Household goods and appliances are cheaper than mobile!! Turists Posting about the inexpensive LCD at Hardly Normal is great! Someone try it! Well, it is worth a try.. Anyone that tries this gear, please tell us your results after serious long term travel on the corrugation. There are a lot of household cheaper gear out there that are a big price attraction, and if any of it will stand up to the travel we should all get it...!
HOUSEHOLD ELECTRONICS: Put into practice, I have found that in general household goods are not designed to be mobile. Like Circuit boards where the larger heavier components are glued or soldered on the board only, to fracture the joints in travel and vibration because they are just too heavy to take the shock and constant vibration of corrugation in Outback travel. The larger electrical components on PC Boards really need to be screwed and bolted in place and then soldered.
MARINE AND AVIATION SWITCH MODE ELECTRONICS: Some of the Switch Mode gear that works well in aircraft and yachts, does not like the corrugation for the same reasons. It is designed to be light, using larger electronic components like mosfets (Metal Oxide Semi-conducting Field Effect Transistors) that compared to the other IC board stuff, are bulky and weighty. The affect of buffeted by wind and sea is a little softer than the hammering of corrugation. They use them instead of our dinosaur technology of tapped wire transformers, because of overall weight of the components. In practice, if you open them up they often suffer from the same problem as above and heavy components like the mosfets have broken the glue or solder joints and are rattling around inside. This is not always true, but in general this IS is a problem… And has happened to just about every one we have tried.. And then when it happens to the high end expensive integrated appliance ones like charger inverters combination, we like simple modular individual units so failure of bit does not take down both…
HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES: Look good and are cheap! But in practice, some washing machines have 30-40 pound unsecured counter weights that thrash all around and beat themselves to death. And air conditioning units that just do not have the components, compressors, and lines, secured enough to take the active vibration and soon come to grief… Etcetera. Microwaves often die for the same sort of reasons, but they are cheap enough not to worry about it… And incidentally we find no correlation to brands or models of microwaves, which change all the time, so there are no recommendations from us on the “best”.
In general, mobile goods are more expensive, and personally I find it hard to justify the costs. But I think it comes down to volume, in a huge Manufacturer 99% fixed household and 1% mobile with special manufacturing commands a premium. Before the new technology TVs, I use to just buy $150 repaired color TV’s not caring how long they lasted in travel. I bought one “Teac” Off Road model in the 1990’s for $600 with a VCR under it, and while I cannot remember what happened to it, may still have it stored, it did travel well. In general, anyone who is brave should try the household goods if they like, and if successful share the good results. But overall, in years of trying due to the obvious cheaper cost attraction, I have not had that good of results in general..
So, somebody please try it, DVDs and all…. But I have found that quality pays, for example the cheaper stereo stuff fails, where the good quality of something like Alpine, lives to move after years from one truck to the next. I think it is just like a
Bushtracker, do it once, do it right…
Regards, Ranger….
