This particular homeowner is baffled that anyone would buy a washing machine that needs an internet connection. I’m all for smart appliances, but a smart washing machine is a solution in search of a problem.
I guess it can notify you via your cell phone when a load is done. I could see that having value.
Mine plays a loud jingle when it’s done, which seems to be enough for me.
Yup. There are two situations here:
- I’m in my house and can hear the sound
- I’m not at my house and don’t care when it finishes
If I’m at home and won’t hear the sound for some reason, I’ll just set an alarm on my phone. My washing machine tells me how long it’ll take, so there’s no guesswork here.
Its enough for me too. But not everyone has the same use case and environment. I definitely see why someone would want this.
What I disagree with is that it needs to communicate to the internet to do this. It adds delay and potential for outage if your internet is out. But they do this so they can force you to get their app and milk you for extra data to sell. Internet capable smart devices are to harvest data not grant features. Features could be done better by ZigBee and a hub, but that doesnt grant the device a way to phone home
Mine is in my garage, and I can’t hear the jingle from inside the house.
But two power monitoring smart plugs+ home assistant fixed that issue
Wait: Do the times listed on the screen of your washer/dryer actually reflect reality‽
My dryer will say it’s got 20 minutes remaining for like an hour and a half. And yes, I clean the lint screen and vent regularly (all the way up to the roof!).
Modern machines don’t display accurate cycle times at all. They use sensors to detect when to finish.
Couldn’t you just program it to start (and stop) at a given time, or make a note of how long it says on the display that it’ll take?
It seems (to me) like a very, very minor improvement for a huge cost, namely that your washing machine is on your network and is internet connected.
Yeah.
Growing up, the washer and dryer were in the basement and you could really only hear that if you were in the living room with the TV off (so… never). But as an adult (who is finally living somewhere with its own washer/dryer…), I can hear that jingle throughout the entire house if I am not watching a loud movie at the time.
Growing up, we would more or less time it. Start a load and set the alarm on your watch for when it is done. But basically any modern washer/dryer is going to use fuzzy logic based on load weight and water levels and humidity and so forth. You can approximate how long it takes, but you don’t really have a proper timer. Which was annoying when my friends’ washer broke and they had to do loads at my place and it was always “Can you text us when it actually finishes?” or “So… I see you play Warframe. A lot… Uhm… It says there is five more minutes left”
So yeah. I can definitely see value in a networked washer or dryer depending on your living situation. And, while it would break IMMEDIATELY, I would love a washer and dryer with SMS push notifications for apartment complexes.
Also, while it is immensely wasteful (or a great way to get mildewy clothes), there is something to being able to start a dryer load when I pass the gas station about 20 minutes from home on a snowboard day. Because that would mean that I would have time to get home, take a really quick shower, and put on toasty warm clothes to compensate for having spent a few hours bouncing in the snow. And I would allow SO much spyware to enable that…
I’m all for smart appliances
I’m personally not. I’m for appliances with a standard interface, maybe, through which it can be connected to some smart home system.
I do not mean internet access or anything else “smart” in the appliance itself. I mean being able to use the same functions as buttons and indicators offer, remotely. I2C will do.
I2C is very short range, it’s meant for connecting parts on the same board. You want something like RS-485. The Modbus protocol, which runs over RS-485 would be perfect for this.
For the love of God, I just can’t understand how “needs Internet” became synonymous with “smart” in the appliances market slang. I know it’s what advertisers do, but this one is abysmal.
Forgotten laundry leads to mildew. Plenty of home assistance scripts out there to remind users to empty washer/dryer.
Makes sense for manufacturers to want to build this feature into the appliance itself.
Mildew doesn’t grow in 15min, it takes hours to even smell weird and days to grow fungi. It’s literally been cleaned with soap and hot water, there’s not much to grow left.
I just start a timer on my phone?
I have one for both my dryer and my washer.
I load the washer then start the timer, when it goes off I just load it in the dryer then start the other timer.
It’s super easy and it’s no effort at all.
I had an old wind up kitchen timer with writing on it for a while but I missed it a few too many times so I switched to the phone timers.
You don’t need it to be on the appliance itself. Hook a power metering smart outlet and you can tell. Or a shake sensor. Or an open door sensor. Combine them all for a reliable effective way to tell if it’s done and the door has been opened, all for a much lower price than what those “smart” appliances charge the premium for. This way you can also choose vendors that work on local wifi/zigbee/z wave and don’t own a paper weight or part functional item the moment the vendor decides to shutdown the servers.
I love mine. It reminds me when to clean it, when the drain is acting up, and when it’s done. It can even order supplies on its own. Sure all those things can be handled with a calendar but I’m lazy.
I love my brain chip. It reminds me when to clean myself, when my bowels are acting up, and when I’m dead. It can even order products I don’t need on its own. Sure all those things can be handled with my own brain but I’m lazy.
- your grandkids in 2074
I’m all for smart appliances, but a smart washing machine is a solution in search of a problem.
I personally love smart washers, they are a solution to the problem that we used to have at home.
We have 5 adults at home. The app lets us know if it’s being used or not, and lets us know how much longer left.
Also let’s us remind the other person to move their stuff in the washer to the dryer.
I personally do not want to walk over to our laundry room in the garage not connected to our house to check each time to see if it’s available, then walk back to my room to grab my laundry, then bring it to the laundry room
I would prefer if everything was able to be used on a local network instead though. Like a Samsung machine that hosts a local server where data never leaves the home and still works.
You can also use it to start a load while you’re at work when you didn’t want your clothes sitting after washing all day. True, there’s old school delay functions but this gives a little more control.
Not saying it’s worth it, but a feature I haven’t seen anyone else mention.
If you add white vinegar to load, you won’t get the ick from clothes sitting in washer for hours.
There are situations where you might want to monitor water use (someone mentioned delaying cycles based on water softener status), or people like me who might need a phone reminder because I’ll forget I put a load in and get busy with something else and it’s nice if I don’t have the extra step of setting a timer and trying to get it just right.
The problem isn’t the connectivity, the problem is the proprietary cloud ecosystems. HomeAssistant is already a brilliant home automation hub, just make devices repairable and with local control and I’ll be a customer.
or people like me who might need a phone reminder because I’ll forget I put a load in and get busy with something else
This. As someone with ADHD, it’s very helpful to get an extra alert when my washer/dryer is done.
I used to pull this off with a Zigbee Smart Outlet + HA, which is frankly an OK fix, but did not work for my electric dryer.
When it came time to replace my old appliances, I got a smart washer & dryer, said what the hell and put it on an isolated network. It’s connected to HA via the cloud (not ideal but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). It just works, and I wind up with mildewy neglected clothes less often.
It’s not perfect, but I’m willing to deal with isolating 2 appliances to cover for my attention span.
When your current washer breaks to the point of being unrepairable, you will find the only choice is an Internet connected washer.
I bought the same model Bosch dishwasher that I bought last year ( I have 2 dishwashers). Bosch added Internet to their dishwashers this year. I was enraged but had no choice. They removed some wash features from buttons and made them selectable only from the app. I haven’t turned the feature on but there’s Wi-Fi in my dishwasher screaming to get out to the Internet. It could likely be hijacked with the right bot attack.
We need a law that all antennas come with a physical switch. Wifi, Cell, whatever comes next. They need a physical cut off switch just like privacy doors have become common on laptop cameras.
I simply will not buy a washing machine where some of the options for its regular use require an internet connection. I can see adding Bluetooth to it for things like remote control and phone notifications, or even WLAN support for connecting to some kind of smarthome hub that is internet-connected so you can get those notifications remotely. But the idea that smart == device-level internet connection is terrible. Appliances for basic living requirements, like laundry, should not require an internet connection of their own to function.
Electricity is pretty expensive where I live, but solar opportunity is fairly good. Selling power back to grid is nowhere near as cost effective as using solar directly.
So, I could see a compelling use case of, “I want my laundry done by X o’clock. Start the wash when it’ll be mostly on my cheap solar.”
But yeah. I would never buy one unless it supports local-only/VLAN-restricts-internet-access usage.
I just ordered a dryer that may have to go on top of my dishwasher which is on top of my washing machine - hard to explain why except to say there was no good place for the washing machine dishwasher in the kitchen.
If that happens, I’ll be able to reach the clothes, but the control panel will be a bit of a stretch. In that case wifi control could be clutch.
Edit: my brain can never sort those two out.
Also I understand this is not the intended use case, I just think it’s funny.
There’s no dedicated spot for a dishwasher under any of the benches, and to get a hose out from the sink would need holes drilled that I’m not prepared to do because it’s a rental. Also, all the wall area is spoken for, and there are doors immediately next to the kitchen on both sides. One of those doors is the laundry, so I just stuck it in there. It’s a small laundry though, so there’s no space side by side for anything. If the triple stack doesn’t work, the dryer can go on the opposite side of the kitchen under or over my small freezer, since it doesn’t need water. That’s where my dishwasher would’ve gone if not for the hoses that would’ve needed to go across the floor.
Idk, in my particular situation I would like a smart washing machine. I have a smart fridge, that is essentially useless, but a smart washing machine would tell me when my laundry was done so I can switch it into the dryer. That actually seems useful in my particular situation.
This is an old article and iirc this was a reporting issue with their router. The wash machine was not using that much data.
Yeah, that’s a much simpler explanation. The data any given smart device sends (unless it’s streaming content) should be on the order of a few megabytes per day, if that. All it would need is:
- outgoing notifications
- incoming requests
- update checks
Depends on what it’s sending. Something like a washing machine would only need a few dozen kb/day, but something like a temperature sensor could send MBs, depending on update freq.
Regardless, I want to fully control any smart device in my home, which is why I tend to not buy smart stuff.
Who’s to say it isn’t acting as a gateway for other smart devices that aren’t connected to the Internet? Or part of a bot net?
This nonsense keeps getting reposted, when it was discovered previously it was a router reporting error
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.
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.
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. Gonna flood or burn your house down.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
