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.
The key is fermentation. Some places used to traditionally make all the years bread in one go – whole-grain sourdough will keep for a year if you don’t cut it – after all, it’s alive and able to defend itself as long as the soft bits are inside the shell.
I doubt the sour dough is still alive after baking. You have to raise the internal temperature above 50 C to turn dough into bread, and that’ll kill it.
The kind of bread that keeps for a year is mostly because it’s baked hard and dry on the outside, and set to dry even further up in the rafters, so mold can’t survive on it. It develops a dense, hard, almost oily crust devoid of water. Particularly the kind of rye bread that folks up north like to eat can be so tough you have to whittle it with a wood carving knife to get a slice.
@dude the microorganisms are gone/dead, but the lower pH (sour) environment is more hostile to mould or fungi in general… so it won’t go bad as fast.
I use the toaster to bump up the taste and consistency of formerly frozen bread to convert crystallized starches back to amorphous ones.
In-store slicing is only done on higher quality bread. In the US, basic bread is sliced at the factory (technically a bakery, but factory is probably more accurate) and then stuffed into plastic bags to keep it from drying out. Due to the moisture in the plastic bags, this bread must be made with loads of preservatives and anti-mold agents.
Why do Americans put up with this? They were raised with it and it’s what they know. It’s cheap and lasts a long time on the shelf. And they toast it to give it some flavor.
I gave up on this cheap, mass-produced sliced bread a long time ago. I bake my own bread or buy good stuff from a bakery when I want something different.
It’s ironic that the kind of bread you’re talking about – wonderbread – was actually the healthier choice back in the day when people understood very little about vitamins and nutrients or having well balanced diets. That’s because consumers preferred bread made out of pure bleached flour instead of whole grain flours, so the regular bread people were eating was pretty much just starch and sugar – everything else was removed by the process of making fine white wheat flour that people thought would make the best kind of bread. Then they ate just bread and potatoes, meat and gravy; forget the salad and fruits or seeds and nuts. Those were too seasonal or too expensive.
The company that invented the bread started adding nutrients back in. Some of the anti-mold agents actually contain nutrients like potassium or calcium. A common way to increase shelf life is to make the bread acidic with ascorbic acid – vitamin C. The other stuff they added sounds pretty bad: Nicotinic acid for example, but that’s vitamin B3, or niacin, and not getting enough of it causes pellegra which was a major problem back in the day. The other methods they used to keep the bread fluffy was less healthy: adding loads of sugar and salt keeps the bread soft by retaining water – but also tastier.
Wonderbread and similar styles of bread are a product of a consumer trend. It wasn’t fundamentally bad bread – it was just ultra-processed bread made for the point of being cheap and aimed at the point of demand with nothing extra. It’s basically cake in the form of a bread, without frosting or filling. The people wanted to eat cake instead of bread, so that’s what they sold them. I mean, what do you think peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are?
A lot of folks put this sort of development down to “manufactured demand” or the rise of marketing and capitalism creating the culture of over-eating fatty sugary foods, but I say it’s more due to circumstances: back in the 1950’s you had a nation experiencing tremendous economic growth with even the best of medical experts having a feeble understanding of human physiology. The public was getting rich and they wanted the best things, and eat the best things available. This was a society where Joe Normal thought eating a pound of butter for breakfast was the best thing you could have because that’s exactly what he and his parents couldn’t have, because the generations before him could barely afford to eat.
You didn’t have to market this stuff to the people against their “better judgement”; the people were like kids in a candy store anyways, and that’s the legacy we have. Other countries which didn’t experience this sudden rise to wealth retained their “peasant foods” and healthier lifestyles, because they got wiser before they got richer.
You can make hardtack that lasts for years, but most people want bread that is not baked twice to dry it out.
Store bread has sugar in it, which makes it moister, and easier to toast, traditional flour/yeast/salt/water bread goes stale faster and until it does, it takes longer to toast.
It is wonderful fresh, but it toasts wonderfully when it starts going stale.
Learn to bake, it is not hard and the bread is better than most of what you can get in the store. And cheaper than eight bucks a loaf.
(this does not count for you unfortunates that have gluten allergies, you all have my sympathy)
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.
I separate the preserved breads and fresh breads in my mind just like they are separated in stores. If you only look at places that actually have fresh bread, then their bread quality tends to fall between acceptable and good even in chain stores. If you look at places that don’t have any fresh bread, of course that means they don’t have good fresh bread either. And there’s only a rare few preserved breads that I like, for instance some kinds of english muffin.
As for spoilage, just refrigerate it if you must. Or at least freeze part of the loaf, it’ll still beat the other bread after thawing.
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.
Even the “nice” breads in the US usually pale in comparison to standard fare in Europe. It’s one of the few parts of US culinary stuff that still hasn’t caught up yet. We get all kinds of good cheeses now (finally) and some other things have gotten better… But other parts still lag behind, and of course our additives and such are out of control.
A lot of times when the US “doesn’t have” a food, it’s actually very easy to find as long as you’re not stubbornly looking for it in the wrong place instead of learning where to look. For instance, even when people were saying that the U.S. had only terrible plastic cheeses or lunchmeats, their descriptions revealed that they went to the cheap prepackaged cheese and lunchmeat section and not the deli where the wheels of cheese and various meats are kept and sliced. Nowadays even the prepackaged section has a little more variety, and they will put small wedges of nicer cheeses in or near that section instead of making you go over to the counter. Now, as it happens most people may be taking the cheaper option, but it’s still only an option.
I love making bread, but even quality bread can be great when toasted. It depends on what goes on the bread. I can make a grilled cheese sandwich in a pan with butter, but I prefer to make it in a toaster. It’s a lot less greasy. Especially in the morning I like to make grilled cheese. Just grab two slices, throw some cheese between the slices and put it in there. Even better to microwave it until the cheese is melting and then throw it in the toaster to add crunch. It just tastes nice to eat something warm.
Even as a non-slav I never toast bread. On the other hand I never buy the limp white doughy stuff that defines my “whitebread” Anglo-Celtic ethnicity in Australia.
Yes. Yes it is. If you tried to sell US bread in, say, Poland… you would be sued and perhaps chased out of town with pitchforks
You know a toaster doesn’t have to brown the bread, it can just make the bread crispy and hot enough to melt whatever you would like to spread over it such as butter? We’ve got perfectly good breads in any decent grocery, we just also have cheap “sandwich” breads that are pre-sliced and square and made for conveniently holding butters or sandwich components.
Thanks for the recipes. I switched from store-bought bread to home bread-making a few years ago. When Covid hit, high prices and (un)availability of baking supplies hint that many other American families switched too. I still can’t reliably buy my favorite flour at the supermarket. I have to buy it from an online wholesaler at twice the price as 2019.
Quick someone get her a link to Technology Connections’s massive videos on toasters.
I am desperately craving some modern, repaiable and slightly smarter (better color selection) versions of the old Sunbeam toasters.
I’m want my toast to come out the same each time instead of down to luck but some of the modern goodies we could slide in that the old ones don’t have.
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.
Not quite. You can’t really feel “a couple volts”. The reason you feel a tingle is that BOTH line and neutral are capacitively coupled to the case, resulting in about 60 Volts referenced to ground with an equivalent series resistance of a few tens of kohms.
RMS or peak to peak?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2763825/
Human body resistance is around 300 ohms internally, and over 100 kOhm at the skin. but can be as low as 500-1000 Ohms with wet skin. If we assume between 2000-5000 Ohms total body resistance and we set the perceptible current limit at 1 mA, you need about 2-5 Volts to get a mild jolt that says there’s definitely electricity running through you.
In practice, you can feel a couple hundred microamps, not as a shock, but a kind of electric buzz or a tingle, like when you brush the back of your hand against a non-grounded PC case. If you grab a hold of the metal case, you feel nothing because the current is distributed over a wider area and falls below the threshold of sensation.
It also depends on which body part you’re zapping. Apparently the tongue can detect 45 microamps of AC at 60 Hz.
https://www.mn.uio.no/fysikk/english/research/projects/bioimpedance/publications/papers/dc.pdf
You need about 5 times more DC to feel the presence of the current, which lends to the perception that you just can’t get shocked from low voltages – which is something that most people only ever encounter in the form of direct 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.
I just don’t want to start a flame in your heart…
hahah this is exactly what i was thinking while reading the article. there are just so few components in the toaster, when they break the device has no value. the device as a whole isn’t any more expensive or valuable than the few components that break.
also i can precisely confirm your supposition. :) i have a 22 year old toaster oven. it has seen some abuse, including once being thrown out the backdoor into the snow as a resolution to a small grease fire. but the timer and heating elements (‘calrod’ style, not coils) are still fine. the thermostat died almost immediately. its contact had too much resistance out of the box, and became a hot spot in the circuit. it eventually welded itself closed, which was fine because i never ran it for long enough for the thermostat to engage anyways. then one day it pulled part of the contact off — the weld survived but the thing it was welded to broke in two. i soldered it back closed (oh man was that a hard solder joint to form! it’s all steel wire with a jacket of rust instead of insulation) and have been using it for more than a decade since.
it never sets toast on fire but you absolutely have to monitor it while it runs…if you run it for more than 5 minutes then i’m sure bad things will happen.
i bought a replacement toaster oven and it smelled like burning plastic. so i ran it for several shifts of sitting outside running for 2 hours and it still smells like burning plastic. don’t know if this is a design fault or assembly fault but one way or the other it’s defective garbage. so i use the old one. some day i want to maybe get a toaster oven with fan ‘air fryer’
That reminds me, those heating elements do have a coil inside. It’s just potted in gypsum or some other mineral. A common failure mode is that the gypsum crumbles and turns to dust, and the coil shifts around until it touches the tube. What happens next depends on whether the tube is grounded or not.
I’ll stick a fork in it if the bread is hard to get out because 1) I’m not going to wildly miss the bread and hit the heating element and 2) I wouldn’t be part of a circuit with only one point of contact anyway. Oh and 3) the heating element isn’t even turned on when the bread is done so I find it very likely they switched the hot line rather than the neutral. Worst case the toaster arcs internally and I have to reset the power, but that’s never happened. Realistically if I was feeling clumsy I would just disconnect power for a moment while fishing out the bread. It’s much less convenient to go look for something fork shaped that isn’t a fork.
For legal liability reasons I have to say this is not a recommendation and if you do any of the above you may explode and be eaten by sharks. Or the magic faeries that make people do the incredibly specific stupid mistakes that can get you zapped will come for you.
With many toasters, the bread ejection mechanism is coupled to the power switch, so getting the bread stuck can keep the power applied, or re-applied after the thermostat has cooled down, or the mechanism has failed otherwise and the user is in panic trying to dig the bread out while the device is pushing out smoke. Or, the device was powered off properly but the user neglected to remove the power cord and presses down on the mechanism with the fork and bread, turning the device back on. To make matters worse, they may be hovering over a metal counter top with an integrated sink.
Many things have to go wrong and sometimes they do, so don’t go tempting fate sticking forks into live toasters even if you’re not feeling clumsy – always unplug the power cord first.
Which doesn’t apply in countries that don’t use polarized plugs. The switch can go either way.
I would use a wooden chopstick or some other narrow object that isn’t a fork down the edge of the bread rather than a fork down the flat side. Much easier to lever the bread out that way.
My answer to almost everything you said is “IF things were different than they are for me then they would be different than they are for me, but they’re not.”
What I’m trying to say is it’s not the fork that’s the problem. It’s being someone who can’t be trusted with a fork that’s the problem, even if that person always uses a chopstick instead. If you don’t panic and make terrible decisions the moment anything suboptimal happens, most of those don’t apply.
While I agree that if nobody stuck metal in toasters there would be no incidents of people hurt while sticking metal in toasters, they’d just do something worse later instead. Someone capable of making all the simultaneous mistakes required to make a small arc and trip a breaker if you let them use metal instead of wood is someone who probably shouldn’t be allowed to operate machinery such as cars. I mean they could conceivably destroy a microwave, cut themselves on glass, and/or start a house fire if they panicked while microwaving something similar to the famously plasma-generating half-grape. Maybe a cherry tomato cut up or something, but we’re not trying to ban tomatoes.
Let’s say you plan to use the fork against the top corner of the bread to tilt it up a couple inches so you can reach it. If you think you can accidentally find an angle at which the fork manages to contact both the heating elements which are kept distant from the bread AND ALSO a grounded part of the device at the same time as your lifting up has somehow translated into pressing down rather hard so that the thing turns back on… which I’m not sure applies to all toasters… that’s impressive. Especially since if the tray was going down, you would a) see your goal getting further away and b) see the slide switch going down.
I would rather make a positive statement for those who can’t be trusted – “use the toaster only as you’ve been shown, or unplug it if it’s doing something bad” rather than the statement “the toaster is fine as long as you don’t stick a fork in it”.
Yes. The difference is in not placing unwarranted trust in yourself. That’s how people get into trouble.
Recognizing that you’re not always the best you, and the fact that you’re liable not to notice when you’re making mistakes because of a lapse of judgement, is the difference between “I better unplug this first”, and, “Oh, I’ll just stick a fork in a toaster because I know how to do it safely”.
That’s just special pleading. What if you manage to free the top corner of the bread, but the bottom half crumbles off and remains stuck at the bottom? What if it’s a bagel and you have no corner to grab? Then you go digging deeper in, while leaning on the metal counter… etc.
Events like these happen because human behavior isn’t rational: it’s heuristic and opportunistic. Most of the time you’re not thinking very far back or ahead, but simply reacting to the moment. If your original plan was to just free the top corner, and you didn’t unplug the cord because you saw it as safe, next thing you’re digging your fork in completely forgetting that the cord is still plugged in, forgetting that the device might turn back on if you push on the lever, and so-forth. That’s why the general rule is to always unplug the toaster first, to preempt your own lapses of judgement.
It’s rather circular logic to say in essence that unwarranted trust is why trust is not warranted. And I recognize that it’s essentially impossible for you to tell if I am full of hot air or not, which is why you have assumed that I must be. So although you’re descending into a lot of what-ifs and incorrect assumptions, they’re probably not unfounded from your perspective.
But anyway, when you extend my interpretation of your viewpoint as far as it will go, you end up asserting that people can only claim to know anything if the society presiding over them agrees that they do. And applying this generalization to itself, then claiming to know who should be able to claim to know anything must be something that only special people are allowed to do. That’s why we give that ability to anyone who can get enough votes. And so it goes that you’re required to engage a professional for almost anything, even if you could do a better job on your own while harming no-one. And you’re prohibited from acquiring or possessing almost anything, unless you have a socially acceptable excuse. It’s rather stifling, and if you want competent people in your society you can’t go so far in trying to protect the rest that you knock everyone down to the same level.
But that aside, I wish you to realize that people vary more than you think, and while you may rarely hear of them, there are those who can actually be mindful around a danger for the entire duration of that danger. Of course, most of them are only good in some subjects and not in others, and they had better know which is which. This helps the heuristic where we pretend being employed in a field is equivalent to being any good at it, since people ought to choose something they’re not bad at when seeking employment. Still, it shouldn’t take a lumberjack to split logs or a chef to slice cheese, despite the blades involved. So let’s be clear that this is about idiot-proofing our speech about toasters, not about idiot-proofing the toaster itself.
No… that was explained in the last paragraph. Anyone who thinks they’re consistently smart and careful enough to forgo safety are placing unwarranted trust as well as unnecessary risk on themselves.
This isn’t vetoing your personal competence, but defining it: people who know to take reasonable precautions can be judged competent. People who turn simple repair jobs into a high-wire act because they’re too lazy to unplug a cord can be judged incompetent, no matter how well they know the job.
True, and on that point, consider the following: the rule around a construction site is “Always wear your safety helmet.”
Should it be, “Wear your safety helmet, except when you’re just going in and out real quick, and it’ll be alright because what are the odds of something happening.”?
The reason for the first is that it’s unambiguous and reasonable. People have different levels of understanding and judgement of the risks involved, sometimes even the same individual as I pointed out, and wearing the helmet is really not that much of an inconvenience. Not wearing it is just negligence, and will get you a warning or get you fired from the job.
In terms of toasters, nobody’s going to come in and take your toaster away or check if you actually have any qualifications. The punishment is rather more direct: you may injure or kill yourself and others. That’s why we don’t say, “Go ahead if you feel like you can do it.” People often feel more confident the less they actually know of what they’re doing, including what amounts to safety (Dunning-Kruger effect).
After all, you may have poked your fork in the toaster a hundred times before, and you never know how close to death you were. By this experience, should you recommend it to others?
I thought about being more detailed but I think I’ll just say that the point was not that a toaster is not capable of being involved in harming someone. The point was that it’s absurd to imagine that a few seconds of getting bread out of a toaster the wrong way is going to appear even on the first page of a hypothetical list of the times I’ve gotten closest to danger in a month. It’d be different if any of the things you made up were true, or if all I did was sit in front of a screen and get other people to live my life for me. Otherwise even in a month where I didn’t do much, that list should usually be dominated by all the hours spent driving, or perhaps times where falling over could have been harmful or something.
Oh and the guys who make sure to follow safety rules to the exact letter are always the first to discover a gap in the rules by getting hurt and indignantly refusing to understand that the rules were made to assist in being safe, not as a replacement for it.
Any manufacturer can make a toaster using safe, insulated heating elements. The elements in my toaster-oven would never electrocute me. Maybe these safer elements cost 0.25 Euro instead of 0.05 Euro. As for fire hazards… for that, I can’t confirm or deny the safety considerations. Maybe modern toasters use an accelerometer to make sure you never try to toast upside-down.
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 very convenient to pre-heat another toaster that way.
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/
a fascinating book! Thank you for reminding me of it.
I applaud Ms. Hou’s goal of making an appliance that is easily repairable, and more important, of inviting non-hacker types to make simple repairs.
If I remember well, he made the plastic part ls using corn starch and the slugs in his garden started eating the toaster.
I recently experienced the pain of taking our modest 4 slice unit apart. It has motorized inject/eject, ability to turn off one side of heaters for bagels and a couple other features.
All of that worked fine, it was the buttons that failed. Or rather the plastic unit that presses the buttons.
I quickly realized this unit’s preformed exo-skeleton is made to be assembled once. Even after careful disassembly the metal became bent in places it shouldn’t. The plastic button assembly had failed do to heating fatigue from poor insulation.
If I had a 3D printer I could’ve probably made new buttons. Right now some “JB weld” seems to be doing ok.
At least it doesn’t require internet access.
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!
Not a Windows user, but Microsoft recently removed support for 8th – 10th generation Intel for Windows 11 installations. That means that 5 year old CPU’s are no longer supported. Those are, to me, brand new CPU’s with TPM 2.0 support. I hope to upgrade to the 10th generation. I already disliked Microsoft but this makes me dislike them even more.
They “removed” support. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still work if you force the install. Anyway I wouldn’t want to “upgrade” to a 10th gen intel when something better would probably be equal or better priced here.
Just force the windows 11 install and don’t worry about TPM or anything. It doesn’t seem to cause any unexpected problems, so ignore Microsoft’s nonsense and just keep using the existing hardware.
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.
zing!
love the callback
Awesome idea. I’d happily buy, assemble, and maintain one. Less garbage please!
Resistance is futile! It is a Borg cube!
Resistance is not futile, in fact it is absolutely necessary for Ohmic heating :)
I don’t know if any one knows the Dualit brand but their toasters go on for thirty odd years and they still hold parts for them.
I believe in France, most US “commercial” bread (prepacked, jammed on supermarket shelves) would technically be classified as “biodegradable packing materials”.
Or cake.
An awful lot of ‘bread’ contains significant amounts of sugar
Yeah I think Subway got in trouble in the EU because their bread has enough sugar in it that no longer classifies as bread under their regulations and is instead a really crappy cake
I could swear I hit post on my comment asking someone to share a video about Sunbeam toasters to give more inspiration. I really want a modern version of it.
I don’t know why that comment would get reported or deleted so I don’t know what happened.
I’ve had my Dualit (UK) toaster for 10 years now. Assembled by Barry, and fully repairable.
Here’s the best toaster I’ve had the pleasure of using so far:
https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Tefal_Thick_N_Thin_Toaster_815032
It takes up the minimum possible space for a 2-slice toaster. And it’s repairable already! I bought a used one in a thrift store in 2011, and have been using it daily (sometimes multiple times daily) ever since. The only repair I needed so far to make was to replace the push-down handle with a home-made wooden one (a short piece of birch from a tree outside), because the plastic handle eventually broke in half.
Too bad it’s not made anymore, apparently.
I wouldn’t want such an ugly boxy big design like that one being proposed.
“Capacitor: This will cut off the power in the circuit once it gets to a certain voltage.”
What?
That Toaster reminded me of an Art Project I found quite inspiring. Thomas Thraites tried to make every part by him self. I think he started by refining the ore…
https://www.dezeen.com/2009/06/27/the-toaster-project-by-thomas-thwaites/