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Comment by gutnor | Hacker News Reader

I'm pessimistic too. However, the labour cost is so huge that it will offset some of your points and only give a slight edge to repair and second hand shops.

If you don't have a top of the range, almost new fridge or TV, even phone, repair will almost always come close to replacement cost. And replacement give you back a 2 years guarantee with faster turnaround.

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> If you don't have a top of the range, almost new fridge or TV, even phone, repair will almost always come close to replacement cost.

I tend to repair everything, and let me say that's not true for the vast majority of my possessions, including cars, appliances, electronics, etc. It highly depends on the nature of the failure, but generally parts are cheaper than replacement. Here are a list of things I've recently repaired around my house + the parts to repair. I don't recall the parts costs, but all were far lower than replacing the entire thing:

Dishwasher: Control board

Garage door opener: Broken gear and sprocket

Hot tub: Two pumps and a pressure/flow sensor

AV receiver: Three capacitors

Rear projection TV: Convergence ICs

Attic fan: Fan motor

And probably tons more that I'm not recalling at the moment. The key is to stop throwing money away on labor costs. Even getting someone out to your house can cost $50-100 and that's before he even does anything. Total scam. I disagree with a lot of replies here--DIY repair is still a viable option for most things around the home.

I suspect I will do much more of that after I retire.

It's hard to motivate myself to spend much time on most such activities now. Now saying you don't have a point, just how the day flows sometimes.

Each of these repairs consisted of: an hour or so of diagnosis/research + order the parts online + go on with your life until delivered + a few hours or so to do the repair.

I spent more time finding the cheapest (+shipping) online source of garage door opener parts than I spent on actually repairing it.

I find that repairing it myself is often faster than getting a tech out to repair things. It seems to be a minimum of two appointments, one to diagnose things and order the part, another to come back to fix it. With the wait windows the repair services want, it's less time to do it myself.

For something like the AV receiver's three capacitors or the TV's convergence IC's, how did you track down the problem and source replacements?

Are there debugging manuals for that level of electronics failure, or was it just "hmmm, that capacitor probably shouldn't have all the goo around it"?

Forums + Youtube + Digikey for most electronics repair. The ICs were a little specialty, I think I got them on eBay. For most anything once you get a hold of the part number, you're good to go.

My approach as a learn-it-as-I-go-DIYer is basically:

1) Google part number and the symptoms, half the time somebody has blogged about the exact same issue. These consumer products often fail in the same way.

2) Google symptoms and look for issues with similar products. Faulty capacitors for example is a classic cause of problems for older electronics and can be observed by just looking at the PCB (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague)

3) Debug using Service Manual (note the User Manuals are typically useless / not detailed enough). Again just googling your part number will typically get you a PDF. If you still can't find the Service Manual you can buy it at these sketchy sites online for $10US, or buy the manual from the OEM (typically closer to $50US from my experience).

4) If still not sure what's wrong, buy a new logic board

5) Buy new gadget

Warning - depending on which appliance is broken irritation level of spouse may grow exponentially!

A big pain for DIY repairs (at least here in Canada) is part prices and shipping costs. I often see a 2-4x spread in prices when checking Amazon.ca and Amazon.com (often will not even ship to Canada).

It's still cheaper (and more satisfying) to DIY but it really hurts when you're paying $40 for a $10 garage door opener part!

Maybe you'd have better luck with eBay?

Wait does any of that include labour ? Because around here you won't find a technician working for less than 50 GBP an hour, parts not included. Or well, you can always find a "guy" that can come around, no guarantee of anything.

That's btw my key argument. If you repair yourself or live in an area with handy undeclared workers, yeah repairing is probably worth it.

Right, but the point of this legislation is to adjust the incentives so that repair becomes possible/economical in a greater number of cases.

Aren't we about to be abounding with mechanical inclined labor? Like aren't all truck drivers and car drivers about to be automated?

This seems like a nobrainer.

Relocating that labor surplus towards supporting a repairable mechanical/technological industry and commercial future seems really plausible.

That sounds like a decent job, troubleshooting and repairing the machines, designing machines to be repaired. Better than driving trucks.

How much is is worth? Assuming every "fixer" is competing with some industry robots somewhere, what is the ceiling on the fixer salary?

I was assuming in our little hypothetical utopia that most consumer goods are designed once again to be repaired and upgraded.

I was also imagining a bunch of truck drivers looking for jobs, since the robots took them all.

Further along in my thought experiment, I imagined that if I owned a sizable fleet of robot cars I'd rather repair and upgraded than replace them.

So I figured if you're into trucks, have basic the mechanical skills required to drive a truck (tire chains, flat tires, oil change, spark plug change) that a new job maintenaning, repairing and upgrading the new fleets of robot taxis and trucks might be right up your alley.

For some reason self repairing robots seem a bit further off.

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