Hacker News Reader

Comment by wampwampwhat | Hacker News Reader

no theyre not. the founder has clearly never worked a day in maintenance-trades and doesn't understand the problem space at all. new construction residential plumbing is so cheap that there is no edge to having a robot do it, and emergency plumbing triage in finished homes is a game discovering exactly how wrong the usually non-existent schematics are.

View on HN

Yeah, the number of times I have called a plumber over it's 100% been a troubleshooting operation requiring weird positioning, moving objects, turning things on and off. Maybe an LLM could do some of the thinking involved but there's basically no profit in replacing these people with machines, just not enough money in it.

Add required cooperation with electrician and potentially some more... yeah SV startup pipe dream.

I have proper professional plumber now doing repairs for a month in our apartment. He is part of 3 member team, the other is electrician with 40 years of experience and another tylist? but each can do each other's trade on cca comparable level, just due to personal connection I have with them).

For repair work, its always discovery, always more complex than anticipated, mostly non-standard, and the guy is creative, he has to be. And thats 20 year old apartment in heavily regulated Switzerland, nothing old or abscure.

Yep, and when you get beyond the basics its not just knowing what to do, but being certified to do it right so the house doesn't burn down and or flood.

Robobutler flickers shutters on its cameras. "I know plumbing. That would be $200/month."

Last two times something went wrong with my boiler in central London it was £400 per call out.

That's why I said enough, there's certainly some money in it.

It's incredibly hard to build a robot that washes dishes in a kitchen sink, let alone climbs up a rickety ladder into a garage attic and unblocks the HVAC overflow drain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com