing about the craft ice. Thirty years ago, when I first became conscious of bottled H2O, I used to crack jokes about designer water. I knew it was time to stop cracking that joke when the local Safeway had a whole aisle of bottled water. Mountain spring water from Fiji, anyone?

oh, that reminds me: the other day I was watching some Netflix series and they were talking to a water sommelier. (Takeaway: never buy purified water, so he said.)

Does a water sommelier offer you a sniff of the cap before he pours? "Notes of cast iron scale blend with an earthy, peaty afternote and a slight aroma of benzine..."

 

[Hercule]

I used a hammer and a screwdriver. Lucky I didn’t break the thing.

I think more of us than would readily admit have been that boat at one time or another, though a hammer might have been a bit of overkill. But then again, impatience is the mother of stupidity.

 

[Haversack]

Gee. Given the apparent market for designer ice, do you think the New England Ice Harvesting Industry could be reborn? It used to export natural ice all around the world.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We hardly ever get good thick ice here anymore. Last winter the ice fishing season didn't open until February.

 

[Trenchfriend]

WHAAAT???!!! You mean you DON'T hack away at it with a steak knife???!!!!!

I don't even use the "Fön".

I just need some of my big bath towels to soak the water in the freezer-bottom. And removing downfalling ice by hand. The defrosting only needs less hours. And it only has to be done once a year.

Such an easy thing.

Maybe the reason, why Auto-Defrost fridges are a very rare thing, here!

 

[tonyb]

I think more of us than would readily admit have been that boat at one time or another, though a hammer might have been a bit of overkill. But then again, impatience is the mother of stupidity.

Yes, and yes again. The overwhelming majority of my screwups, and those of my erstwhile role models, were born of impatience.

It’s of a piece with “a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.” (There’s a reason cliches catch on.) I would hope that with advancing years people would get a sense of what they don’t know, which is almost everything.

It takes time to acquire skills and knowledge, and we have only so much time, which is to say not enough to truly master more than a few things. Understanding the basics of how, say, hardwood flooring is properly installed doesn’t render a person a hardwood flooring installer. A person with hands-on experience in other construction trades might do a creditable job of it, but for just about everyone else, I’d recommend hiring it out. I hate to see good materials wasted by shoddy installations, as the previous owners did with so many of their DIY efforts in this house.

 

[Trenchfriend]

The Kia Venga's bumper does well, the old dry-wooden doorpost of the garage was too weak.

Typical example of routine making you blind, sometimes. Everything was fine, I drove the car slowly out as always, everything looking okay as usual. But when I passed the doorpost wit the back bumper, MEEEH.

No problem for the bumper. It was 95% only wooden dirt, I removed with tissue and spit. The doorpost lost 5 millimeter.

The thing is, the many of us East Germans have to deal with the old small, narrow GDR-garages. My fathers problem, he absolutely wanted a garage for the Venga.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
People are likelier to have a driving mishap nearer home than farther away for a couple of reasons, the first being that’s where people do most of their driving, and, because familiarity fosters complacency. A person who has backed out of a driveway, or pulled into the nearby convenience store parking lot, without incident on hundreds of occasions, gets to believing no harm can come of it. He lets down his guard.

 

[Zombie_61]

^^^^^
People are likelier to have a driving mishap nearer home than farther away for a couple of reasons, the first being that’s where people do most of their driving, and, because familiarity fosters complacency. A person who has backed out of a driveway, or pulled into the nearby convenience store parking lot, without incident on hundreds of occasions, gets to believing no harm can come of it. He lets down his guard.

I never found out whether or not there was any truth to it, but back in the 70s there was a saying going around that most drivers have accidents within 1 mile from their homes. The popular joke response was, "Well then, those drivers should move to a neighborhood with fewer accidents."

 

[tonyb]

There was a story in The New Yorker a few years back on this very topic. Back before backup cameras and automatic braking, suburban cul-de-sacs were among the likeliest places for little kids to get struck by cars. It was attributed to the youngsters being beneath the drivers’ rearward vision and the drivers’ false sense of safety backing out of their own driveways, where, you know, nothing much ever happens.