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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: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday January 25 2017, @12:55AM
By liability, I was assuming they meant that insurance companies would refuse to cover fire damage if any non-certified appliance is plugged in.
However, checking wikipedia:
- Portable appliance testing [wikipedia.org].
It appears that if you are competent enough to fix a toaster yourself, you should have the ability to do the PAT testing yourself as well.
In Canada insurance companies want UL or CSA certification. I looked into CSA certification a little bit: they essentially certify a production run. There is no way to certify one-off projects. For example, you need to give them a samples for (destructive) testing. Kind of pointless if it is the sole prototype.
The classic way manufactures get around that is wall-warts (Class 2 power supplies). All of the dangerous voltages and currents are regulated by a mass-produced commodity. That way, your insurance company does not go ape-shit if they find a single-board computer plugged in after a fire (unless it is obviously the cause).
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 25 2017, @04:25PM
If your toaster is UL certified, it doesn't magically lose that logo when you repair it. I'm not talking about building your own toaster here, I was only talking about repairing products you own.
Finally, most of us here are in the US, so we don't have the level of regulation you're talking about. As far as your "PAT Inspection", if "regular user checks and visual inspections are sufficient", I fail to see how the law is even necessary since there's no way to enforce that. Anyone could just claim they regularly looked at their toaster.