On Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 12:59:34 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 11:27:08 AM UTC-5, rangerssuck wrote:


Now, as for the fifty-cent vs five-dollar decision, by the time the washer hits a retail store, the price difference might be $1,000 vs $1,020. I KNOW
that given the choice, I'd spend the extra twenty bucks. Larry J. mentioned that in the next post.

That makes sense, but what if there are 6 such items . Then in the retail store the price difference might be $1000 vs $1120. Tougher choice.

Dan

True, but then again, I doubt major manufacturers are paying anywhere near five bucks for solid state relays in the sizes and quantities they would consume. But still, a 10% or 15% premium for the appliance that's going to last longer seems pretty reasonable.

A few years back, I bought 100 seagate barracuda drives. They started failing soon after installation, and at an alarming rate (I have since replaced every one of them), Several frustrating calls to Seagate got me no further than "they're under warranty, so return them and we'll ship you refurbs." I told them that I wasn't interested in a like-for-like replacement, as the new ones were just as likely to be bad as well. It's not the cost of the drive, it's the cost of travelling to the customer to replace it. let alone the lost faith the customer has in my product. The best they could suggest was buying enterprise level drives which had a longer warranty, but no promise that they were less likely to fail during the warranty period. I would gladly pay double, triple or even quadruple the price for had drives that are built to last. Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi and Western Digital all told me that they don't have such a product because their marketing people didn't recognize a need for them, and "If it dies under warranty, we'll ship you a refurb." Feh.