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posted by martyb on Monday July 06 2020, @06:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the Use-it-up.-Wear-it-out.-Make-do.-Do-without. dept.

Fixers Know What 'Repairable' Means—Now There's A Standard For It - Ifixit:

[Earlier this year], three years of arguing with industry finally paid off, as the European standard EN45554 was published. This official document with an unexciting name details "general methods for the assessment of the ability to repair, reuse and upgrade energy-related products." In plain English, it's a standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff. It's also a huge milestone for the fight for fair repair.

We want to repair the stuff we own, so we can use it for longer. This is not only important because we want our money's worth out of the things we paid for, but because manufacturing new products is a huge and underestimated driver of climate change. So if we want to avoid cooking our planet, we need to stop churning out disposable electronics and start repairing more. Like, right now.

The problem is, industry won't do this by itself. Managers get ahead by showing quarterly sales growth, not increased product lifespans. Hence we need the government to step in, banning unrepairable products and helping consumers—that's you!—to identify the most durable products out there, so as to empower them to make better purchasing decisions. And in the EU, our political leaders are getting ready to do so.

But here's the rub: those leaders don't know what a repairable product is. If you ask manufacturers, they will all tell you their products are repairable. If you ask us, some devices clearly are more repairable than others, and some are frankly just not repairable at all.


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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:50AM

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:50AM (#1017438)

    Yes, definitely. I work on cars a fair amount for someone who doesn't do it as a job. Anyway, more and more the aforementioned parts are NOT being offered as rebuilt- sold as new only, coming from China of course. They're so inexpensive that it's not worth rebuilding them. Many recent examples: water pumps, alternators, starters, etc. It's great that they're so inexpensive and you're getting new parts, but I question the quality and I'd rather have rebuilt older ones. More and more I've taken to buying the parts- like bearings and seals and brushes and rebuilding the things myself. One alternator I took apart- I could not find anything wrong with it, so I blew out the dust (air nozzle) and reassembled it and it's been working perfectly for 2 years. I reason there must have been a loose connection that I unknowingly fixed by disassembling and reassembling.

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