Our fancy new “Space Fridge” has some amazing features. It will auto-fill a glass, based on sensor readings so it knows how much water to add. It has a fancy LCD touchscreen that allows you to configure its features. Heck, it even warns you if you leave the door ajar by playing an annoying tune until you shut it.
It also requires a $50 water filter with a special RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tag that has the sole purpose of forcing you to replace the filter after 6 months. It’s crazy. You can buy a pack of 2 filters that will fit the fridge for $16, but without the RFID tag, they won’t work, and your fridge will refuse to dispense water. Mind you, the ONLY difference is the RFID tag, the cheap filter itself is perfectly fine.
That really annoyed me, and so I pondered what to do. For the past year, I’ve left the “expired” filter in the fridge and constantly press “override” to get another perfectly-filtered fill from the expired $50 filter. That is extremely frustrating, and occasionally the fridge absolutely refuses to dispense water unless you replace the filter. I didn’t want to put the “bypass” device in, because I really dislike drinking chlorinated water. But that made me think… Why does the bypass device work?
See, the GE fridge includes a plastic non-filter thing that screws into the filter slot, and allows the fridge to dispense unfiltered water and ice. But why does that work, yet the cheap non-RFID filters don’t? It turns out there’s a tiny little RFID tag hidden under a sticker on the bypass device, which puts the fridge into “unfiltered” mode. The only difference, apart from being unfiltered, is the tiny little graphic on the screen shaming you into buying another $50 filter.
You probably see where I’m going with this. I tore the plastic bypass device apart, took out the RFID tag, and taped it to the inside of the fridge where the sensor is. (That’s what the red arrow is pointing to at the top) Now I can use the cheap filters, and replace them when they stop working well. How do I know they need to be replaced without the RFID system telling me? Well, because the water starts flowing more slowly. Then I pop out one $8 filter, and put in a new one. The fridge still thinks it’s in bypass mode, and I no longer want to smash it with a hammer.
Oh, and that “Unfiltered Water” reminder? It just makes me smile every time I see it. Because it turns out I’m smarter than our smart fridge after all. 🙂
Yo Mr Powers, welcome back to posting. Your observations have been sorely missed since I ran screaming from Twitter, never to return. Evers. This comment seems to have turned out to be about me. Sorry.
Ha! That’s ok by me, the post was all about me. I’m all for balance. 🙂 And I hope to keep writing here. I miss it, as I don’t write as much for LJ now.