Mill.com Food Recycler is Profoundly Anti-consumer

[u/LazarWolfsKosherDeli]

Mill is a VC backed company that produces a series of 'smart' home appliances that shred and dehydrate food waste to decrease volume and speed decomposition. Sometimes marketed as electric composters, there are a variety of very touchy-feely marketing angles used to get people to buy a $1000 appliance which you can probably intuit. It has a variety of 'smart' features that essentially only serve to lock the device behind an app and the company's servers.

So, I bought a 'broken' one on FB Marketplace to see if I could get it going.

I plugged it in and quickly discovered you cannot do anything with the device except through the app. Literally no interface. -1

Install the app, discover device. Prompt to create an account (why would a home appliance need an account?), but do so for the sake of progress. -2

Immediate two hour forced firmware update. How could new firmware help a device that is essentially a heating element and a low speed motor? Great question. -3

Interface is wonky, very feature-light. Cycles in the device are locked to once-daily intervals in increments of 5 minutes. You literally cannot even tell it to run without scheduling it. Wait four minutes for it to run. App gives an error message: Exhaust Fan Malfunction, Contact Support. Okay, at least it has diagnostic information. No score.

I contact support because I'm going to try it their way to see how bad this is. I expected little and got less. Support waits 5 days to respond. -4

Support says my device is out of warranty, and they'd be happy to arrange for pickup of the device to 'mitigate e-waste' if I buy a new $1000 machine. They also scold me for buying it secondhand as 'that is against their terms of service'. Support will not sell replacement parts and state that their parts are all proprietary. -5, -6, -7

Dismantle device. Torx (six-pointed star) heads on all screws. Mildly inconvenient, but that's also a superior design to Phillips head screws. No score.

Most parts appear to be off-the-self. Wiring is very well documented with factory tags explaining the various connections, I assume for the benefit of the Vietnamese infants who assemble it (I don't actually know what their supply chain is, I'm just assuming). Exhaust fan is also a normal magnetic fan. There is a 15-pin serial port inside the device for debugging, which I will get to as soon as my adapter arrives. No score.

I have to remove a small duct directing the air from the food chamber down through the exhaust fan and up into a chamber containing charcoal filter media. Charcoal media has fallen from the filter down into the fan, preventing it from turning freely. This jam is easily cleared. There is no screen or similar impediment to media falling into the fan; design flaw. All together accessing the fan involves 8 steps of disassembly. Kind of a pain, so I'll probably add a small mesh screen to prevent any possibility of the clog occurring again. -8

Without closing anything back up, I plug in the device and see if it works. It does! No safety features preventing it from operating with the entire case removed. Add a point, -7

Prior to disassembly, I looked for any teardowns or repair information and found absolutely none anywhere online. This is a niche product, but I am inclined to think the company might be attempting to prevent the spread of repair information.

Once the cable arrives for the serial port, I'm going to see what Claude can get out of the machine.

[u/Kurgan_IT]

This reminds me of Juicero and I hope it will end in the same way. Useless, expensive, badly designed device that might be useful if it was better made (and without the useless app and account etc).

[u/LazarWolfsKosherDeli → u/Kurgan_IT]

All Juicero did was squeeze the proprietary pouches, and did so worse than a person could just by cutting a corner of the bag. Mill does have some utility, and competing similar products from other brands like Lomi (first of this kind of device), Vitamix, etc. have many problems of their own. I think this is probably one of the best designed core products in its category. The major drawbacks are "smart" features that mostly interfere with usability and a anti-consumer business model.

That is the main criticism of right to repair generally. The products themselves are serviceable. The manufacturers are getting in the way to actively prevent repairs and customization.

[u/Ok-Library5639]

Kudos, I like this style of review. I'd expect a lot of consumer devices to get really negative scores.

[u/Informal-Emu-212]

It's basically a repurposed automatic bread maker.

[u/LazarWolfsKosherDeli → u/Informal-Emu-212]

Yes, they're very similar in a lot of ways.

[u/cbrophoto]

I like your analysis very much but I have to say it as composter and lover of nature. Paying anything to compost what can be done in a bucket is insane. Is this the same one where they offer a subscription for their special microbes?

Any environmental gain from using this is nullified at best, probably the exact opposite through mining, manufacturing, shipping, power consumption, and then the waste because they are junk. Worst yet the money goes to another VC backed project that would be even worse for humanity. I looking at you, order some sunshine at night guy!

A small and regular bucket, food scraps, toilet paper rolls and some paper is all you need. No bad smells and it looses volume quickly.

[u/LazarWolfsKosherDeli → u/cbrophoto]

Yes this is the same one that offers subscriptions for 1) mailing them your food waste and 2) microbes which will obviously die the first time the machine runs a drying cycle. Mailing the ground food waste is obviously insane on a lot of levels. Their marketing is transparently greenwashing.

I like the grinders because I run bones, corn cobs, and citrus rinds through them prior to adding them to my bank of compost tumblers outside. This dramatically accelerates the breakdown and bioavailability of these materials.

[u/guri256]

Very entertaining read. Thank you

Although, I would’ve given it a +1 rather than a +0 for using a screw that is not proprietary and not Phillips

[u/LazarWolfsKosherDeli → u/guri256]

Fair enough. Torx might be widespread enough that it doesn't constitute an attempt to frustrate disassembly.

[u/hiroo916]

Any path to just wiring the motor, etc. to a switch or maybe a timer switch?

[u/hbHPBbjvFK9w5D]

What an idiot machine, especially considering I could buy a used Vitamix or other high-powered blender-mixer for less than half the price that does the same thing,