The toaster is a somewhat modest appliance that is often ignored until it stops working. Many cheap examples are not made to be easily repaired, but [Kasey Hou] designed a repairable flat pack toaster.
[Hou] originally planned to design a repairable toaster to help people more easily form an emotional attachment with the device, but found the process of disassembly for existing toasters to be so painful that she wanted to go a step further. By inviting the toaster owner into the process of assembling the appliance, [Hou] reasoned people would be less likely to throw it out as well as more confident to repair it since they’d already seen its inner workings.
Under the time constraints of the project, the final toaster has a simpler mechanism for ejecting toast than most commercial models, but still manages to get the job done. It even passed the UK Portable Appliance Test! I’m not sure if she’d read the IKEA Effect before running this project, but her results with user testing also proved that people were more comfortable working on the toaster after assembling it.
It turns out that Wikipedia couldn’t tell you who invented the toaster for a while, and if you have an expensive toaster, it might still be a pain to repair.
I don’t get why toasters are so popular in the US and perhaps western EU. Is your basic bread really so bad that you can’t or don’t want to eat it without Maillarding every single slice?
If there’s one thing to be proud about being a Slav it’s our breadmaking. Note that examples below are the basic thing that I’m eating every day, that’s available in every store; it’s not some “fitness”, “healthy eating” or “premium” product sold for grossly overinflated price in designer boutiques. Usually I’ll slice it and make some sandwiches, but sometimes when I’m really hungry I’d just grab it and munch it as it is.
https://en.twelvegrains.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Baltonowski-Bread-800g-chleb-baltonowski.jpg
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/–0oyTRWqo4E/VxqL6-OO9FI/AAAAAAAAEBg/sf3a-cYN8_475k24HCJpvbPJsLssfdPuwCLcB/s1600/IMG_0885.JPG
If you want something a bit more fancy there are plenty of variants, for example with poppy or sunflower seeds:
https://srhrolnik.pl/piekarnia-cukiernia/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Chleb-pszenno-%C5%BCytni-mak-CH27.png
https://cdn.katalogsmakow.pl/2020/01/26/0x600/malo-wymagajacy-domowy-chleb-z-ziarnem.831637.jpg
And then there’s also lots of equally tasty rolls to choose from:
https://spolemkielce.pl/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Bu%C5%82ka-wieloziarnista.jpg
https://sklep.stokrotka.pl/files/fotob/product-37534.jpg
https://www.putka.pl/upload/produkty/p_1632204834_bu%C5%82ka%20dyniowo-s%C5%82onecznikowa.jpg
https://piekarniagrzybki.pl/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/kurkumka_na_www.jpg
Actually, yes. The basic bread in the US is so bad that turning it into toast is your best option. Store-bought sliced bread here is uniform, limp, flavorless, has a thin dark crust that is barely harder than the bread itself, and lasts way too long in the plastic bags it comes in. Its main uses are sandwiches and toast.
You can buy better bread here, but it’s more expensive and it goes bad quickly. I’ve given up buying bread at the store and just make my own. My toaster does little these days, except that my kids use it for English muffins and Pop Tarts.
“You can buy better bread here, but it’s more expensive and it goes bad quickly.”
Let me guess, due to the store owner offering to slice your bread by default, and you thinking “well, that’s convenient, i love these modern times!”, you ask the store to slice your bread for you. And so the store owner slices your bread with their mold-infusing machine, and turns your bread into a houseparty for molds.
The ancients knew a thing or two. And one important thing they knew is that if you bake a bread such that it has a crust, the bread will keep much longer without going bad or stale.
Be like the ancients. Buy your bread uncut, as a complete loaf. Keep it in a paper bag so that the crust stays dry. And cut your slices only when you need them. And cut them with a clean knife.
:)
Actually, nice bread made without preservatives and crap to make it last, goes stale much faster. Take a look at French bread.
Slicing won’t help, but it’s unlikely to be the slicer that’s the issue.
One thing people fail to realize about toasters is that they are much more efficient at toasting bread than toaster ovens, since the heat is much better-targeted, meaning less of it needs to be produced and toasting requires less time. This makes a real difference if you are choosing between the two for electricty-limited places like off-grid cabins.
As others have said, most of the bread available here is not very good. Currently I live on my own and with a consumption of no more than two slices of bread a day, I would basically have to chuck most of even the smallest, good quality loaves as it becomes stale or mouldy.
Toast bread in a plastic bag and a toaster to the rescue here.
Slice your fancy bread and then put it in the freezer. When you want toast or to make a grilled sandwich just use it as normal. It defrosts and gets toasted and it will not go bad.
Even good bread can be made better by toasting. A pan toasted sourdough can be simply divine. Even just warming up the slice can really improve the experience too it’s not just about fixing the crime that is standard US white bread.
The basic working mechanism of a toaster is dead simple – most of what has gone into the modern design is window dressing and making it safer to users, including not being able to disassemble the toaster in the attempts to “repair” it without adequate understanding of electrical safety.
Remember: people are stupid enough to stick metal forks in the bread slot and get electrocuted. It’s one of those devices that any idiot can use, so it really needs to be idiot-proof. In this design, the bread holder is going to be super hot after use, so the user is likely to injure themselves with it.
If you wanted a dead simple user-repairable toaster, you’d get one of those 1920’s vintage models with an exposed heating element in the middle and simple racks on the sides to hold the bread. It’s nothing but a heating element, a switch, and a bit of bent steel. Of course you’d have to keep it locked away in the cupboard so your kids don’t kill themselves with it.
Well put. As a kid I remember jabbing a fork into a toaster because at some point I noticed you could make sparks.
I’m probably lucky I didn’t die unless some safety mechanism was protecting me.
Kitchen outlets will be GFCI protected in any house built since the mid 80’s in the US. They will instantly trip and cut off the power if you stick a fork in the toaster while touching something grounded.
Im not sure I remember the breaker tripping (RCD as we call it in the UK).
But I’m surprised an isolation transformer isn’t used, maybe it is?
An isolation transformer to handle toasters about 1 kW power would be a size of at least two toasters…
You can still get shocked from an isolation transformer.
It depends on the toaster. There are some very sketchy old designs out there where the internals may actually be live because they’re part of the circuit – to save on wiring and assembly. Kinda like the 1970’s hot dog cooker that puts 120 Volts across four hot dogs, using the sausage itself as the heating element.
You’re just not supposed to stick your fingers or a fork in there. So shorting the heater to the chassis doesn’t necessarily produce a ground fault – it just starts to draw more current than normal.
I think bonded ground and neutral didn’t become “outlawed” or out of code until 1996. In those cases you can’t really have people safe ground fault interrupters. They used bonded ground to save the third wire to every appliance.
For instance, you might feel a little tingle between your kitchen sink and your electric kettle if the kettle’s ground is bonded to neutral anywhere near the outlet. The water pipe to the sink will be at actual ground while the kettle chassis is floating at the neutral voltage, which depends on how much current is passing through the neutral wire, due to Ohm’s law. The chassis of the kettle is floating a couple volts above the sink, so touching the two together will cause a ground fault current to appear out of “nowhere” even when the device isn’t broken. These random currents can trip sensitive GFCI devices, so if there’s any installed it will be at a higher tripping current.
That said, even a modern toaster is nothing but a heating element and a bi-metal thermostatic switch. When it breaks, you have two alternatives: the heater wire has burned through, or the bi-metallic switch is corroded.
When the user tries to repair it, they’ll either try to bodge the heater wire back together, or they try to mess with the thermostat switch. In the first case they’ll either fail and give up, or if the wire has burned up near the end terminal they will attempt to remove the shorter section and stretch the coil to the end terminal, creating a device that is liable to set their bread on fire. In the second case, the user will likely bend the thermostat strip out of calibration and disable the thermostat, again setting their bread on fire when they attempt to use the device.
Why is this a concern? Because the “DIY electricians” out there will not read manuals and they will not order spare parts if they see some problem that seems simple enough to fix, because they don’t actually understand what the problem is. This is why electrical appliances have a sticker that says, “No user serviceable parts inside.” It’s not that they couldn’t be serviced, it’s just that you shouldn’t be the one attempting it.
The third failure mode is that the toaster is just stuck full of grease and old gunk. In that case the user is liable to just toss it anyways, since a cleaning it up is so much work that it’s more economical to spend an hour of your wages on a new toaster than spending 3-5 hours scrubbing an old toaster.
Ah, @Dude now you have me singing, “I Don’t Want To Set the Bread On Fire” to the tune of “I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire” as I eat my toasted bagel. Thanks. I guess.
A friend who used to work for a major small-appliance brand told me that they all buy the toaster mechanism form one of three Chinese companies. All toasters are the same on the inside so it makes no difference if you buy a cheap one.
The differences are mostly, width of the slots, either normal or large. Then there’s the 1-2-3-4-5-6 slot models. And then there’s looks and other items. My toaster has fold out bars on top so you can put something over the toaster to reheat. I have no idea what I would reheat with it.
It’s there for people who arrive at the breakfast table late, and their servants don’t want to toss perfectly good bread away, so they can re-heat it quickly.
Dualit still make theirs in-house as a recetn “Inside The Factory” demonstrated… but then they cost 5x as much as a perfectly good cheap toaster.
I can’t remember ever having to throw away a toaster because it went faulty, so, for me, thisseems like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
If it really were a problem then I would suggest making the elements into a cartridge form so the could be safely replaced.
The only other failure I’ve heard of with toasters is the solenoid latch/contact assemble, again, a simple job to make replaceable but these are commodity items which are so cheap you have to wonder if it’s better to expend the effort to make them easier to recycle than repair
Same here, who’s out there going through toasters at such a rate that this is a problem that needs solving?
Also toasters are very minor as e-waste goes what with containing 99% metal and plastic and very little else, unlike anything with a PCB inside.
Dualit supplies replacement heating elements, timers, switches etc. for their toasters – I’ve replaced elements on mine and it was very straightforward.
Their devices have a price premium but they are robustly built, user-serviceable, and are pretty-near universal in catering operations.
That’s like a next level version of the “Toaster Project” by Thomas Thwaites, where he tried to build a toaster from scratch with pre-industrial tools and methods: https://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/
If I remember well, he made the plastic part ls using corn starch and the slugs in his garden started eating the toaster.
The only repair I’m doing on MOST toasters is cleaning out the crumb tray. Although I did swap the cord on a Sunbeam Automatic from the old cloth covered one to a more modern one. When that beast dies…
My toaster is over 20 years old. I wouldn’t think twice about just replacing it. Trying to say anything about e-waste at a juncture in time when millions of PC’s are going to be made obsolete due to Windows 10 becoming unsupported is moot.
+100 points on that observation!
I recently took a stab at fixing a toaster (>40 y.o. Sunbeam) that shot the slices clear out of the toaster. “It must be a spring tension adjustment.” The disassembly, further disassembly, no screws so panels with bent over tabs – fuhgeddaboutit.
I’ve deep cleaned a couple of old Toastmasters and they contain a small air piston designed to slow down the toast as it pops up. Crazy! You’d never see anything like that in today’s $10 toasters.
I’m sure the flat pack was all about emotional attachment and not at all about saving shipping costs.
Awesome idea. I’d happily buy, assemble, and maintain one. Less garbage please!
Resistance is futile! It is a Borg cube!