"Lazy compliance" and unintended consequences

Last week, a friend of mine got a new electric stove. But that was only the beginning of the story.

Once it was installed, she learned that her new stove wasn't compatible with her cookware. I didn't know that was possible, but she explained it to me as follows: 

Turns out all electric stoves manufactured since 2018 need to meet a safety standard to reduce fire risk which cycles the burner off when a pan is not in contact with it. 

In complete contact with it; to work on my "sensi-temp" burners, pans have to have a completely flat bottom.

My only 2-quart saucepan was warped.

So, this morning I purchased a new one.  Stainless steel, $28, sigh.

But at least I can cook rice tonight!

This is the kind of outcome that makes people believe conspiracy theories. To her credit, my friend didn't start yelling that the stove-manufacturers must be in cahoots with the cookware-manufacturers to drive up sales—at least, she didn't say it around me—but I would have understood if she had. For myself, I began to wonder how such a defective outcome came to pass in the first place. 

Should I take a minute to explain what it is that makes this update to new stoves an impairment and not an improvement?

It's unexpected. Maybe there was coordination inside the kitchen-appliance industry, but I don't remember seeing any communication to the general public back in 2018 that stoves were changing in a fundamental way. Nor does my friend, obviously.

It requires additional actions from consumers, unrelated to the stove itself. When the auto industry introduced anti-lock brakes, they didn't insist that drivers start braking differently. Rather, they started from the known facts about how drivers react in panic situations, and redesigned the brakes to fit the drivers. By contrast, telling home-cookers that they have to buy new cookware to fit their new stoves is completely backwards. 

It requires additional and unexpected costs. This is basically the same point, hitting your wallet as well as your habits.

It's going to break. Every feature that you add to a product is one more thing that can break. But what happens if the sensor breaks on this new stove, while the shutoff-mechanism for heating elements remains intact? Then the stove will fail to detect a pan on the burner even when a pan is there, and the burner won't heat up. Result: the stove won't work. Any change that makes a product more fragile and less resilient is an impairment and not an improvement.

Sure enough, people hate it. There are long discussion threads on Reddit (see here, for example) about how to replace your brand-new "sensi-temp" burners with the old style, where to buy old-style burners as replacement parts, and so forth. Of course, buying old-style burners from some random site on the Internet means you have to spend even more, but plainly some people think it is worth the expense. 

Ironically, I bet that dismantling your stove to replace the heating elements with ones you ordered online may introduce some safety risks into your day; and yet I guarantee that when GE and other manufacturers did a safety analysis on this change before implementing it, they never considered the risks from home retrofits by angry customers. But this change to stoves has created a market and a community for exactly this kind of home retrofit. 

Why did they do it?

I wish I knew. I would love to see the FMEA carried out on this change before it was implemented.

It would be easy to blame ignorance. Maybe the engineers never actually do their own cooking, and didn't realize that this new feature could pose a problem. But that can't be the whole story, because GE (at least) provides an information sheet that warns explicitly about non-compliant cookware. You can download this sheet from the GE website here. (Also I have archived a copy locally here, in case the GE site is ever rearranged.) 

At the most basic level, the change appears to have been introduced in response to an update of the safety standard UL 858, "Household Electric Ranges." [You can buy the standard here.] Based on other informational material provided by GE, the thinking appears to have run something like this:

• Stovetop oil and grease fires are bad.
• To prevent them, we have to prevent pans on the stovetop from getting too hot.
• To measure how hot a pan is, we have to have a sensor touching the pan.
• But this approach could fail if the sensor doesn't touch the pan. So to avoid that case, if the sensor doesn't touch the pan we will cut off power to the burner. (According to this article, the stove should not cut off power completely; but my friend's experience was exactly that.)

It's logical, as far as it goes. But the whole line of reasoning exemplifies what another friend has called "lazy compliance": that's "where they make changes required for safety without bothering to make compensatory changes so the thing works as well as it did before."

Of course, you might think, So what? It's safer, and that's what counts. And to some extent, naturally that's true. But in the rest of our lives, we are often willing to make trade-offs where we sacrifice a measure of safety to secure nothing grander than convenience. 

For example, if all automobiles had to observe a strict maximum speed limit of 20 miles per hour, the number of fatal car crashes in a year would drop to nearly zero. Shall we take a vote? Never mind, I guarantee the measure would fail. Even though "car crashes are the leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 1 to 54," we'll never get a voting majority willing to eliminate those deaths by lowering the speed limit so far.

So why stovetops? And why didn't those of us who use stoves regularly get a vote? (If you remember last week's post, that's called "stakeholder engagement," and it's important.)  

I wish I knew. If you know more about it than I do, please leave a note to help explain.