Ice Makers and Magnetic Paint: What they have in common.
We’re slowly redoing our kitchen. We purchased a new fridge a few months ago. Nice and shiny stainless with an automatic ice maker. Our first ice maker! We also decided to do a bit of a Martha Stewart (or is it more proper to say ‘a Rachel Ray’ these days) and get some of that magnetic and chalk board paint to make a chalk board for the kids.
It’s coming along.
But I’m slowly realizing that these seemingly great design ideas are quite useless. An ice maker sounded great. Ice! All the time! No refilling the ice tray! But after a while you realize that it wasn’t that hard to fill an ice tray. And now, even with the automatic maker, you’re tossing the ice out every month anyways as it starts to solidify into a giant block of ice. On top of all of that, you have to hook the fridge up to your water supply with a little hose that, if you ask around, seems highly prone to leaking in the future. So, we now have 1/3 of our freezer taken up by a huge ice maker that really isn’t improving our lives in any way.
As for the magnetic paint…wow! What an idea! Just paint it on and now you have a magnet board! Well, the reality is that it’s not quite that simple. At a minimum, you need at least 3 coats of paint. And that is barely enough to stick a Pizza Hut delivery magnet too. I’m on the 5th coat and probably have 2 or three more to go to make it usable. In hindsight, I should have just bought a piece of steel and painted that once.
Unfortunately, new and innovative just sounds new and innovative. We’re suckers for a bullet point list of fancy features and will purchase based on that without giving a second thought as to whether or not those said features are even something we’d use.
This is especially true with software and web sites these days. I can’t even recall how many ‘web 2.0′ web sites I’ve signed up for based on the shiny list of features. I can now count the number of web 2.0 sites that I actually use on one hand. Even then I could afford to loose a few fingers in a saw accident without loosing count.
So, note to self: look at each bullet point. Study them. THINK before opening that wallet! ;o)
3 Comments
I totally agree. This reminds me of a 37signals post I saw a week or so ago. They show a Microsoft Visual Studio ad that boasts “Over 400 new features. The difference is obvious.” and compare it to a Vanilla ad that says “back with fewer features than ever.”
Oh, and I’ll make sure that the next fridge I buy does not have an icemaker.
It would be great if everything you bought would work just as yolu imagine it, but that isn’t the way things are. It is much better to do a bit of homework before you buy in order to find out how a thing really is rather than to imagine how you would like a thing to perform and then get mad that it isn’t what you had in mind. Magnetic paint, case in point. Magnetic paint doesn’t change a surface to steel. It mearly coats the surface with a very thin layer of magnetically attractive particles that will attract magnets. Not all magnets are equal in strength or weight and they will not all be attracted equally to magnetic paint. Some magnets, the heavier and weaker ones will not stick well at all. Others, the sheet magnets and rare earth magnets will stick fine. It takes a little experimenting to find out what you really can and can’t do with any new medium.
I make Magically Magnetic paint additive that just stirs into ordinary paint and rolls on to any wall. It takes a minimum of two coats while some people prefer to use three or even four coats. A lot depends on how heavy you paint it on with each coat. Again, its the magnetically attractive particles in the paint that attract magnets, not the paint part. You are not just changing the color of the wall. You are changing it’s surface completely. It is no small task to get magnets to stick to plaster.
“It is much better to do a bit of homework before you buy in order to find out how a thing really is”
Yep. Hopefully my post will help the next person googling ‘magnetic paint’!