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.
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.
This is closer to minimum wage now. The average (post-tax) is more likely to be around 20 PLN.
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.)
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 :) )!
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.
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).
I would expect the full load current to be considerably higher, as the dryer's drum rides on friction pads and not ball bearings.
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.