DESIGN GONE WRONG WITH COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS -AND HOW TO FIX THEM

[Moby Duck]

Most of the commercial items we buy have been designed by highly paid experts and still they often get it wrong. I am sure that to the innovative people that subscribe here, that these thing are glaringly obvious. Lets make a list here of your pet hates and why you hate them, in the hope that the experts may read some of these answers and change their product. Here is a chance to vent your spleen. If you are an expert, please tell me or others that may post here where we are wrong.

I will start off with some of my pet hates:-

1. Bottle Openers built into a survival knife or even worse a bayonet. If you are in a survival or combat situation and just happen to have a handy truckload of soda or beer bottles available, and you are unable to open a bottle cap with your plain old knife blade, then perhaps you don't deserve to survive. Most bottle openers in the blade just weaken the blade.

2. Domestic Refrigerators with thin walls. Pretty much all domestic refrigerators these days have sides about 1 inch thick. Originally in the 1950/60s' they were around 2 inches thick but over the years that followed they tell us insulation got better and they were able to reduce the thickness and create more interior space. What they never tell us is that now there are heaters built into the sides of your fridge to stop condensation forming on the outer walls. In humid areas these walls can get quite hot doing their job. They do their job well but the reason they are needed is because the thin wall insulation is so poor that the outside of the fridge is getting cold enough to to get this condensation. The heaters heat up your already humid kitchen and also heat up the inside of the fridge so that your fridge unit must run longer to remove that internal heat. Poor design and a waste of your electricity. Get better fridge insulation and fix this stupid idea.

3. Domestic Refrigerators (Again) - Refrigerant gasses in your fridge. There have been many changes in refrigerant gasses over the years and mostly for environmental reasons, ozone layer holes etc. Originally sealed units were large and used Freon or similar gasses. Now the units are about half the size and use environmentally safer gasses which are usually not quite as efficient as the original Freon. Of course if the gas is not quite as good and the compressor size has halved, it will now have to run approximately twice as long for the same cooling effect. Another waste of my electricity. I have a half size fridge in a holiday cabin that runs off ozone friendly ammonia and a 60 watt heating element. It's about 50 years old, has no moving parts, has thick walls and gets no condensation on the sides and has never needed to have a gas top up or a new heating element or thermostat. Perhaps a modern design of this fridge could save the world. Don't tell me that ammonia is dangerous, all refrigerant gasses are dangerous and you can smell even tiny amounts of ammonia long before it reaches toxic levels. We should be able to do much better with the insulation of all fridges, something better than squirting in some cheap foam.

4. Computers and Software. Both go through extensive testing and beta trials etc etc but they still haven't got it right. There is no excuse for a computer crashing unless it is a developing electronic fault. There is no excuse for continual security updates, bug fixes etc etc and service packs 1,2,3, etc. If you haven't sorted out the bugs before you sell me this product then you are selling me a product under false pretenses. You are selling me something that doesn't work. Sell me a car or other machine that is unsafe or doesn't work properly and there will be a general recall to make it good. Selling me a product that in 3 or 4 years the manufacturer decides that it has a better product and refuses to support the old product is not on either. Selling a replacement product or even giving me a free copy of that new software that changes my whole computer so radically each time I "upgrade" is completely unforgivable. There is one software manufacturer out there that will never get any of my money again.

[C-Bag]

OMG, this is one of those topics that I should walk away from for my blood pressure's sake and because there is just not time enough in the day! Basically I'm more surprised when I find a good design than not. The world is awash in good idea, bad execution and bad ideas for no good reason.

One of my favorite quotes: it takes an engineer to make it complicated and a genius to make it simple. Amen.

If I may add on the fridge rant what genius thought it was a good idea to put the compressor and condenser UNDER the fridge! The really efficient new fridges that are made for folks who want to live off the grid have thick insulation, I think ammonia and the mechanicals on top of the box like the old 30's or 40's fridges. And the condensers don't need cleaning as much as ones under the box.

My old TOM TOM ONE gps is another good example. It just worked, the mount was a little clunky but whatchagonnado on these steeply raked windshields? They decided that you couldn't update the maps because some maroon( yes I'm a Bugs Bunny fan ) made the awful software not be able to not load garbage that wouldn't fit in the ONE tiny memory. But every time I used a newer Garmin or TOM TOM I was glad to get back to the old ONE. Then it got stolen and I HAD to update. The new one has a bigger screen, but they decided they would put more info on there so it's all so small now I can't read it at a glance. Then there is this totally stupid all in one mount. Yeah it folds up nice and tidy......but did Mr. Engineer Maroon ever try and mount it to a windshield? Either he has long skinny octopus fingers or it's actually a bait and switch get you to spend another $20+ for those stupid beanbag dash mounts.

Don't even get me started on cars and the obvious rampant Rectal Cranial Inversion Syndrome in that industry! I am no genius but come on. Personally I hope the clowns who decided in the 20's that you should base an economy on consumerism and planned obsolescence are smoking a big brown one in the special hell reserved greedy liars and cheats.

Rant off, now to go ride my bike and get my BP back down.

[Jon]

Agreed on refrigerators. Our icemaker stopped working recently (after all, it's been an entire two years). A small motor had failed, and I thought I might just replace the motor. It looks like the manufacturer had taken a very common small motor, and altered its housing such that only this proprietary modified motor would fit. That way, my most reasonable option is to replace the entire icemaker unit.

And on GPS. My neighbor called me recently to lend a hand transferring his map files to his new GPS. His old maps were highly detailed, but the file format compatibility had changed, so he had to replace everything.

Seasonal items is another issue. We repeatedly fell into the trap of replacing holiday lights each season. My wife's parents have had the same exact lights for 40+ years now.

The upside is that our purchasing habits can now improve from reading discussions in online communities. I ended up finding a holiday lighting forum, and I saw a small light manufacturer who posted regularly in the forums, guaranteed his product (he even had a tiered money-back guarantee, with X% back if they failed at 1 year, Y% at 2, etc.), and was vocal about the problems with mainstream lights. I ended up purchasing from him, and was shocked at the build quality of his products, and the reasonable cost. It might even cost more to initially manufacture an inferior product, but it's more profitable long-term with repeat purchases.

[Moby Duck]

Hadn't considered the unit being under the fridge to be a bad site before but do so now that you have pointed it out and will now add that to my hate list. One day I will have a go at our local fridge "design engineers" about this, or perhaps I should go direct to their MD.
Blood Pressure is also on my list. It seems that every few years something that we do or eat is very bad for us and it usually revolves around Heart Health or BP or Cancer or both. In the 1940/50s' it was healthy to feed babies full fat milk and adults were encouraged to eat lots of eggs and butter/animal fats and even white sugar and carbs. Then it slowly changed and and all of these things except sugar were considered unhealthy. Now eggs have made a bit of a comeback and white sugar is nearly the most toxic substance on the planet. Whilst all of this nonsense has been going on we still have people on subsistence diets in third world countries that only eat whole grain foods and all the "healthy" stuff. They are certainly not over weight, have never eaten much refined sugar, salt or animal fats, and one would assume that their BP must be perfect. But most of them still die around 20 years before their counterparts in the developed world. These bad eating cholesterol ridden fat people are actually increasing their life expectancy and it can not just because of their access to modern drugs.

[Moby Duck]

You have me thinking of something else now. Down here in NZ we get a tiered money back system on car batteries and usually a 5 year warranty. There is a sticker on the battery and they scratch out a number to indicate when you bought it. They rarely scratch it out though and you think that you are on to a winner. It is not a simple date scratch out system, it is a simple code that battery sellers understand but you don't. None of this seems to matter anyway because when your battery dies they work out how old it is from a permanent number on the sticker. "You have done really well with this battery. It has lasted 2 weeks longer than the warranty." And " Oh you have a special battery and those $60 dollar ones we always have on special will not fit your car. Your one will cost $250 +tax."

[C-Bag]

These bad eating cholesterol ridden fat people are actually increasing their life expectancy and it can not just because of their access to modern drugs.

I get how confusing it is and here it's corporate interests capturing government policy. Being a mechanic all my life made me automatically an observer of symptoms. When I think about it I was like that before. Like even as a little kid I hated the smell of cigarette smoke and wondered how any body could consciously breath that in.

I noticed they were not healthy. They hacked and wheezed in the morning and their skin color was not good. They basically looked sick and along about '63 my hunch was scientifically proven. But it took almost another 30yrs and an inside whistleblower to prove that there was a conspiracy to hide the facts that they purposely made it addictive and toxic.

And it shows how much power they have that they were not put out of biz. And how they are not properly charged for the pressure on the medical system lung cancer , heart disease and dementia causes. Much less the range of other problems the use of cigarettes cause. And I see the use of natural tobacco as different from cigarettes.

Returning to your original point, I disagree with your accesment. I know my BP is directly linked to salt ,fat intake and exercise. I was somewhat making a joke about my BP because stupid engineering makes me crazy. But my whole life my BP had been the same and then we moved to the coast and I continued to eat like I had where we used to live. I had to eat a lot of salt where I used to live because from May to October it was above 95 deg. F and most times as high as 110 and I was working in uninsulated/unairconditioned metal building assembling and fabricating machinery. It was even hotter inside than out. Going back to cutting my salt and fat, riding my bike regularly and cutting dairy took me from scary BP to normal range with no drugs.

The stuff that kills 3rd world folks IMHO is not their diet(like here). It's war, disease and famine. THE 3rd world doesn't have heart disease or dementia like we do here in the US.