Also, I anticipated ads on a smart TV (unfortunately it's inevitable), but (wrongly) assumed that such invasive tracking and "we own the glass" would be a bar too low even for the budget manufacturers.
I'm never buying any LG product ever again.
I also had an LG washing machine. The dispenser plastic drawer broke after a year of use. After over a week of multiple emails and calls with the shop, LG themselves and third-party spares shops trying to get a replacement, I bought a Bosch.
I am also never buying anything from LG again.
May i suggest basic home repair? Two techniques that work in many cases are:
- "welding" with a soldering iron, using cable tie as a filler rod. You'll want good ventilation and a sacrificial tip - epoxy repair putty
Superglue (cyanoacrylate) tends to give disappointing results on its own, but can be a good first step before putty. Putty can be reinforced with some kind of fibre. Never use cyanoacrylate with the welding technique (cyanide).
I don't love the model profusion that makes spare parts markets inefficient, but free markets are inefficient all over the place. Price in the externalities.
Perhaps, but LG has proven problematic to deal with.
To give you an idea, I tried directly with them at first. They gave me an official website to search for the part. It wasn't available. They then game me 2 or 3 third-parties to search. None of them had the part available. I emailed and called. They would at best say "not available".
Eventually I got LG to escalate to a manager, who called me back the next day. The manager was very nice. Told me to go to that official website again. I couldn't find the part. She then instructed me how to navigate to a form on that same website where I could send a message requesting the part. Remember, this is an official LG website.
I sent the form. The next day I got a reply from a third party, telling me they didn't have the part and I should contact the manufacturer directly. Now this is with dirty laundry already accumulating and us risking running out of pants. There's no laundromat near me and I don't have a car, nor I have the time for this crap.
Eventually I found what _could_ be the right part. Only there was no way to be sure it was, and it had a 3-week wait and would cost about 100 quid.
At that point I sat down and calculated how much I paid for the machine, its expected lifetime, deducted the time I had it for to get an estimate "remaining value", and it was less than the time I was wasting with this ordeal, plus everything else if I had to arrange alternative washes for the time being and the price of the replacement part (assuming it was the right one), so it made sense to just buy a new machine and send that one for recycling, so I did that.
> May i suggest basic home repair?
Sure you can, but I don't have that machine any longer, would probably not get it to a good state, and would waste even more of my time.
It wasn't a simple plastic crack. The drawer was comprised of 3 bins (on the same part), 2 of them covered by rubbery lids. The rubber needs to seal the bin below, otherwise detergent and softener leak and make a mess (which was happening at this point). One of the bin walls somehow got completely deformed. The rubbery lid wouldn't seal, and to make it worse, it eventually split at the seal because of the pressure from the bin wall. It would have been a nightmare to repair to an acceptable state.
Also note that the bin lid is something that needs to be opened and closed frequently for top-ups and cleaning. No home repair would survive for long.
Better yet would be never needing an update, but alas.