If American appliances are anything like Swedish, your new refrigerator will last exactly 10 years. At least our appliances are programmed to give up after 10 years! I was lucky this week though with the oven in my "new" stove that gave up after that time because it was easy to mend. But I have little hope that the rest of the stove will live another 10 years.

It's true that you can almost program an appliance to live a specific number of years. I don't mind paying a premium price for an appliance (Well, I mind, but I will do it) if I know it's of really good quality and will last. I remember the days of the repair shops and fixing them if you needed to. But, in the last decade or two, appliances are made much more cheaply and the parts to fix them are priced in such a way the consumer is encouraged to just pitch their broken appliance and buy a new one. Shame, shame, shame on the manufacturers.

When I married my husband, both he and I had a refridgerator, so I sold mine, rather than move it. He had in his kitchen a 20 year old model and it was still running well. We kept it another five years, and it was so ancient, the interior disintegrated before the working guts died. That's how well it was made. Twenty five years old and still running! Since the compressor was fine, I was able to donate it to one of our utility companies to be recycled. Win/win.

If I have X dollars to spend, I'd really rather get a very basic model of something with no bells and whistles, but made of really good components. It's hard to buy basic anythings anymore...........it's all designed with extraneous stuff many people won't even use with plastic bodies and nylon gears. Whomever came up with the idea of making gears out of nylon should have been committed!

When I was with my ex we had two Servel gas refrigerators with fair sized top freezers from the '50s. They were each a 4 man job to move due to the extra insulation but cost less than $10 a month to run for both. No moving parts just a flame the size of a pilot light. I bet they are still running.

Oh,oh. 21 to 22 years ago, every appliance in the house had to be replaced. Furnace, too. They were the reason/s I changed from part-time to full-time at work. The only interim replacement was the washer & dryer, and even those are into their second decade. I told DH that the smart thing to do would be to replace the replacements (except the furnace) before I retire. He doesn't agree, so we shall see.

I have a feeling that by next fall, it's going to be awfully hard to not say, "I told you so."

I have a picture of myself (less than one year old) on my Grandfather's lap eating watermelon, in the background is the same refrigerator that is still servicing Grandma's kitchen. I am 37. The fridge is rounded on the outside and turqoise blue on the inside. I don't know how long she had it before I came around.

In the 28 years we lived in our house we didn't *have* to replace any appliances, but did so after 15 years b/c they were pretty outdated. We've been in our current house for 14 1/2 years and just this past spring got new appliances when we got new countertops. The dishwasher and refrigerator are so much quieter and more energy efficient than the ones we had.

Suzi, I agree with you about the *bells and whistles*. The dishwasher has features I know I won't use and the fridge came with an ice maker (not in the door), but we didn't have it hooked up. I didn't want something else which might require an electrician or plumber in the future. We had to have an electrician come a couple of weeks ago and what he had to do took him only ten minutes and cost $10. I think he was embarrassed about the additional $75 service charge, b/c he checked several things that were not part of the original problem.

If these new appliances last ten or 15 years, I seriously doubt we'll be here to replace them! :>)

we had an old frig from the fifties in the house when we bought it. used it for years, because it had one of those tiny interior freezers, we bought a deep freeze instead. When we finally redid kitchen and got new one, the old went in the basement where it was fired up over the holidays. Boy did it make the electric meter spin. It finally quit cooling very well, so we got rid of it. I have had two fridges. The last is a side by side, the smallest they had so it could fit in space. I don't like it because the shelves are too narrow to put some things in. DH just had to get the ice and h2o dispenser in the door. My comment was , One more thing to go wrong. What I do like about the ice and h2o dispenser is dh and kids are drinking more water.

Dh's aunt's electric drop in range from the early sixties bit the dust. It was one of those where the range top pulled out like a drawer. Auntie got out the brochure that had come with it and wanted to go buy one just like it. Refused to believe her daughter when she said they don't make them anymore.

The problem with appliances today & that they're full of electronic circuitry - you know those programmable ovens, digital displays on refrigerators & washers, and let's not even go into the microwave. When something gores wrong, you often have to replace the circuit boards & sometimes those are almost as expensive as a new appliance.

That is exactly the truth, Andie......but there are a lot of people who don't want bells and whistles, and when they find a product without them, they're so shoddily made it's scary. There is a market for very well made appliances without digital crap on them. Meldy, I laughed when you said you didn't want an icemaker. I didn't either! The part of our kitchen in which we have our fridge does not have cellar beneath it. There is one run the length of our kitchen, dug out of the earth where we have run all our utilities, and anything located away from that run we keep as simple as possible as it's hellatious to get under the flooring to repair it. We even have outside entrances for some of the stuff to avoid the crawlspace situation. I am not going to dig out a basement to attach a tiny water tube to make blinking ice I don't even use. So, I try to buy a refrigerator without an internal icemaker and am told they don't make them, and I can remove it easily myself. Ha, yes they do make them, and I've never gotten around to taking the stupid thing out. The store clerk was just to lazy to order the basic unit without the icemaker. He wanted that 'sale' on the stock they had handy.

I wish I had the ice maker. When we bought our refrigerator it was when we moved to Dallas & for some unknown reason (builder incompetence?) the spot for the fridge didn't have water hook-ups. So we bought ours without the ice maker.

When we moved out here, the place had the water hook-ups but to retrofit the fridge with the ice maker was going to coat $400!! At that point we decided to forget it & just get one with the ice maker when this one dies. Since that's out attitude, I'm sure that the fridge we have will last another 20 years - LOL!