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from the making-broken-vacuum-cleaners-suck-again dept.
If you've ever despaired of getting your vacuum cleaner fixed or thought that your broken lamp was a lost cause, there's hope. A worldwide movement is trying to reform our throwaway approach to possessions.
The movement's foundation is the Repair Cafe, a local meeting place that brings together people with broken items and repair coaches, or volunteers, with the expertise to fix them.
[...] "One of the things that makes it challenging and interesting is that we don't know what people are going to bring," Ray Pfau, an organizer of a Repair Cafe in Bolton, Mass., said in an email.
Lamps top the list of items brought in to be repaired, followed by vacuum cleaners, Mr. Wackman said. The types of repairs offered vary by location and reflect the particular talent in a community, he said.
New Paltz [in upstate New York] has a repair person with a national reputation as a doll expert. It also has a "Listening Corner" with a psychiatric nurse "because being listened to is a 'reparative act,' " he said.
The cafes invite people to bring their "beloved but broken" possessions to the gatherings, which are hosted in church basements, libraries, town halls and senior centers. The cafes make no guarantees that items will be fixed.
"All we can guarantee is that you will have an interesting time," Mr. Wackman said.
The gatherings tend to draw professionals, retirees and hobbyists who volunteer as repair coaches.
None in my area but I would be tempted to show up and help. I like to fix things and have a decent success rate, just coaxed some more life out of our ~30 year old garage door opener.
Similar article at: http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/repair-cafe/ and the main website is at: https://repaircafe.org/en/about/ (also available for NL, FR, DE & ES)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 24 2017, @05:50PM
It's not all sweetness and light. Whirlpool/Maytag/Kenmore can eat a big bowl o'dicks for its short-lived dishwasher racks, their exorbitant cost to replace, and discontinuation less then ten years after the brand new unit was installed.
Kenmore doesn't make dishwashers, or anything else for that matter. They just rebadge stuff made by other companies (like Whirlpool, though I saw some laundry machines recently that sure looked a lot like LG units). So some might be good, others might be crap, it just depends on who really made it and what it really is. I have a ~10-year-old Kenmore washing machine, but it's really a Whirlpool Duet.
Whirpool, Maytag, and Frigidaire are all the same company now. They're the last American appliance maker (though much of their stuff is now made in Mexico). And their stuff is short-lived crap. Avoid. Get stuff from Samsung or LG now. Samsung might make an exploding washing machine once in a while, but it's still a lot better than the Whirlpool/Maytag crap.
Your post is great, and should be modded up instead of the "new stuff all sucks! you can't fix anything any more!" old-fart drivel you replied to. You're exactly right: the internet has made it much easier for DIYers to fix stuff: it's so much easier to find parts (thanks Ebay!), and you can find Youtube videos showing how to fix many things. Forums for specific things (like car brands) are also invaluable. And much of this stuff is Googlable, and failure modes are usually common to a certain product, so if yours failed, it's quite likely a bunch of other people have had the exact same problem, and you can learn from them what the problem is and how to fix it. You couldn't do this 30+ years ago.