Glances over at my 1954 GE Combination that has NEVER been serviced outside of cleaning and replacing the light bulbs.
Old fridges never die. Modern fridges are more efficient but more break-y, can’t have both.
Old stuff that broke got thrown out and forgotten
Old appliances broke, but they were made to be easy to fix so our grandparents could just swap out the broken parts. I helped my dad replace the compressor on an older fridge as a kid and the heating elements on my grandma’s toaster. I remember my dad taking me to some locally owned mom and pop hardware store where we could buy replacement parts for old appliances off the shelf. My parents still have the toaster, but that store closed down and new stuff isn’t made to be fixable anymore (most likely due to planned obsolescence thanks to late-stage-capitalism).
On a tangent, when you think about it, throwing an entire toaster away because one heating coil burned out or throwing awag an entire fridge just because the compressor gave out is not rational. But if you tell people we should have the freedom to buy repairable appliances then they look at you like you are crazy. To me, it is the other way around. Sustainability isn’t political or a luxury, it is an inevitabe, unstoppable force of equilibrium.
When it comes to refrigeration in particular newer appliances tend to break more frequently because they are using more environmentally friendly refrigerants. Old CFCs cooled really well with minimal work from the compressor. Newer fridges and freezers are more frequently using isobutane (R600a) because it doesn’t deplete ozone and it’s GWP (global warming potential) is 3 where the GWP of even non ozone depleting HFCs can frequently be in the thousands. The problem is isobutane requires higher head pressures to work properly and doesn’t cool as well as older refrigerants so the compressors have to work much harder to get the same result.
Also when it comes to household fridges and freezers, they really aren’t worth it to fix anymore. You need an EPA 608 cert to even touch refrigerants (in the US anyways). Plus you need a two stage vacuum pump and a recovery machine (amongst other things) both of which can easily cost as much as a new fridge. Then you need to actually have the skillset to remove the broken component and braze a new one in because everything uses brazed connections now to minimize leaks. Then you need to have the know how to properly recharge the system with refrigerant which when you’re working with a critical charge of maybe 2oz of refrigerant is an absoulte pain. All in all, maybe if you are already an HVAC tech and had the tools and materials on hand you might barely break even fixing your own fridge or freezer.
When it comes to consumer refrigeration they can’t be user repairable due to having to work with refrigerants and economies of scale mean they just generally aren’t worth a trained techs time to fix.
Just be sure to clear the lint off your coils every five years or so. Otherwise you’re making the poor guy suck air through a shag carpet.
suck air through a shag carpet.
Welp, that’s a new euphemism.
she probably just wants you to stop racking up the electric bill
Meanwhile the fridge using two cool lasers for cooling since the end of ww1
Except LG and Samsung fridges or the ones that use the linear compressors.
RIP to the Minsk fridge my granny used until 2022. Built end of 70s, that thing was continuously in use for 50 years.
The fridge is a big pump, it needs to circulate… It’s when it sits idle for too long that it risks death!
Self-hosters:
My PC is never on when I’m not using it.
My server, however…
Your PC is an unused server.
Server, as in singular? 😅
NAS running a bunch of docker containers; a ThinkServer running Proxmox, which is in turn running Debian, which in turn is running more docker containers; a VPN running Debian, running docker containers…
It’s docker containers all the way down.
Spoiler
Send help.
Well I have a VPS to run lemmy just because I don’t want something that public near my home network but I haven’t found the limit to my little i7 HP mini PC… Yet
MORE CONTAINERS
No redundancy? No high availability? No clustering? What are you even doing man? One server? Those are rookie numbers. You gotta bump those numbers up.
/s, obviously. You do you, and whatever works for your needs/budget.
Yeah I’m trying not to fall further down the rabbit hole at the moment. Want to get a big raid cluster going so I don’t have to be so skimpy on my Jellyfin library but I have to stop myself everytime I start pricing parts out lmao
The call of the upgrades will claim me one day though
I’m addicted to raspberry pis and have six of them for various purposes. Hard to say no to 5 watts when you wanna spin up another thing.
Are you able to easily attach spinning rust hard drives to those? If so, how? I think those things use more than 5W on their own. Biggest question I have before planning a horizontal raspi setup. Currently I use old x64 PC boxes for self hosting.
I attached little portable USB SSD drives to them when they need the storage; otherwise I have been using raspikeys. Though I am excited about the new m2 chips on offer nowadays from RPi.
Currently my pis are used as:
- Two separate pi holes
- Shakenet
- Birdnet
- Homebridge
- Torrent client
Does it count if the secondary “server” is a NAS?
You host a server from your own computer at home?
It deeply saddens me that this is now considered freak behavior. It’s what the internet was supposed to be!
No, from the fridge.
Its a Doom server
Facts.
Thermal cycling is one of the biggest stressors electrical components can be subjected to. Leaving your processor on and at a consistent load massively improves the lifetime of the chip. So take THAT, mom!
I run prime95 24/7 on my AMD FX-9590 to keep it at a nice stable temp. Plus it means I also don’t need to heat my house in the winter. Gotta love a tdp of 220W.
Heat cycling is a huge stressor on any material. That’s part of why diesel freight trucks tend to last well past a million miles while it’s newsworthy if a passenger car makes it that long. How many times a week is your Toyota Corolla driving 10+ hours at a time? Most commonly, when you hear of a million mile vehicle, it was making long haul deliveries daily and was maintained at the correct intervals.
I think there are a lot of other factors in that case.
The biggest reason why it’s rare to see regular cars get to a million miles is because they don’t get driven as much. At the average of 14k miles per year it would take 71 years for someone to drive 1 million miles. Since it takes so long to get there, many non engine related issues start taking hold like rust and obsoletion.
I’m over here just over 30k miles after 6 years
What’s the heat stress difference between idle/off and heavy-usage/idle for a PC? If the latter is much bigger, then turning it off may have a negligible impact while still saving some energy. Avoiding heavy-usage may also be a better solution than avoiding turning it off.
It’s obviously more complicated than can be summarized in a lemmy comment, but that said you’re absolutely correct. That load management is the reason bitcoin mining farms undervolt their cards, so that they can maximize lifetime while minimizing energy usage.
The webway must remain open!
In the grim darkness of the present day, there is only cold food and drink.
Freezy Pops for the Freezy Pop throne.
Nothing like the coldness of the warp to keep your cold brewed recafe cold!
Wouldn’t that be the webway must remain closed, in this case?
Do you intend to remove the Emperor from the Golden Throne?
He’s keeping it closed, because there’s nasty shit on the other side. Are ya’ll eating crazy pills or something?
Is this from Warhammer?
Looks inspired by it, but the emperor only has 1 mechanical eye lighting up.
If it’s not it’s stolen from it.
My refrigerator was never the same after everything that happened in Yugoslavia.
Say what you will about Serbian nationalist fridges but unlike Yugoslavia, they were built to last!
Simplified:
Having a fridge running is nothing complicated compared to a computer. The compressor and the light inside are the only things that are being powered. Both components work mechanically: The compressor has an electric motor that is running when fed with electricity. Pistons inside the compressor are linked mechanically to the electric motor. The light inside the fridge is operated with a switch that is mecahanically connected to the door. The light is off when the door is closed. As long as electricity is fed to the fridge, it keeps running.
Computers however are more complicated, as they basically are running clocks that connect an event with a time stamp. They can get disturbed easily when several events happen. When a computer is running long enough it can happen that the memory overflows when a specific event is being executed for example. For this reason it is renommended that your smartphone is supposed to be restarted at least one a month, otherwise it couldn’t function properly.
If refrigerators were operated the same way as a computer, like your laptop or smartphone, I bet it has to be restarted every once in a while, otherwise a malfunction would occur. To my knowledge refrigerators are built the same like 40 years ago, albeit with more efficient compressors, better insulation and less harmful refrigerant.
Those young machine spirits need their rest
Except those walkers capable of perpetual movement, we never let them rest cause we aren’t sure if we can make them move again
By the Emperors grace and the Mechanicus perseverance your toaster shall live again.
