Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have a pair of Fisher & Paykel dish drawers that I've kept alive since 2004. For a while I was replacing one part or another every year or two. They slowly improved the replacements and now, finally, they're trouble free, except the water inlet valve which needs to be replaced (and is available) every 3-4 years. (BTW, these things are a bit finicky and use a little more plastic than I'd like in places, but the engineering is really beautiful, and at least once they worked out the kinks, they're pretty reliable.)

Our Kenmore Trio fridge, also from 2004, I've kept alive. I had to replace the freezer fan and the air diverter motor each once. The water valve needs to be replaced every 3-4 years.

We have a GE washer & dryer from 2003 or so. Those too I've managed to keep alive. The washer needs a new timer, for now we just use the permanent press cycle all the time because my wife is patient, a replacement timer is ridiculously overpriced, and I haven't tried to repair the existing timer. :-( The dryer needed a new drive belt at some point, and I've jury-rigged a bearing for it as well.

Last year I had to replace the microswitches in our GE microwave. Fortunately, they've used pretty much exactly the same switches for decades and still do so these are easily available.

Our 2004 Wayne Dalton garage door openers were damaged by lighting a couple years ago. Was able to find the parts I needed to repair them on eBay.

So, I don't know, around my house I've had pretty good luck sourcing parts.

I notice a lot of neighbors don't even bother thinking to call a repair man and just replace appliances when they fail. I wonder how many of these things are actually repairable, but it isn't cost-effective if you can't do it yourself.

I would love to perform DIY maintenance, but it seems more like a luxury activity.

From an economic perspective, the amount of effort spent in researching, diagnosing, ordering and fixing any one device far exceeds the effort being good at one's core job and trading dollars for someone else's experience.

I think it depends. We recently had an issue with our fifteen-year-old Kenmore dryer not heating anymore. A little scouting around showed new dryers around the $500 mark, so I decided to do a little more research into diagnosing what might be going on, before just buying a replacement.

Fortunately the online Sears parts outlet has a great DIY video section that helped me use my very rudimentary multimeter skills to pinpoint the issue to a bad heating element. $50 later and we have a working dryer again (and I'm not so mystified by my dryer anymore :) )!

This article prompted my to do a quick search to see what was available in terms of repair guides for dryers and I found this: https://www.familyhandyman.com/appliance-repair/washer-and-d...

Th belt on mine is going but replacing it seems to be well within my comfort zone. For $30 I can probably get several more years out of it at least. I'm hoping by then someone like dyson will come out with a much more efficient dryer anyway, surely they could tumble at a much slower rate and waste less electricity.

>> surely they could tumble at a much slower rate and waste less electricity.

Tumbling uses a fraction of energy heating does. The motor used for rotating the drum will use about 20-30W, while the heating element will be rated at 2000-3000W.

I suppose it could use less heat for longer, but then I'm not sure if it actually works out favourably(as in - if you just use 1000W of heat, is the process 2x as long, or longer? Because if it's longer or the same then it's more efficient to use full 2000W of power for heating).

The motor for the dryer also needs to power the fan that draws air through the unit. Without anything attached to the shaft, I previously measured the no-load power of the electric motor to be 200W.

I would expect the full load current to be considerably higher, as the dryer's drum rides on friction pads and not ball bearings.

My day job, typing code into a computer, is beyond the understanding of everyone in my family. There’s nothing I can show them really when they ask me what it is I do.

But fixing the microwave? That they can see and understand. It gives me great enjoyment building and repairing physical things. So call it my hobby.

How do you decide when to pay someone and what to do yourself?

I could also change the oil in my car and rotate the tires myself, but I decided long ago I was tired of dealing with that mess/hassle, so that I pay someone else to do. (Annoyingly I have to mark the tires to make sure they rotate them correctly. Sometimes I do things myself because it’s so hard to find competent people these days it seems.)

I really does depend where you live and how much you make relative to what the repair costs. In UK if I wanted to call an engineer to look at my fridge, it would cost at the very least £100 just for labour, without taking any parts into account. Considering that my huge larder fridge cost a whooping £180 brand new with free delivery, I'd just buy a new one. The company selling it even has to recycle the old one for free, as per EU regulations. It's just not worth repairing at all.

However, considering where I am originally from(Poland), repairman labour won't cost more than 50PLN/hour(£10), so actually, fixing a "cheap" £180/900PLN fridge is completely worth it. It's even more worth it to actually repair it yourself, as the average hourly wage in Poland is about 10-15PLN(£2-3), so even though having it repaired is "cheap" by western standards, doing it yourself still saves you money.

> as the average hourly wage in Poland is about 10-15PLN(£2-3)

This is closer to minimum wage now. The average (post-tax) is more likely to be around 20 PLN.

And let's not forget the pressure from the SO to get it done fast!

What is left? Pleasure to learn new things, do something with own hands and see the accomplished quickly, same day or week. Not like those Agile coding periods...

I don't mind trading dollars for someone else's experience -- unless that "experience" consists in knowing a parts supplier, ordering, and adding 30% margin when billing me. Guess what, more and more of these parts suppliers sell to end users just as well, and some even give a very good advise on compatibility etc.

A 30% markup on parts may not even be enough to make it make sense to the vendor. It costs a fair amount of non-billable time to order and manage parts and you end up paying for that time in the markup. I’m semi-notoriously frugal, but don’t have a problem paying parts markup of even 50% on the rare occasion that I have someone perform work for me. Their office staff has to eat, too.

Oh no, mind you, the work time is billed separately. I have no issues with that, obviously.

The work time for the tech, of course. The markup (IMO) covers the risk (wrong part, bad part causing warranty work that they have to comp, stock shrinkage/obsolescence, cash cost of holding stock items [rather than charging you two truck rolls], etc.), the time/effort to find, order, receive, inspect, pay the invoice, etc. most of which is not done by the tech or is not billed by the tech as wrenching time.

I never got those "economic perspectives". As a salaried employee, the marginal value I can get from spending an extra hour at work is $0 (well, I may get a bit of good will). Finding a side gig of 2-3 hours is also practically impossible - you'll probably spend that much just finding it. So unless you're self-employed, you're probably better off (financially) by doing it yourself.

Over the last decade, I’ve replaced the defrost element on my fridge, the door latch on my washer, replaced the ice maker, changed the bearings and seal on my in-laws washer, the magnetron on my parents microwave, the door switch on my parents SubZero fridge, and probably a few other things that I’ve forgotten. Most of those were in the $20-30 range, and only the magnetron was substantially over $100. Parts are readily available though not locally anymore at a price that makes sense.

When I compare working to earn an extra $2000 to have $1000 left after marginal taxes to buy a new appliance vs a 1-3 hour repair (half hour google/YouTube and the rest with tools in hand), a DIY repair often makes more sense, even if your success rate is only 50%. My success rate is over 90%. Only substantial failure was a washer of ours that I couldn’t get the bearings removed to replace. They’d failed and spun and chewed up the shaft too much, leading the parts required to be prohibitive compared to a new washer.

We bought out house in 2001 and it had a high-end GE Combination refrigerator from the late fifties or early sixties. Vacuum out the lint from the condenser coils twice a year and replacing one or two inside light bulbs is all I've done. Not even that inefficient according to my KiloWatt. This is what is possible but very hard sustain for a consumer product company. People can easily compare prices but comparing quality, just by looking at something, is hard to impossible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com