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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

My town has an appliance disposal fee, though I don't know if it's at the level of the true cost. I actually think of it when I'm considering the cost of replacing something.

Anecdote: Just over a decade ago I moved into a house that was empty of appliances thanks to an all too successful estate sale. Literally every single appliance has broken since then, some more than once. I'm lucky that my parents taught me to fix things.

But I remember watching my dad fix appliances, meaning that they weren't 100% reliable back then either. And one thing that might bias my "statistics" is that there are a lot more appliances nowadays. Things that were only barely coming into prevalence while I was growing up: Microwave, home computer, electric toothbrush (yes, I've repaired one), air conditioner (rare in my hometown), various garden implements, etc. Things that don't even need to be an appliance, but are now electric, break.

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It's not just about whether appliances need to be fixed, it's also about whether they are serviceable at all. Due to miniaturization and perhaps planned obsolescence, increasingly appliances cannot be fixed at all.

In many white goods, miniaturization to the level that prevents repairs are not necessary.

I think there's some truth to this. It's not just miniaturization, but sometimes components are now so tightly integrated and specialized that failure of one part causes a lot of collateral damage.

At least for "major" appliances, I tend to choose based on my best guess of serviceability. I avoid models that have too much electronics, not because I expect those parts to break, but because the complexity might frustrate diagnosis in the future.

There's a lot of repair information online. People enjoy blogging about their successful repairs. But judging from comments on web forums, I'm guessing that a lot of people doing these repairs are landlords. If you buy 15 dryers, and they all break on the same day for the same reason, you'll have a pretty strong incentive to figure out how to fix them.

There's some debate of this exact issue among musicians who play amplified instruments, as I do. There are now tiny little amplifiers, but if you open them up, it's apparent that diagnosis of the circuits (switch mode power supplies and amplifiers) would be daunting, even for a pretty serious electronics enthusiast. There are players who will avoid these products for this reason. I've decided in that case that I will take the risk of having to replace a module or an entire unit in the future, because the portability is actually a benefit.

> There's a lot of repair information online.

Indeed there is, and one of the sad things is that this proliferation of easy access to information has seemingly not had much effect on the throwaway consumerism of today's culture, nor in getting people to understand more about the machines they use. A service manual is often literally a Google away (even for older models, there are a lot of neighbourly people who digitise them), and although I've not needed to do any major repairs on my white goods, I've collected from the Internet all the information I need to for most if not all of them.

The other is parts inventory and availability. I was renting a house about 14 years ago and the washer from the early 60s finally broke, not the motor the belts or the pump but one of the timing gears in the clock like sequencer that ran the cycles. The landlord simply disposed of the old unit and replaced it with a new way less well built one.

I called tons of GE parts suppliers and they could not procure a sequencer. Now I would just 3d print the one gear that had worn out. :(

Another option to 3d printing (I wonder how well this works for gears on consumer-level printers?), is to print out the gear pattern on label paper, and stick that onto a piece of plexi glass. Then cut out the circular shape, and finally use a triangle file (along with a vice) to cut the gear notches, using the printed label as a guide. I did this once for a gear for an older Okidata dot-matrix printer used for multi-part forms.

That would have worked but I didn't think of it in 2000. That washer could have run another 20 years. kintsugi

It's not just statistical bias. We know things today are made from cheaper materials(plastics instead metal in washing machine) for example, and it makes sense they'll be less reliable.

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