You already have a phone in your hand just put an alarm on there. There are you eliminated the supposed use of internet on a washer.
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Newer washing machines vary in time depending on how dirty your clothes are. So the same program may take 50 minutes or 90 minutes. This cannot be solved with a regular timer.
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If you have a job with varying hours, you might want to start the washing mashine when you’re heading home. Then you’re clothes are ready to be hung as you arrive and they aren’t laying around for hours.
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If you own photovoltaic, you might want to time energy intense home appliances such as washing machines, dish washers etc. to a period of overproduction.
Not saying, these issues are super important but there definitely are use cases for smart devices. However, I’d always recommend using a local / self-hosted rather than a cloud-based solution.
y’all are min-maxing life a bit hard there.
I just want a washer that can work with the water softener to determine if there’s enough soft water for a load or if it should request the softener regenerate first. So the smart home I’d like to have is one where sometimes it will advise against doing laundry until I’ve acquired more salt. All without any data leaving my home network, and if I’m accessing it remotely, it’s by accessing my home server without any other computer needing to be involved.
If smart options were actually smart you could do that.
With the right devices I’m certain this can be done with HomeAssistant, but everyone who makes these appliances wants to wall you into their cloud ecosystem and harvest your activity data.
I thought they go off of weight. How could they tell how dirty they are?
Not a washing machine technician but I guess an optical sensor measuring the light permeability of the water (over time) should do the trick. Similar to a smoke detector. But I guess weight is a thing as well.
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- I rarely carry my phone at home unless I’m also going to be outside.
- Washer can be variable on time and such (and mine’s not even an IoT/“smart” one)
Well if one’s true then a smart washer doesn’t help you anyway does it?
My phone can send alerts to my watch up to like 30m away, so I would still get notifications anywhere inside and many places outside my house.
Well congrats I bet it gets alarms from your phone too then.
Not that I’ve found, actually. Certainly not on any that I set by default. Also, if I don’t know how long the washer will run, I can’t just set an alarm for it, now can I?
A buzzer on the washer/dryer has worked fine for DECADES.
my personal favorite is the part where the washer/dryer is noisy. And you can just hear it not running, and then remember to not forgor about it.
😏
Data laundry.
Man that laundry must be heavy
There’s that word again. “Heavy.” Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth’s gravitational pull?
having lots of networked devices means your life depends on a lot of network programmers
If you think the useless appliances are bad, just take a look at more critical connected devices.
I needed some POE security cameras, found some foscam ones on the cheap. Plug them up, go to IP, “install our app”… was pleased to find it allowed a local account without the need for an email, but found that half of my network traffic was comprised of requests to their “ivyIOT AI detection”. I didnt measure what data was going through before sectioning them behind a firewall zone.
My fault for not having looked further into other brands, they were still a bargain and work without issue with my setup, but annoying
I have the circuits for all my “dumb” appliances monitored by my homeassistant. Then HA sends notifications to my phone. And it doesn’t need to send 3.6GB to the internet to do it.
Circuits?
How would you homebrew a smart washer into HA?
Power monitors can tell when a washing machine is running and the notifications are based on that
You can do the same with a vibration sensor
Using a smart plug that measures wattage makes the most sense.
Sure, just throwing out ideas. I already have a vibration sensor so that’s the route I’m going for the dryer when I move
I like the wattage sensor since you can also monitor energy use and it’s applicable to more devices. Just need to set thresholds.
Was it a bug?
Yep, but not a washing machine bug: an ASUS Router data reporting bug: https://lemmy.ml/comment/9957810
(Sorry for piggybacking)
I just bought a new dishwasher and it came with “smart” features like remote start and notifications, which I don’t want. Easy solution: I didn’t connect it to my wifi.
On the positive side, the manufacturer (Bosch) wasn’t pushy about it at all. The only indication that the machine has smart features was a small instruction card, which I promptly tossed in the recycling.
I have a supposedly smart washing machine that came with the apartment. Setting it up in my locked down appliances network, it didn’t work with home-assistant, required cloud access and wanted me to open up ports in the firewall. Nope. No network connection for you. You are a regular dumb old washing machine.
When your washing machine tries to download Baldurs Gate 3 because it’s bored too
Botnet node? 3GB sounds excessive even for a company that’s notoriously invasive.
I’m sure this got posted before and the most likely reason was that it was downloading some sort of update and failing to apply it repeatedly.
As someone else already posted, the 3GB was incorrect, it was a router reporting incorrect traffic.
But that doesn’t seem to stop everyone here from continuing to post how the thing that didn’t happen in the first place is ridiculous…
Why the fuck does my appliance need wifi? It’s not ordering refills for consumables when low at a great discount nor is it going to schedule it’s own maintenance as it passes lifetime milestones or detects errors.
I don’t want my fucking washer/dryer to text me when the load is done and I definitely don’t want my fridge to alert me I’m low on milk or bread, or the door is open. That’s such a huge backdoor for anyone looking to maliciously gather data and peer into my life, definitely without my consent.
My fucking washer has NFC and I cant even figure out why I would ever need that, let alone WiFi?
Features for features sake, I guess? Another bullet point on the features list.
It’s not very useful. But, I can start a program from an app which is a lot easier than understanding all the little logos on the unit. Plus I have more flexibility to tweak it, like be faster or gentler or schedule it to cheaper electricity hours all much more easily and intuitively than in the panel.
Also timer, remote start, and letting me know when it’s done are something I might use once in a blue moon.
Can I live without it, hell yes, but is it a totally useless gimmick… Well 50/50.
I don’t get the remote start, you should never start them if you’re away from your home. Gonnaa floor or burn your house down.
At least in my case, its electric
Electric dryer can still catch fire on heat mode by lint accumulation that blocks air flow.
Rather safe on no heat mode, though.
If, just for fucking once, they could use fully open source software to send that information directly to my mobile phone instead of using black box software to send all my info their corporate overlords, we might talk.
In principle these things aren’t directly a bad idea. The fact that these asshats inserted themselves in the process is.
I mean this one’s kind of pointless, but I do get what youre saying.
I have my washer and dryer on an isolated network. It’s actually useful to be able to tell if they’re done without walking to the other end of the house to check.
My machine shows how long the program takes when I start it. Why it needs a message when it is finished? I know the time.
Mine does too but can run up to 45 minutes over time depending on how it adjusts the load, water temp etc.
The dryer is a sensor heat pump dryer so I have zero idea whether it’s going to take 30 minutes or 2 hours.
It’s a feature I find useful, I can isolate it on my network and I didn’t pay extra for it.
Seems weird to be defending it.
You know looking at a clock and realizing an hour passed and its done is free, and easy to accomplish with the features already built into your phone and most houses.
I have a front loader that takes anything from 1.5 - 3 hours depending on water temperature, load size etc.
It may tell me 2 hours when I start it, and still be going 2 hours 20 minutes later.
The dryer next to it is even worse when it comes to guessing duration, so having a notification pop up next to me is helpful.
Seems entirely unnecessary. My units have buzzers that go off when they complete a cycle. I also have a phone with a timer setting, I know a load of laundry will take approx 60min to accomplish per machine. I don’t see the need to spend my time and money to create a more complex system.
My laundry machines are in the basement, and my current machines play a pleasant jingle when they’re done, instead of a loud buzzer. I can’t hear them. I wish there was a setting to go back to buzzer mode
Of course they also have reliable timers so I usually set my watch timer when I start the machines. Done
How freaking big is your house? I’m in a rather large 3500+ sqft across 3 levels and I really never struggle to hear if the laundry is running and it’s isolated in its own room on one corner of the house… behind a solid wood door too.
My washer dryer are old fashioned and I live in a 1100sq ft home and can hear when the machine is running. And my dryer has a buzzer. So I think I will just not buy one with wifi.
I’m in less than half your size and am two floors away from my washer. Not everyone has a nicely designed home.
That said, I generally buy the simplest appliances I can.
The laundry is next to the garage and I work from the exact opposite end of the house.
Is also a front loader that’s pretty quiet even when spinning.
Mr. moneybags over here with his house…
Exactly my thought hahaha my house is normal size and I can hear that sucker beeping anywhere
Now, all joking aside, what’s the big advanta of knowing exactly when the cycle finishes? I get that it may vary because of the new sensor driven cycles but still… Unless you are running a laundromat and every second of machine use counts, I can ballpark it just fine
I hate laundry so try not to do it before I have to. However, especially with a family, that means I need to get through too many loads in one day. It wastes less of my time if I can feed them all through sequentially. Then when my minions are home from school I can make them cry at all the baskets of laundry to fold
Wife? What are you doing here?
Lol this is exactly my wife’s style… When we divided the chores long ago she picked laundry and seems to have learned to hate it … Always seems to make it worst by leaving it all for last minute
Kids are teens now so they do their own… There is a future ;-)
Haha, no …
Similar boat here. When we picked chores long ago, wife picked laundry.
… Later on she complained about carrying baskets up and down the stairs, so I did that for her.
… Still later she complained about how she could never get them all done, so I started running them through the machines for her: I know how to use a timer.
… then she complained about how long it took to fold, so the minions fold their own and I fold sheets and towels as well as my own
… then when we got divorced, she was still complaining about how much of a hassle laundry was
Now the minions are teens and I made sure they knew how to run the machines, but it more efficient for me to run everything through, and we split the folding
I can hear that sucker beeping anywhere
You can make them quieter or even silent these days with the “signal cycle” or similar setting, a legitimate thing I want to do but mine don’t tell me when they’re done so I leave them loud.
what’s the big advanta of knowing exactly when the cycle finishes?
Even when on my Adderall I forget I set it all the time and wind up with smelly wet clothes too often. Also would be nice to get an alert if my wife set it without telling me, then I can easily swap it out if I’m not doing anything and she is.
I want a washer/dryer with these features now goddamnit
Yes we could make them quieter… But she who rules the laundry room won’t allow it
ADHD, OCD and other neuro atypicals often need reminders or an action item that needs to be cleared. The features can be used by an infinite set of one offs, starting a load remotely before driving home from work, sometimes you are just under a time crunch. The burden of responsibility here is product enshitification not making us fear features, not someone wanting to utilize a feature rich product.
I find the idea of “downloading new wash programs” to be absurd.
Main Menu:
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Wash laundry
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Mine crypto
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Launder crypto
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How long have washing machines been a thing? You would think they would have them all figured out by now
Lost technology. Like curbs and televisions.
Glad I bought a non-smart washer and dryer. I’ve yet to encounter any situation in life where I thought, “too bad my appliance doesn’t have Internet”. Not once ever.
The only thing in my 6 year old washing machine that has been broken was the circuit board. Part mainly needed to cycle trough the menu because they put that instead of analog buttons. Meanwhile, I know people with certain German brand machines that are 30 years old and running perfectly for the entire 30 years, and if something would break it would 9 out of 10 be super obvious and mechanically easy to fix.
Sometimes smarter is definitely not better.
The big physical on/off button on my dryer broke 4 years ago. Bypassed it and has been running strong ever since.
I think my oven/stove can be connected. I have never tried because I don’t see the need to preheat my oven when I am not home.
Considering how security is often forgotten on smart devices, having an oven connected to the internet is pretty scary…
I like my old dumpy dryer. Its a motor, a belt, and the most complicated component: a timer. Ive fixed the thing several times, still runs fine despite being 15+ years old.
Maybe unpopular opinion but I like connected stuff. I like what you can do with modern tech. I think it’s cool to have a coffee maker or something hooked up to Home Assistant so you can start a brew from your phone when you wake up.
What I don’t like is when I can’t control the tech. The only way I’d ever allow smart appliances is if the data never left my network and I took reasonable steps to ensure the IOT devices are isolated and secured.
I don’t own an IoT device, but I do like the idea. I just hate the idea of not being in complete control MUCH more. If I can’t do it all locally, connecting to my own server, I don’t want it.
