Tuesday March 5, 2013
Smoother housekeeping
By JOSEPH LOH
LG Electronics’ latest range of home appliances take the hard work out of everyday chores.
WHEN people say "they don’t make them like they used to", it’s usually to paint modern-day products in a bad light.
However, with LG Electronics’ latest range of home appliances, that’s actually a good thing!
Domestic appliances are made to do a specific task – a washing machine for laundry and an oven for cooking.
LG products do the exact same thing, but how they go about it is another matter altogether.
By incorporating age-old techniques into modern day appliances, household tasks are easier, more efficient ... and more fun as well!
For example, most would agree that cleaning done with steam and cooking with charcoal yield the best and tastiest results respectively.
At the LG Asia Family Festival 2013 held in Seoul, South Korea recently, media and key business partners from South East Asian were shown how these elements come together as part of LG’s latest product line.
Here are some of the sweetest ideas....
John Kim, LG Electronics Malaysia home appliances head with the door-in-door refrigerator. Kitchen convenience
Refrigeration: The kitchen is where the most activity happens in households, and LG has shown how they can make mundane kitchen appliances interesting.
It all revolves around food, and what better way to keep your produce fresher for longer than with the current top-of-the-line refrigerator, a side-by-side model with double door technology, the GR-V9100 (RM15,999). This model boasts a cavernous 910-litre capacity, and is the largest in LG’s lineup.
Power consumption is always an issue with cooling appliances. In the case of refrigerators, cold air escapes every time the door is opened, requiring the appliance to cool the interior again.
LG’s solution is simple – provide an isolated compartment within the door (Door-in-Door) to store commonly-accessed items. Therefore, when one opens the outer door, only the dedicated space is accessible, leaving the secondary door closed and the temperature of the inner space unaffected.
This, the company says reduces energy consumption by 16% in the life cycle of the product. Further energy savings are achieved by its Inverter Linear Compressor, which saves another 14%.
Keeping food fresh is the main function of any refrigerator. With its Hygiene Fresh air purification system, which uses ginseng extracts and an independent anti-bacterial and deodorising fan, it can neutralise 99.99% of bacteria commonly found in refrigerators.
Furthermore, in the event of a power failure, its Powercut Evercool feature enables it to remain fully functional for up to six hours!
Cooking: If not cooking over a stove top, modern kitchens do with an oven instead. However, food cooked in convection or microwave ovens do not always taste as good as those from a wood-fired oven. Here’s where the LG’s Lightwave convection oven with Charcoal Heater, MJ3881BP (RM1,999) comes into play.
It employs both microwave and convection methods to cook your food. This model’s cutting edge, however is its charcoal lighting heater, which literally has a charcoal filament within its heating element, which give food a distinct, tasty flavour.
By employing both lightwave and the charcoal heater, dishes can be cooked up to three times faster, saving energy in the process. What’s more, with an additional 20 steam cooking programs, users are able to cook up healthier and more diverse dishes for the family.
Cleaning up duties
Dishwashing: Once the cooking is done and the family has ingested a satisfying meal, the next step is not the most welcome of chores – doing the dishes. Using an automatic dishwasher is one way of making the task easier, but that does not always mean it is a hands-off task. Cooking utensils – especially pots and pans – need to be pre-cleaned first to remove stubborn burnt food remnants before popping them into the dishwasher.
But that is all a thing of the past with LG’s TrueSteam dishwasher. This machine uses steam that is discharged under high pressure by carefully-aimed nozzles so even the toughest food residue particles are dislodged.
The dishwasher also has a function that emits an ultraviolet light to neutralise 99.9% of bacteria for up to four hours after washing.
Vacuum cleaners: The bigger the house, the more floor area there is to be cleaned. Modern-day technology has evolved to the point that even this tedious task can be done automatically, thanks to robotic vacuum cleaners.
However, almost all robotic cleaners are circular in shape, and all rooms will have corners that a circular shape simply cannot access. You know the term ‘you can’t fit a square peg in a round hole’? That certainly applies here. LG, however, hasn’t cut any corners – literally – in the design of its Home-Bot Square vacuum cleaner, VR6270LVM (RM2,499, available in May 2013). Simply by making the corners of the appliance sharper, room corners are now within reach of its cleaning bristles.
It also uses not one, but two Dual Eye 2.0 camera sensors that map the floor areas more effectively. Since it is a learning device, it can recognise the areas it has cleaned before, thus doing the task more efficiently the next time around.
Washing machines: If households could only have one appliance in the house, it would most probably be a washing machine. There are some who believe that hand washing is the only way to clean clothes properly. And that’s probably true – think how many times you’ve washed out a stain by hand.
But now, LG has incorporated the motions of hand washing into two of its models. LG’s advanced motion control technology, the Six Motion Direct Drive, rotates the drum at various speeds and directions to emulate it.
Another problem households face is the amount of clothes that can be washed per load. That won’t be a problem with LG’s top-loading washing machine, WF-HD200GV (RM3,199) which has a whopping capacity of 20kg!
Another model is available with a smaller 17kg capacity, the front-loading WD-SR1709VM (RM7,499) with TrueSteam technology. This is another product in LG’s line-up that uses steam to accomplish its task. Not only does it remove allergens, mites and residual detergents, but its Steam Refresh function is able to remove wrinkles and odours from clothes in just 20 minutes.
An enhanced version of this story appears in the Star's tablet edition, The Star Editor's Choice March 5, 2013 issue. The app is available free from the App Store or Google Play
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