My wife is selling a property and recently had to move some stuff out of it. In the process "someone" left some metal pans on the induction cooktop in the kitchen, over the touch controls. We are not sure how long they were there.

Anyway, the Gorenje IT6410RA cooktop displayed an error 22 ("filthy keyboard"!) which in itself is expected, safe and valid behaviour.

The problem is the error now cannot be cleared, rendering the whole cooktop inoperative.

You would think that removal of the offending objects and cycling the mains power would clear this, but you would be wrong. Nor is there any backdoor method of clearing the error or resetting to factory defaults.

According to the manufacturer the control PCB now needs to be replaced at a cost of $219!

Looking inside this unit, it looks like new. It's probably done no more than a few hours work in its life, since it is installed in what is effectively a holiday home.

So it's off to Aldi tomorrow morning to buy a replacement cooktop for $199 so sale contracts can be exchanged! Grrrr!

Needless to say I will never buy another Gorenje / Asko / Siemens / Bosch appliance, and neither should you! This egregious design exists under all these badges.

Sounds like one of those jobs The Serviceman writes about in Silicon Chip.

But he always manages to fix his!

Only in the articles he chooses to submit for publication. .
JJ

He has admitted defeat a few times, but not for want of trying.

A workmate had a serviceman come to his house this arvo to fix a sagging door on his oven. I suggested that it may have been his young child opening the door and sitting on it that may have caused the sagging. Whitegoods are not built that tough these days.

When I was a young lad, my family had a St George stove and it was built like a tank, had huge monocoil hotplate rings and a big oven. It even had a GPO on the stove's dashboard which is something you'd never find now. As for the oven door, when we were tots we'd climb on the door and jump off. The stove was that heavy that it had no chance of tipping on us and the door's hinges took the strain no worries.

Why don't they build stuff like that anymore? Inside the dashboard, it even had a fuse block for each element.

Oh, I forgot to mention - it was built to a future-proof design. Not a single bit of electronics in it anywhere.

You can loose customer loyalty very easily by building stuff with too great a scanting or like Duracell batteries that I will not now buy. I need a new vehicle & it will not be one associated with Zoom. The motor is a lemon its on its third water pump since 100K & the one in it is limping to 200K.

Breville has also lost me, $82 17/11/ 2014 for a glass electric kettle. How complex are they? In no time the lid latch stopped gripping (plastic & possibly a Bakelite (or sub) rim ) so it came open if you did not dump something on it and it would not shut off if you didn't. Not intrinsically safe. Last week the lid finally broke at the hinges? Quality like that I do not need. Now a cheap Sunbeam, price does not boil the water.

Already pointed out the UPS issue. It now has a strategic thermal fuse in it. Some stuff here is really old & fixable and over 100years old.

It even had a GPO on the stove's dashboard .... it even had a fuse block for each element.

Back in the late 1960s our combination stove and oven also had those but it wasn't St George. From memory it was a Simpson.

Ours was the three-hotplate version of this one. The GPO on ours was where the fourth simmerstat is.

Our stove was all white though, not those horrid colours.

Actually I have a white fridge: Really does not suit the décor, SS or grey would match much better, a lot more harmonious.