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Saturday, June 15, 2019

Yet another product safety issue - a self-balancing electric scooter, a.k.a. "Hoverboard"

Considering all the fuss about this particular type of personal transportation gadget having been responsible for numerous fire incidents, given that it is already part of a distant past (by modern perception), I took the chance of buying one of these units, going for a cheap one. My expectation was that this industry had some time to mature and learn with all the beating they received from the press and these incidents:



Sunday, May 12, 2019

Dealing with dishwasher failures

Albeit 10 years of flawless operation can be considered quite good for a home appliance, still when it finally fails, there is the brief criticizing thought of "why didn't it last longer? Bloody programmed obsolescence in modern industry!" ..and so on and so forth.

Well, the truth be said, 10 years of operation without a single glitch is either a product of sheer luck (i.e. one golden batch in the production line), or the brand really went serious with quality and the strategy at the time didn't include the need for recovering the same consumer soon in the product life cycle.

I can say this from the Whirlpool dishwasher model ADP 6837/1 that I have been using since 2009. During 10 years it never complained, while we threw dirty dishes at it on a daily basis.



Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Once again bumping into questionable product safety standards



About 6 months ago, I replaced the manual plastic pump I used to have for dispensing water from 5+ litre jugs, with what would in principle be a more sophisticated and convenient approach: looked for an electric water dispenser, and without much searching, found several options. Most, if not all were unfortunately designed to fit into the 19 litre office water bottles. Without any alternative, ordered one of these, considering that I would have to come up with some custom adaptation if I wanted to use it with the 5 litre bottles. Ended up ordering the one below, for its minimally elegant design and compact dimensions: