My Appliance Repair Blog

Home Appliances

Home appliances are electrical/mechanical machines which accomplish some household functions, such as cooling/heating, cooking or cleaning. Home appliances can be classified into:

 

 

 

• Major appliances, or white goods
• Small appliances,
• Consumer electronics, or brown goods in regions with UK influence 

 

 

This division is also noticeable in the maintenance and repair of these kinds of products. Brown goods usually require high technical knowledge and skills (which get more complex with time, such as going from a soldering iron to a hot-air soldering station), while white goods may need more practical skills and "brute force" to manipulate the devices and heavy tools required to repair them.

 

Given a broad usage, the domestic application attached to "home appliance" is tied to the definition of appliance as "an instrument or device designed for a particular use or function". More specifically, Collins dictionary defines "home appliance" as: "devices or machines, usually electrical, that are in your home and which you use to do jobs such as cleaning or cooking." The broad usage, afforded to the definition allows for nearly any device intended for domestic use to be a home appliance, including consumer electronics as well as stoves, refrigerators, toasters and air conditioners to light bulbs and water well pumps.

Prehistoric furniture

The practice of using natural objects as rudimentary pieces of furniture likely dates to the beginning of human civilisation. Early humans are likely to have used tree stumps as seats, rocks as rudimentary tables, and mossy areas for sleeping. During the late palaeolithic or early neolithic period, from around 30,000 years ago, people began constructing and carving their own furniture, using wood, stone, and animal bones. The earliest evidence for the existence of constructed furniture is a Venus figurine found at the Gagarino site in Russia, which depicts the goddess in a sitting position, on a throne. A similar statue of a Mother Goddess was found in Catal Huyuk in Turkey, dating to between 6000 and 5500 BC. The inclusion of such a seat in the figurines implies that these were already common artefacts of that age.

 

 

A range of unique stone furniture has been excavated in Skara Brae, a Neolithic village in Orkney, Scotland. The site dates from 3100–2500 BC and due to a shortage of wood in Orkney, the people of Skara Brae were forced to build with stone, a readily available material that could be worked easily and turned into items for use within the household. Each house shows a high degree of sophistication and was equipped with an extensive assortment of stone furniture, ranging from cupboards, dressers and beds to shelves, stone seats, and limpet tanks. The stone dresser was regarded as the most important as it symbolically faces the entrance in each house and is therefore the first item seen when entering, perhaps displaying symbolic objects, including decorative artwork such as several Neolithic Carved Stone Balls also found at the site.

 

Ancient furniture has been excavated from the 8th-century BC Phrygian tumulus, the Midas Mound, in Gordion, Turkey. Pieces found here include tables and inlaid serving stands. There are also surviving works from the 9th-8th-century BC Assyrian palace of Nimrud. The earliest surviving carpet, the Pazyryk Carpet was discovered in a frozen tomb in Siberia and has been dated between the 6th and 3rd century BC.