The Hi and Lo directions on my range’s knobs

You'll love it more when the numbers get washed off. Here's mine.

How in the hell did this make it to market?
- Mass consumerism and companies not caring.
- They had different teams working on each knob to speed up the design process.
Oh God, playing Russian Roulette with your food using that knob.
- Honestly, I just never use that burner!
Haha yeah. I have the same one from Samsung.
- Samsung makes shit home appliances.
Lol this is the funniest thing I've read today :)
This is criminal
You can get an engraver for like $12 of Amazon, with a little practice you can probably ingrave new numbers and paint fill them.
Technically they can use their picture as reference and maybe order a sticker with the settings printed.

My dryer has a "less dry" setting.

Who likes their laundry done rare?

That actually makes sense for things you want to finish drying on a line so they don’t heat up too much and shrink.
- Also for ironing
- This makes sense... But my washer defaults to this mode and I can't figure out how to change it. By default all my clothes are almost dry.
Mine has similar settings but they're named in ways which actually tells you why you'd want them that way: "Ready to Iron", "Ready to Hang" and "Extra Dry", things like that.
So it actually adds water?
- It just seemed nuts hooking up a water line to my dryer the first time I got one with steam cycles.
Tell me you didn’t read the manual without telling me you didn’t read the manual.

(I didn’t read mine too, btw)
It's useful for when I forget about my laundry and the clothes are already mostly dry, but not completely.
- So they can build a nice layer of mildew?
Some fabrics wrinkle when you allow them to sit in the dryer totally dry. For those you want to take them out and hang them for the last bit so when they reach their driest state they’re hanging and not crumpled within the dryer.

source: am appliance salesman

At least “Off” is consistent. That could have been a total train wreck.

I bought a portable electric space heater a few years ago that had an alarming tendency to rewire itself - like, "Off" would become "Low", "High" would become "Fan" etc. Finally took it apart and realized that the dial was just a contact that rolled across a bit of printed solder and occasionally the solder would melt (no way they could have expected that to happen in a fucking heater) and flow into a new pattern. I have absolutely no idea why thousands of people haven't burned themselves to death with these things.
- Are the 300 deaths and 21800 fires not enough? People absolutely do burn themselves to death with space heaters. Source: https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Releases/2002/CPSC-Offers-Tips-to-Prevent-Home-Fires-Caused-by-Space-Heaters-Devices-Associated-with-21800-Fires-and-300-Deaths-Annually

mildly?

This is fucking pitchfork worthy

It's like your stove top was the experimental test one where you could see how all the knob styles worked, like it wasn't supposed to be released to the public.

You have double burners. Some of your knobs have two HI and two LO positions, one for one burner and one for both burners.

On top of the stove this looks like two concentric heating elements. You can turn on one or both. Turning on both is sometimes called a “fast boil” burner.

The best solution the industry has come up with is to put two control surfaces into one knob, so instead of the control surface being a full circle it’s a half circle.

There’s no way to make all the knobs match in appearance unless all the burners have optional double burner operation.

source: am appliance salesman.

Yes they’re double burners but the Lo -> Hi rotation is different for each position which is infuriating, but only mildly.
- I see what you mean.
  
  What they should do is make the rule: “clockwise is hotter”, and make all the LO…HI arcs increase in the clockwise direction.
  
  Then no matter which burner you’re adjusting, you know it’s a clockwise movement.
  
  They should also have a little LED light bar that changes length to show how high that burner’s setting. As you turn clockwise, it lengthens toward “full on”.
  
  The LED light bar should light up whenever a knob is touched.
  
  Need high temp LEDs too I guess.
My folks had a stove with two (electric) heat elements in the same way I assume OP has, to use both, you had to go 360° all the way to a full circle where it "clicked", then go back to where you wanted it at. Much easier and sensible IMO than whatever the hell this headache is.

I'm really trying to understand what's going on here in a way that makes sense, even if it's a twisted kind of sense.

My best guess is that each of these burners are a different size and some have multiple rings and that by turning the knob left (Anti-clockwise), you're going from smaller number of rings to larger number of rings - however, the rings start at their highest heat level. So looking at the bottom right dial as an example, the first "Notch" on the left is the smallest burner on the highest setting, then as you turn left more, it'll dial down that burner until you get to the second ring on the burner - starting at full power for that second burner and continuing to lower power until you get to the 3rd ring, then it's same again for the 4th ring.

Is that right? am I even close? I don't understand why you'd go from smallest burner to highest burner anti-clockwise, but go from lowest burner-power to highest clockwise. That still doesn't make sense to me.

That's pretty much exactly how it is.

OP's stove is GCRE3060AF, or similar. The rightmost knob is inconsistent for reasons I cannot fathom, unless there is some obscure electrical reason. It is an electric stove, and the knobs with multiple ranges do indeed control burners that have multiple potential sizes. One of them has two selectable sizes, and other has three. On these I believe the rationale is that the high setting is the closest and most easily accessible because radiant electric ranges suck [citation not needed] and since they take forever and a day to heat up most users will just leap right to the full blast output setting immediately. I have no idea why the direction on the last knob is backwards from the others, clockwise versus counterclockwise, but it is.

If you're morbidly curious, you can view the entire control panel from OP's stove (or one similar) here.
- Yep. It’s. GCRE3060AFF electric stove. (Other thing I hate is the fan noise when the oven is on, even when not on convection). Your idea of Hi closest to off position makes sense except of that triple knob, the 3rd ring Hi position isn’t at the top.
- Also hers a pic
- Probably due to the knob itself and the configuration of the leads coming off of it.
- It takes like 5 seconds to heat up.
Yes they’re rings. Still doesn’t explain why not everything is in the same rotational direction.
- What is this, a space age analog computer?
  
  🖕
That’s what I’m thinking, the different burners have different rings that are individually controlled

This looks like an AI-generated fever dream nightmare.

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The longer I stare at it, the worse it gets ...

what in the actual fuck

The burner has two zones. A small one in the middle, and a wider ring around. If you turn to the left, you only turn the middle part on from High to low, and if you turn right, you turn both on from low to high.
- Damnit... Great explanation... Also, it just pissed me off because it reminded me that I have a burner on my stove like this with the small and large and different settings for each... Unfortunately, it currently only works at all on the large burner on high... I need to slide it away from the wall and take the fucking thing apart and figure out why...
  
  Not tonight though... 😂
Has to do with the fact that several burners have multiple sizes that can be used. My stove is the same way, and there’s really not a much better way to do it imo, short of a touch screen, which I don’t want on a stove.
- A dial with a mode select switch directly above it. That us the much better way.
  
  If you want the inner burner at power level 6, you set the mode switch to inner and the dial to 6. Then every dial can work the exact same way, but you still have multi-sized burners.
- I like the other commenter's idea, but I'd be happy with just consistent directions. Turn it a little bit counterclockwise and it's the minimum low, turn it a bit clockwise and it's max high.
  
  I have an LG one with a single triple burner that doesn't match any of the others. The oven also sucks, I need to set it 25 degrees higher on convection (with normal cook time) for things to cook properly.
  
  Oh and then there's the bottom drawer which is a second oven but it takes forever to preheat. I've used it twice and then stopped bothering.
  
  I think I'll replace that piece of shit next time a big purchase is up.

I can explain this one! When the knob only has one set of hi/lo, it controls the burner's heat as you'd expect, and it all works in the same direction. Those with multiple hi/lo sets control the heat and the size of the burner, since there are 2 (and on one, maybe 3?) concentric heating elements available for that knob.

I've had something similar for years, and have never had an issue. I'm even less likely to accidentally choose the wrong knob since the single-size one tends to have a looser feel to it.

Traslation: you get used to weird design.
- It took me about a minute to figure the same, before reading the comment, and I never had a multi element burner.
  
  Maybe OP, you, and a lot of other people in the thread are being a bit overdramatic?
This explains the circle symbols beside each "lo" on the multi-knobs. That's pretty clever once you get used to it.
The issue is the direction of the Hi Lo. One it’s clockwise the other counter and the other it depends on which burner size you want.

Yes they’re rings one double and one triple.
- Each one that controls only one size gets hotter as you go counter-clockwise
nice features, albeit highly situational, and probably useless for most home cooks. I imagine R&D needed something new for the model and over-engineered it.
- I have different sized pots and pans, so it actually really comes in handy for that

MILDLY infuriating!?

Depends on which direction you turn the knob. If can be Mild ore Extremely…

This is maybe the worst thing I have seen in my life.

WTF, they're all different?

Lo for the same reason it's hi and not high.

They put Med so why not Low?
- Got a 'Sim' in there too. Simmer?
  
  Just, why?

That should be illegal, throw it out

Ohhh, that’s just a left-handed stove.

Look closer, not all the knobs are left handed.
- That just means it's a 4th dimensional left handed stove.

My brain is on fire seeing this

Maybe because the knobs in your brain also have different directions for high and low?

Please stop, he’s already dead….

"Which one should we put on the stove?"

"Yes."

Using "Low" would be more infuriating than "Lo".

The full words are "High" (not "Hi") and "Low", so to save space they use the first two letters "Hi" and "Lo". If they use "Hi" and "Low" it would be inconsistent, e.g. more infuriating.

I thought it was just saying hellow.

Last one is the only one that's out of place to me. They all have counter clockwise when solo mode, when 2 modes available, low is at the bottom and high is at the top, makes sense, but the last one is different.

Also, why would it be Low? They're using 2 letters, Hi and Lo are different enough to identify. I'd have to check mine, but using Hi/Lo seems normal.

Yeah, the last one is different because it has three modes, but in a vacuum it seems like they could have set it up closer to the paradigm of the two-mode knobs. Depending on how those knobs are actually wired though, there may be a good reason why it was easier to make it that way.

My high ass would burn the house down using this.

Yes.

Confusing, but nice that they have the simmer spot marked. I always find that hard to gauge.

What the actual fuck?

That is literally unusable. How is this even legal?

What witchcraft is this on earth!? Crime against humanity?

Thanks Frigidaire
- There's your problem. Their appliances are junk. I've got a Frigidaire fridge and it has a bunch of known issues. The refrigerant line is too close to the back of the fridge, causing the back panel to rust. The line for the ice maker also freezes a lot. The bottom of the fridge is very cold to the point where stuff freezes (the water line runs near here).
  
  All know issues for the model I've got. Outside of warranty, so all Frigidaire could offer was a 10% off coupon for a new fridge... As if I'd buy a Frigidaire again.
  
  Frigidaire literally invented the modern fridge. You'd think they'd know how to build a good one by now.

Dude, yeah, what is with those things.

wtf is this

Ok I have nothing else than WTF

One office I worked in had a toaster with a knob where "off" is almost all the way to the left.

Turning the knob to the right lets you control the toasting time, like any other knob-based timer.

But if you turn it left from the "off" position, that's the "stay on" position.

So if you'd set the timer, and then wanted to cancel it, you can't just turn it all the way left like on any other knob timer. If you do that, you're telling it to stay on forever and eventually scorch the table and set off the fire alarm.

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What the hail?

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I guess you can screenshot my post and repost it on !mildlyinfuriating …

Mine has burners like this too and I hate it. Very confusing!

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That's at least semi normal. Outside knobs are front, inside are back. Center for the oven.

As long as they're labeled and spin the same way, I'm fine.

But what Lovecraftian villain came up with OP's oven controls?

That last one is what kills me. Three different ranges of lo-hi, who does that?

Are these like different pictures of range knobs mashed together? I find it almost impossible to believe they put a different style control for each possible position.

At first I thought this was a new Marshall amp.

Cook the food?

Sim 🇧🇷

Looking at the one in the top left... imagine if that was for an amplifier. Like, you have to pass through maximum to reach off. That would be the worst to live near.

On mine the high setting is right in the middle, so both zero rotation and full rotation means off, while middle means "full blast", even now sometimes I make the mistake of turning it up to cook faster only to accidentaly close it all together, always great when you're in a rush -.-