The irony begins with the fact you must…
The irony begins with the fact you must pay for consumer advice! Now that would be fine if it was genuine advice! What do I mean by that? Well Consumer Magazine takes money for writing articles about certain retailers and brands to promote their products/service. Unfortunately this leads to obvious biases.
Now what I can say is that Consumer Magazine does obviously tests products but…
1. Money = Bias. They write positive reviews for products which they receive money from! And likewise they write negative reviews about products they don’t! Hardly seems fair now does it?
2. Their testing is effectively entirely pointless. Why? Imagine you take you average everyday Joh Blog and sit them in a formula 1 racing car. Now ask them to take it for a lap around a track, come back and report on how the car preformed. Is Joe going to genuinely understand how the engineered downforce affected his front right tire when going around turn 2 at 250kph? No. He has no experience with cars, let alone engineering! My point here is that why bother testing a product if you have genuinely no idea behind the technology, or it’s true advantages or set backs? Take a heat pump dryer for example. An average heat pump dryer will take somewhere between 2 1/2 to 4 1/2 to dry a full load of cotton clothing. Now take a vented dryer and it would take about 45mins to an hour. Consumer would say why waste your money… or similarly name and put down specific brands for having such a long dry time. Reality is heat pump dryers use heat pump technology which produces lower level temperatures but saves considerable about of money per cycle! Not to mention more expensive units which have typically longer dry times are designed in such a way so they don’t shrink clothing/damage clothing over a period of time.
3. Lastly. Your general consumer advice is very poor and misleading. For example take the New Zealand’s CGA Act. Don’t promise to customers that if you $400 fridge which has failed 3 years outside its warranty is going to be 100% without a doubt covered. There are many considerations which go into warranty advice and so forth! Funny enough extended warranty’s for example are talked considerably negatively about because according to you it is ALL covered under the CGA. Come on, who are you kidding!
In short, do not bother. Research brands and retailers yourself! Don’t pay for some nonsense run by an entirely for profit business which seeks legitimacy behind its paid .ORG URL.
