What household item do you wish there was a trial/testing period for?
What household item do you wish there was a trial/testing period for?
I know some companies offer 90-day returns etc, but what item would you think everyone would benefit from if it was an industry standard to have a test drive like new cars?
My nitpick would be microwaves. I have tried picking out what I thought was decent microwaves in the past but it's hard to know exactly how it functions without using it. For instance, my microwave has an express button (30 seconds) or a minute plus button. You can only use one of them, if you've hit the minute button the express button doesn't let you add 30 seconds while it's active and vice versa. Also the beeping, even if you hit the stop button and open the door when it gets to 0 seconds, it still goes through it's "I'm done" beeping which is loud and repetitive making you stop it at 1 second and still having to click cancel which makes noise. So what's your choice?
Refrigerators, dish washers, washer/dryers, any appliance really. But I want the test period to be 90 days, it's a good length to properly use and determine if something is decent or a steaming pile of shit.
Fyi some microwaves have a way to set it to silent mode. I think in some models it might even be an undocumented button combination to do it. Web search your exact model to see if there's a way to do it
Blu tak over the speaker hole mutes them nicely too.
I had to buy a new microwave because the one I got didn't have a silent mode. The beeping makes me irrationally angry,
Mine is super annoying so the silent mode is clutch. You just have to remember that you were heating something if you’re also distracted with other stuff. Whenever the power goes out and I have to reset it, I swear I turn the sound off before I do the clock because every button press is super loud. Even my MIL commented on it once when she was visiting, before we figured out how to turn the sound off.
HVAC systems.
When my wife and I we had to replace our forced air furnace and central air system in the late autumn due to carbon monoxide literally the evening before our son was to be born, I felt under pressure to get something in place.
I told them I needed a more powerful air conditioner for all the unique heat-generating equipment in my basement, especially since our old system had trouble keeping up. They said that the new unit was more than enough for the square footage. I reiterated again, that air conditioners don't cool square footage, they cool BTU's, and the average home doesn't have a grow op and server farm in the basement generating significant heat. Then, they decided to hit me with the old "I've been doing this for {x} decades" speech.
Needless to say, I've had to consolidate servers, stop indoor gardening, replace the bulbs in the house with those shitty blue-hued LED's that can't dim right (and dimmer switches to handle the change in load characteristics), take the weather into account when cooking indoors and clean both sets of A/C coils on a more frequent basis. The air conditioner still can't keep up and when we have a string of hot days, we can't always count on the cooler evenings to get the house back down to "room temperature".
Oh, and now our old chimney drips water into the basement.
Normally, they try to talk you into overshooting your AC needs, so you end up with a house that's the right temperature, but too humid. Strange that they undersold.
I get the sense that across the board, hvac people literally just glance at a house and proclaim the size of system you need. There's all sorts of calculators online where you can put in all the relevant info, and it will calculate your needs accordingly, but they just ignore that.
Without knowing the heat load calculation or what was installed it's obviously all guesses. But the fact that temps are easily reaching 40+ or 105+, no AC is going to transfer the heat from your house to the outdoors. It's basic science.
Air conditioners aren't actually cooling your house, but instead it's relocating heat. So if it's too hot outside, it won't do anything. heat transfer can only continue until the two objects (condenser outside and the ambient air) have reached thermal equilibrium and are at the same temperature. Once they balance out, it won't do anything.
Infact, getting MORE BTUs on your unit is actually a bad thing since it won't have time to dehumidify your house. This will lead to short cycling of the AC (it'll turn on and off a lot) and you never get cooling. The amount of homeowners that demanded bigger sizes units only to get pissed it's worse is astounding.
The indoor gardening also is TERRIBLE for air conditioners since your feeding so much moisture in the air.
You just said that AC can't make an indoor space cooler than the temperature outside. This is completely wrong and easily disprovable by simply asking anyone who lives in a hot region. The air conditioned indoors is always MUCH cooler than temperature outside.
Like, how do you think freezers work? The temperature inside the freezer stays below freezing while the ambient room temperature is 80 F.
AC is an ACTIVE heat pump. It can push heat out to where it's already hotter, because it's using energy to do it. What you're describing is a passive cooling system, but air conditioners are active systems that use energy to push heat against the gradient. It's like how a passive water pipe can only have water flow down from it's highest point, but a powered water pump can actively move water upward to a point above where it started.
The grow tent was mostly self-contained and humidity-controlled and monitored inside and out. It actually had to be indoors because of our short growing season, risk of germination from nearby industrial crops, and federal licensing requirements for the type of plant at the time. Regardless, the HVAC experts were here on-site and they could have opened their eyes to what I was telling them. There's was no heat load calculation. They said "this is the unit we install for your type of house and it's more than enough. Trust me, I've been doing this for..." etc. etc.
Of course condensers and evaporator coils work by pushing entropy around. I'm not sure what in my comment would have led you to believe I thought otherwise.
Short cycling would be a happy problem at this point. Over the past month the shortest cycle was on a 16 C day, when the A/C ran from 6:41am to 9:15am, and the longest were on those 32 C days when it started at roughly 7:45am and didn't finish cooling until 5am the next day. You suggest that it won't do anything on a hot day, but the temperature gradient indoors when the outside temperature is high is measurably lower when the system is cooling as compared to idle.
Maybe the HVAC guy was thinking I was just one of those same customers you're complaining about. Nobody's asking for a system ridiculously overpowered -- Just properly powered. I understand the value of properly sizing a system. For instance, I know that a properly-sized furnace should run nonstop on the coldest day of the year. I also know that you don't have an entire month's worth of "coldest day of the year"
My house can be 60 degree warmer than the outside temperature in the winter, so I just have to point the blame somewhere when it can't stay 10 degree cooler than the outside throughout summer. And yes, I know cooling is a lot more complex than heating, but I'm giving the A/C a 50 degree headstart.
...And that is why I think there should be a trial period for HVAC systems.
TVs
Mattresses. Some of the major brands offer a trial period but they also cost a ton of money and are still a hassle dealing with. Memory foam mattresses in a box can be great quality but if you dont like it, no chance youre getting it back in the box. If you brought it home in a car you now have to rent a truck, get some help and its just a bad experience if you want to return the bed.
Most comments have covered the biggest ones, but I'm going with a toaster. I have bought some really fancy toasters that can't consistently toast a slice or bread or bagel and burn the edges and I've have some non-name junk tier that do great. It really seems like this should be a solved problem at this point, but nope.
My GF did extensive research before buying our new toaster because almost every single one seems to suck. She finally got an expensive one from SMEG. Nice name. How hard is it to make a toaster that doesn't suck? They're SO simple.
The youtuber Technology Connections did an episode about toasters and how much better they were in the past. Retro toasters are apparently the way to go.
Coffee machines. Every one I've gotten for years now ends up leaking water. Tried a load of brands.
Pet owners.
Are you a land lord?
No. I just think having pets should require a licence, mandatory lessons and a trial period.
Food
Spatulas with overly-long handles. Nothing like constanty banging it all over a small kitchen.
Those little lights made to look like light switches, with their weak-ass magnets.
Clamp lamps that have scant threads on the reflector. They like to pop off and can actually instakill an incandescent.
As far as a house itself: installed carpets. It's everything you hate about carpets, but permanent. They're especially loathesome in bathrooms.
If you hold the two button down it might stop the beeping
"My Wife."