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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: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 24 2017, @06:52PM
This post is absolutely pathetic, especially for a "tech news" site. It sure is a good thing the non-techies out there are actually rolling their sleeves up, buying tools, and fixing stuff themselves, as they show on all their Youtube videos for fixing everything you can imagine. Meanwhile, all the "techies" and "engineers" here on SN and on the green site are throwing their hands up and saying "this newfangled stuff is too complicated for me! I have to either throw it away or hire a professional to fix it now! Waaaa!!". Meanwhile, the middle-aged regular Joes, the 20-something with art degrees, etc., are out there taking things apart and figuring out how to fix them, whether it's their car or their washing machine, and writing about it in forums or posting videos on Youtube. Or they're building all-new stuff out of Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, while the "techies" here sit around and moan that "I can't work on anything any more!" and getting modded up for saying so. I'm truly disgusted.
And despite being a tinkerer, a repairer, a wirer, there are so many items in my house that I just can't approach,
You're no tinkerer or repairer. You're a loser. You've given up.
I'm sure you can repair some things like toasters and stuff but generally the cost of liability if you get it wrong is prohibitive
You call yourself a "tinkerer" but you're worried about liability??? On a toaster? Are you that unsure of your abilities? If so, you're right, you shouldn't be repairing anything. Put your broken stuff up on Craigslist and give it to someone who can.
Even when you can get the parts, or an identical replacement, the hassle involved often isn't worth it.
Here again, lame excuses. It's true: for some things, repairing just isn't worth the hassle because you can buy a newer, better one so cheaply. This is the case with toasters IME. Why would I spend a lot of time fixing a 15-year-old toaster if I can just go buy a nice digitally-controlled one for $30 that does a much better job? (Incidentally, I do have one of those digital toasters now; I've had it for at least 3 years I think, and it still works great and looks like new even though I've moved a couple of times. It's a lot more accurate than the old ones ever were too.) But if it's not too old and crappy and the fix is cheap and easy, why not? There's always a repair-or-replace evaluation to be made when something fails; this isn't anything new, but the numbers have changed because a lot of consumer items are much cheaper (as a fraction of your salary) than they were decades ago. But cars and large appliances are still quite expensive and worth repairing usually.
I can't even look at my washing machine, it's far too complex.
That doesn't seem to stop all the Youtube DIYers. There's tons of videos showing how to fix relatively recent washers. I took out the "boot" in my front-loader recently and cleaned all the mildew out of it and put it back in; it wasn't very hard.
Even lamps - which were traditionally a hard-wired bulb - are now touch-sensitive, dimmable, LED-compatible, etc. so have electronics that blow and you can't replace.
Citation needed. WTF kind of lamps are you buying? The lamps I see are as simple as ever for the most part: the same shitty old Edison socket, some cheap, simple switch, and some wire and a plug. No one's forcing you to buy a touch-sensitive lamp.
It used to be the same with cars - everything was replaceable, bodgeable, etc. Now it's just a case of buying a whole new module or nothing.
Wow, this is just plain dumb. Cars haven't changed much in decades. Disc brakes, wheel bearings, are all the same. Most of the parts don't look much different than the cars 20 years ago. The main thing that's changed is the addition of new electronic modules. And yes, when those fail usually people just replace the whole module, but that's nothing new either; it was the same 20-30 years ago. Mechanics never took apart ECUs or relay modules to repair solder defects, they just replaced the whole thing and charged you a ton for it. At least now you can buy scan tools on the internet for your car from China so you can fix things yourself.
And "broken" items don't break in the ways you might expect. Plastics are my biggest nightmare. If the plastics on your toaster goes, you're stuffed, or potentially using it unsafely.
What kind of cheap POS toasters are you buying?
Same for everything - every laptop I've ever had die has died because of broken hinges and plastics destroying themselves.
What kind of cheap POS laptops are you buying?
I have a stock of old laptop screens which still function find if you plug them into the accompanying laptop board, but they aren't compatible with others, and you can't fabricate or source the plastics to make them a whole item again.
And why would you want to? Those old screens probably have terrible resolution and color. If they're actually any good, you can resell them on Ebay to people who actually have a positive attitude about repairing things. I have no trouble buying any part at all on Ebay for the enterprise laptops I use. If your laptops were actually worth repairing, you'd just buy replacement parts on Ebay.
I'm honestly sick of this moaning and groaning and scare-mongering, especially from people who claim to be technical. Things are generally better than ever for repairing things, thanks to the internet, Youtube, pirated repair manuals, and message forums. It would be nice if there was a law requiring repair manuals to be freely available, but this is nothing new either; that stuff used to be impossible for anyone except "qualified technicians" to get their hands on (usually at an exorbitant price); this was how TV repair shops stayed in business.
(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.
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Wednesday January 25 2017, @02:28AM
Going to have to agree with you on this. With the exception of anything that I would need to program I have not come across something that I could not fix or at least break until its completely irrepairable. There are some things that I do not feel I have the time to fix though. I recently had the brushes fail on a very old sander, my backup very old sanders wiring frayed and failed. Both are fixable, brushes were on backorder and not expected to be restocked and who knows how long fixing the wiring will take me. Had to get stuff done for christmas so bought another sander. I wll fix both of them, but my primary function is not fixing things it is doing things. I will always prefer to fix rather than be wasteful but if it is impeeding my other projects I will be buying a replacement and fixing it when I have time.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam