The Hi and Lo directions on my range’s knobs

LazaroFlim@lemmy.film to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 1034 points –
i.imgur.com

I kept burning my food or wait forever for the pan to heat up and I finally understand why. Each knob has a different direction for the Hi and Lo (also why isn’t it Low).

144

You'll love it more when the numbers get washed off. Here's mine.

How in the hell did this make it to market?

Mass consumerism and companies not caring.

Their target audiences are home flippers who just need the cheapest stainless steel appliances that look fine at a glance, and cheap landlords that don't understand that they're choosing themselves more money in the long run.

I don't get how this would be cheaper to manufacture. They'd need to make five different switches.

By knobs, you mean rotary switches, I assume. I think the thing is they cheaped out by not designing the switches they needed. Instead they just sourced whatever rotary switches they could find that had the number of outputs they needed for these weird, segmented burners, regardless of their potentiometer directions.

They had different teams working on each knob to speed up the design process.

Lol this is the funniest thing I've read today :)

You can get an engraver for like $12 of Amazon, with a little practice you can probably ingrave new numbers and paint fill them.

Technically they can use their picture as reference and maybe order a sticker with the settings printed.

My dryer has a "less dry" setting.

Who likes their laundry done rare?

That actually makes sense for things you want to finish drying on a line so they don’t heat up too much and shrink.

Also for ironing

Also for if you enjoy the feeling of cold damp underwear.

Cold damp underwear sucks.

Cold damp socks on the other foot...

I mostly agree with you, but I feel like damp underwear would be awesome if you were someplace that's hot and arid.

Edit: accidently replied to the wrong person

This makes sense... But my washer defaults to this mode and I can't figure out how to change it. By default all my clothes are almost dry.

Mine has similar settings but they're named in ways which actually tells you why you'd want them that way: "Ready to Iron", "Ready to Hang" and "Extra Dry", things like that.

So it actually adds water?

It just seemed nuts hooking up a water line to my dryer the first time I got one with steam cycles.

I never hooked mine up because I didn't see much point in steam... But now I kinda want to.

You can mimic most of the steam features by throwing an ice cube in before running the dryer.

Tell me you didn’t read the manual without telling me you didn’t read the manual.

(I didn’t read mine too, btw)

It's useful for when I forget about my laundry and the clothes are already mostly dry, but not completely.

Some fabrics wrinkle when you allow them to sit in the dryer totally dry. For those you want to take them out and hang them for the last bit so when they reach their driest state they’re hanging and not crumpled within the dryer.

source: am appliance salesman

At least “Off” is consistent. That could have been a total train wreck.

I bought a portable electric space heater a few years ago that had an alarming tendency to rewire itself - like, "Off" would become "Low", "High" would become "Fan" etc. Finally took it apart and realized that the dial was just a contact that rolled across a bit of printed solder and occasionally the solder would melt (no way they could have expected that to happen in a fucking heater) and flow into a new pattern. I have absolutely no idea why thousands of people haven't burned themselves to death with these things.

It's like your stove top was the experimental test one where you could see how all the knob styles worked, like it wasn't supposed to be released to the public.

I'm really trying to understand what's going on here in a way that makes sense, even if it's a twisted kind of sense.

My best guess is that each of these burners are a different size and some have multiple rings and that by turning the knob left (Anti-clockwise), you're going from smaller number of rings to larger number of rings - however, the rings start at their highest heat level. So looking at the bottom right dial as an example, the first "Notch" on the left is the smallest burner on the highest setting, then as you turn left more, it'll dial down that burner until you get to the second ring on the burner - starting at full power for that second burner and continuing to lower power until you get to the 3rd ring, then it's same again for the 4th ring.

Is that right? am I even close? I don't understand why you'd go from smallest burner to highest burner anti-clockwise, but go from lowest burner-power to highest clockwise. That still doesn't make sense to me.

That's pretty much exactly how it is.

OP's stove is GCRE3060AF, or similar. The rightmost knob is inconsistent for reasons I cannot fathom, unless there is some obscure electrical reason. It is an electric stove, and the knobs with multiple ranges do indeed control burners that have multiple potential sizes. One of them has two selectable sizes, and other has three. On these I believe the rationale is that the high setting is the closest and most easily accessible because radiant electric ranges suck [citation not needed] and since they take forever and a day to heat up most users will just leap right to the full blast output setting immediately. I have no idea why the direction on the last knob is backwards from the others, clockwise versus counterclockwise, but it is.

If you're morbidly curious, you can view the entire control panel from OP's stove (or one similar) here.

Also hers a pic

Also seems mildly infuriating to reach across whatever you are cooking to handle the knobs.

I can’t decide if I prefer this (my stove is this way) or bumping the knobs with my hips.

My stove has the front knobs, it's gas, and it's been bumped on accidentally more than once and someone else walks into the kitchen and has the horrifying realization that the kitchen smells like gas. I think I prefer the electric stove I had as a kid.

That's why modern gas stoves have safety valves. There's a temp sensor near the burner which automatically shuts the gas off if the burner isn't lit.

I nearly burned myself the other day doing this on my stove. Put the damn knobs down on the front!!!

That was a choice. We have a young kid who loooves touching buttons and turning knobs.

Well that's fair and relatable. My kid keeps turning on the oven and turning off the dishwasher. Our stove has touch controls on the surface that he hasn't figured out quite yet, but since it's an induction stove it turns off pretty quickly if nothing is on it.

Our dishwasher has buttons on the i side. You need to open the door to control it. Then when you close it it looks clean with no buttons.

Yep. It’s. GCRE3060AFF electric stove. (Other thing I hate is the fan noise when the oven is on, even when not on convection). Your idea of Hi closest to off position makes sense except of that triple knob, the 3rd ring Hi position isn’t at the top.

Have you Google the fan being on all the time? Ours (different model) doesn't do that and they really shouldn't.

It has to do with keeping the internal circuit boards cool so they don’t overheat due to the heat from the oven. We had a stove that did that too. I hated that thing. It would roar like a jet engine for about 30 minutes even after you turned the oven off.

US kitchen appliances are so weird and bad. I don’t get why your stuff doesn’t progress like over here in EU. We get the cleanest, modern, most silent kitchen setups ever.

Because you can make a larger profit by keeping the same design and parts on a crap product and charge you an inflated premium vs selling you a good product with decent R&D and testing. If it’s all crap you can’t tell you’re being fucked. Same thing with sliding guillotinée windows and health insurance.

Probably due to the knob itself and the configuration of the leads coming off of it.

I'm sure there's a lazy engineer reason. But as someone who does engineering semi-professionally, come on! You don't skimp out on UX just because it's easier to make it this way! There is a reason why Murphy's Law exists! And in this case it's actually a fire hazard!

As a UX designer who became an appliance salesman, I challenge you to invent better UX for these features.

Well, for starter. Pick a direction for Lo -> Hi either clockwise or counterclockwise and stick to it.

The rotating knob is great. Haptic feedback. You can see it’s off at a clan r from afar. It’s not an encoder but a potentiometer so each position always has the same function hard coded. Just make them all turn in the same direction.

I would chose counter-clockwise as it’s easier to turn it that way for a right handed person (and that’s how the single burners are designed, all 3 of them (although the warm zone has a weird dead zone for some reason). Start on Lo until it gets to Hi then for multiple ring ones when you hit ring_1 hi and continue you get to ring_2 Lo and so on.

Yes they’re rings. Still doesn’t explain why not everything is in the same rotational direction.

That’s what I’m thinking, the different burners have different rings that are individually controlled

You have double burners. Some of your knobs have two HI and two LO positions, one for one burner and one for both burners.

On top of the stove this looks like two concentric heating elements. You can turn on one or both. Turning on both is sometimes called a “fast boil” burner.

The best solution the industry has come up with is to put two control surfaces into one knob, so instead of the control surface being a full circle it’s a half circle.

There’s no way to make all the knobs match in appearance unless all the burners have optional double burner operation.

source: am appliance salesman.

Yes they’re double burners but the Lo -> Hi rotation is different for each position which is infuriating, but only mildly.

I see what you mean.

What they should do is make the rule: “clockwise is hotter”, and make all the LO…HI arcs increase in the clockwise direction.

Then no matter which burner you’re adjusting, you know it’s a clockwise movement.

They should also have a little LED light bar that changes length to show how high that burner’s setting. As you turn clockwise, it lengthens toward “full on”.

The LED light bar should light up whenever a knob is touched.

Need high temp LEDs too I guess.

My folks had a stove with two (electric) heat elements in the same way I assume OP has, to use both, you had to go 360° all the way to a full circle where it "clicked", then go back to where you wanted it at. Much easier and sensible IMO than whatever the hell this headache is.

what in the actual fuck

The burner has two zones. A small one in the middle, and a wider ring around. If you turn to the left, you only turn the middle part on from High to low, and if you turn right, you turn both on from low to high.

Damnit... Great explanation... Also, it just pissed me off because it reminded me that I have a burner on my stove like this with the small and large and different settings for each... Unfortunately, it currently only works at all on the large burner on high... I need to slide it away from the wall and take the fucking thing apart and figure out why...

Not tonight though... 😂

Has to do with the fact that several burners have multiple sizes that can be used. My stove is the same way, and there’s really not a much better way to do it imo, short of a touch screen, which I don’t want on a stove.

A dial with a mode select switch directly above it. That us the much better way.

If you want the inner burner at power level 6, you set the mode switch to inner and the dial to 6. Then every dial can work the exact same way, but you still have multi-sized burners.

I like the other commenter's idea, but I'd be happy with just consistent directions. Turn it a little bit counterclockwise and it's the minimum low, turn it a bit clockwise and it's max high.

I have an LG one with a single triple burner that doesn't match any of the others. The oven also sucks, I need to set it 25 degrees higher on convection (with normal cook time) for things to cook properly.

Oh and then there's the bottom drawer which is a second oven but it takes forever to preheat. I've used it twice and then stopped bothering.

I think I'll replace that piece of shit next time a big purchase is up.

I can explain this one! When the knob only has one set of hi/lo, it controls the burner's heat as you'd expect, and it all works in the same direction. Those with multiple hi/lo sets control the heat and the size of the burner, since there are 2 (and on one, maybe 3?) concentric heating elements available for that knob.

I've had something similar for years, and have never had an issue. I'm even less likely to accidentally choose the wrong knob since the single-size one tends to have a looser feel to it.

Traslation: you get used to weird design.

It took me about a minute to figure the same, before reading the comment, and I never had a multi element burner.

Maybe OP, you, and a lot of other people in the thread are being a bit overdramatic?

This explains the circle symbols beside each "lo" on the multi-knobs. That's pretty clever once you get used to it.

The issue is the direction of the Hi Lo. One it’s clockwise the other counter and the other it depends on which burner size you want.

Yes they’re rings one double and one triple.

Each one that controls only one size gets hotter as you go counter-clockwise

Yea but the extra ring ones are all over the place.

There are two knobs that control burners with multiple sizes. One of them, like mine, controls two sizes. You can turn either direction to control the burner size you want, and it'll go high to low regardless. The other has three burner sizes. There is no third way to turn a knob, so they needed a different approach.

nice features, albeit highly situational, and probably useless for most home cooks. I imagine R&D needed something new for the model and over-engineered it.

I have different sized pots and pans, so it actually really comes in handy for that

This is maybe the worst thing I have seen in my life.

MILDLY infuriating!?

Depends on which direction you turn the knob. If can be Mild ore Extremely…

That should be illegal, throw it out

Using "Low" would be more infuriating than "Lo".

The full words are "High" (not "Hi") and "Low", so to save space they use the first two letters "Hi" and "Lo". If they use "Hi" and "Low" it would be inconsistent, e.g. more infuriating.

Last one is the only one that's out of place to me. They all have counter clockwise when solo mode, when 2 modes available, low is at the bottom and high is at the top, makes sense, but the last one is different.

Also, why would it be Low? They're using 2 letters, Hi and Lo are different enough to identify. I'd have to check mine, but using Hi/Lo seems normal.

Yeah, the last one is different because it has three modes, but in a vacuum it seems like they could have set it up closer to the paradigm of the two-mode knobs. Depending on how those knobs are actually wired though, there may be a good reason why it was easier to make it that way.

That is literally unusable. How is this even legal?

What witchcraft is this on earth!? Crime against humanity?

Thanks Frigidaire

There's your problem. Their appliances are junk. I've got a Frigidaire fridge and it has a bunch of known issues. The refrigerant line is too close to the back of the fridge, causing the back panel to rust. The line for the ice maker also freezes a lot. The bottom of the fridge is very cold to the point where stuff freezes (the water line runs near here).

All know issues for the model I've got. Outside of warranty, so all Frigidaire could offer was a 10% off coupon for a new fridge... As if I'd buy a Frigidaire again.

Frigidaire literally invented the modern fridge. You'd think they'd know how to build a good one by now.

One office I worked in had a toaster with a knob where "off" is almost all the way to the left.

Turning the knob to the right lets you control the toasting time, like any other knob-based timer.

But if you turn it left from the "off" position, that's the "stay on" position.

So if you'd set the timer, and then wanted to cancel it, you can't just turn it all the way left like on any other knob timer. If you do that, you're telling it to stay on forever and eventually scorch the table and set off the fire alarm.

This is actually pretty infuriating for me to look at and I´m getting violent impulses from it. You should at least have put a trigger warning before it you monster!

I guess you can screenshot my post and repost it on !mildlyinfuriating …

That last one is what kills me. Three different ranges of lo-hi, who does that?

Are these like different pictures of range knobs mashed together? I find it almost impossible to believe they put a different style control for each possible position.

Mine has burners like this too and I hate it. Very confusing!

Looking at the one in the top left... imagine if that was for an amplifier. Like, you have to pass through maximum to reach off. That would be the worst to live near.