When Old Designs Are Still The Best

Have you ever wondered at the point of designers? Obviously when some new invention or technological improvement of an existing item occurs then there may be some point in a designer within the company to re-design an existing piece of equipment.

Most of the time they have nothing much to really do so they try to justify their pay by taking something perfectly designed and working well and then rework it and invariably buggering it up.

A simple example is my steam kettle. The old electric one was a classic steel nettle with a whistle and automatic cut off that lasted forty years until it eventually passed away.

The new replacement apparently won a design award and hence the price which allowed the company enough profit to keep the designer on full pay for another few years before he would have to get his hands on let us say the company steam iron which will suffer the same fate.

With central heating another remarkable discovery has just been made! Something called column radiators are suddenly in vogue and these very smart and efficient radiators are often seen to be replacing the boring white efforts that have been hanging on walls throughout the UK since they first appeared in the nineteen sixties and seventies.

What is extraordinary about these smart looking column designs is the fact that they look suspiciously just like the ones that were removed and scrapped all those forty or fifty years ago to make room for the skinny boring steel ones that are now in turn victims of the scrap man.

The column design radiators actually have a far greater area of exposed metal than the panel radiators and subsequently are a great deal more efficient in heating up a room.

When the gas boiler is gasping its last and the rattling old pipes and radiators keep you awake at night then the time may have come to seize the nettle and rip the whole lot out and replace with a brand new system.

If you do this, the boiler will pay for itself within a few short years and the new shape radiators will finally look like they belong.