A major appliance is a large machine which accomplishes some routine housekeeping task, which includes purposes such as cooking, food preservation, or cleaning, whether in a household, institutional, commercial or industrial setting. An appliance is differentiated from a plumbing fixture because it uses an energy input for its operation other than water (generally, electricity).
Major appliances are differentiated from small appliances because they are large, difficult to move, and generally fixed in place to some extent. They may be roughly divided into refrigeration equipment, stoves, washing equipment, and miscellaneous.
Types of appliances
Appliances are divided into white goods and brown goods.
- Brown goods are typically household electrical entertainment appliances such as:
- White goods comprise major household electrical appliances including:
Brown goods were traditionally finished with wood, or looked like wood, or bakelite; at least televisions and music systems were. This is now rather rare, but the name has stuck, even for goods that are unlikely ever to have been provided in a wooden case (e.g. camcorders). White goods were typically painted or enamelled white, and many of them still are. The addition of new items to these categories shows that the categories still serve a purpose in marketing (consumers rarely use the terms), perhaps because they divide into traditional gender roles in the house suggesting "gadget/novelty/power" marketing for brown goods and "practicality/reliability" marketing for white goods.
See also
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