Death to Whirlpool, Part 3

January 15, 2013

Whirlpool Customer Service
553 Benson Road
Benton Harbor, MI 49022

Dear Person,

I am unhappy with the Whirlpool Gas Water Heater I bought a couple of years ago. I bought it to replace the A.O. Smith brand gas water heater that was installed in the house when we had it built 15 years earlier.

The old water heater was conventional in all respects, it had no electronic controls of any kind. It may not have been the most efficient, but it was reliable. It never failed to supply hot water. Even when it was on its’ last legs, leaking water all over the garage floor, it was still providing hot water.

I cannot say the same for my new, fancy, Whirlpool water heater with the electronic controls. Two, maybe three years old, and the electronic controller gives up the ghost. Two weeks later the water heater  flames out again. This is disappointing, to say the least.

I chose this particular model because it seemed like a good compromise between expected life time (estimated from the warranty) and price. I did not like the fact that it had an electronic controller, but it seemed that all of the gas water heaters available at Lowes had some kind of electronic controller. Lowes and Whirlpool seemed like good brand names, so I took a chance.

As I see the situation, there are three distinct problems here:

1. Poor response to customer complaints.
2. Failure to follow up on controller failures.
3. Bad choice of connectors in implementing the design.

When I called the first time you were closed. When I called the second time I was on hold for a very long time. This tells me you were very busy, which means either that you are scrimping on customer service, or you are getting way more calls than you expected. As it was, my water heater failed on Friday and I did not get the replacement controller till Wednesday. A better response would have been “for $100 we can have that controller replaced before midnight”.

You sent me a new controller without asking for the old one back. This tells me that either

• you don’t care why it failed, or
• you have already examined enough failed controllers to know what the problem is, or
• this is such a rare occurrence that it is statistically insignificant.

I’m thinking you already know what the problem is. The question then becomes why haven’t you done anything about it?

When my water heater flamed out a second time, you sent me a replacement sensor. Since unplugging and reconnecting the sensor was all that was required to get it running this time, I suspect that the problem was a tiny bit of corrosion on the contacts. Plug in connectors are fine for quick assembly, but if you are going that route perhaps you should have taken a lesson from the computer industry and used gold plated connectors. If using gold causes you grief, perhaps you should use a more positive method of connecting the sensors to the controller, like screws.

To correct this problem with the connectors, I suggest you spend a little time and money on R & D and develop a replacement connector that will not suffer from loss of contact due to corrosion.

The sensor replacement kit you sent me contains two instant connectors. I did not install it because it looks to me like installing it would simply introduce four new points of possible failure (two wires contacting a clip in each of two connectors).

Sincerely,

Charles Pergiel

Whirpool Gas Water Heater particulars:
Model Number: SG1J5040T3NOV
Previous posts on this subject here and here.