my electric heater died today
Submitted by emma in yourpersonalblog (edited )
... and i couldn't be happier. that thing is a complete piece of shit:
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it looks like an oil-filled heater, but it's just a big coathanger connected to the mains, and this fooled me into buying it.
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because it's not an oil heater, when it's cold inside and i need to warm my legs, i can't use that thing because only the top part gets hot
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the light always stays on even if the heater is off. there is no indication when it's on, other than it makes almost identical clicking sounds when it turns on and off.
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the temperature dial has no fixed scale, so you can't be like "yes i would like the temperature to be maintained at 25°C please", instead it's like "yes i would like it to be thirteen out of thirty units on the arbitrary unlabelled scale hot in here please". i know it's common for cheaper heaters to not have dials that are calibrated to specific temperatures, but you can usually tell easily what is cold and hot on those. not on mine: the scale is an asterisk followed by a bunch of pipe characters that grow slightly larger, but they're printed on the dial itself, so it's like reverse to what it'd been if it were an arrow on the dial, pointing at a scale outside it, which is incredibly confusing.
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there's an lcd display and buttons for setting timers and stuff, but the lcd display isn't backlit and is basically unreadable unless you're shining a light on it, and the aforementioned red light is close to the display so it shines right in your eyes and makes it even harder to read
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the buttons for setting the timer are completely unintuitive and cannot be figured out without reading the manual
basically this thing is like a 300th generation clone of a design that someone competent came up with 50 years ago. it's like if chatgpt looked at 1,000 heaters and was tasked with creating a new design. no purpose to anything, no thought given to usability.
but now i won't have to suffer any longer. although i initially waited too long to return it, today i unplugged it, and it began making a bunch of clacking noises. when i looked a few hours later, there was a ton of what i assume is iron oxide coming out the bottom. so now i can claim warranty on it, have it sent to e-waste where it belongs, and hopefully get my money back. hooray!