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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this.

A few years ago we bought a generator. A few months after the warranty expired, it broke. There are no small-engine repair shops in my area, and it's too big to fit in my car anyway. Having someone come to our house to repair it would cost more than buying a new one. But... how do you get rid of a broken generator? It weighs 45 kg and it has four gallons of gasoline in the tank. You can't just chuck it in the trash.

(FYI, I decided to take it apart and was actually able to get it running again. It turned out to be an easy fix -- broken fuel valve. But success was far from guaranteed, and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?)

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It would have been incredibly easy to get rid of this by listing it on any online marketplace "free for pickup". There are hundreds of guys who know that many of these will have a simple fix and they get a free generator for a few hours' time. And many other guys who might pull parts or get various other uses out of it.

I still think it was the right call to give it a shot. Save my uncle and myself, nobody I know will try to repair anything themselves.

My preferred disposal method of anything that I think has some value is to post it "free for pickup" or if it's a real hot thing (like cut up logs from a tree felling) just put them on the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street - the universal "free" location.

I usually list it for $5. Free seems to attract too many high maintenance or scary customers.

I don't even put a phone number or anything resembling an address, just "drive down this street and if you see it, take it".

I used to read all the time, see videos, "you should learn to deal with small engines," but for decades I just leaned on my farm-raised friend when I couldn't get a thing started. Then I moved out of the city and came to a morning when I needed to blow my driveway, the blower wouldn't start, and basically I had no choice but to figure it out.

Solution: find a very thin pin and ream out the buildup in the carburetor, and all the steps leading up to being able to do that. The sense of personal (horse)power I felt after reviving that engine was palpable.

It's funny cause now, just based on that experience, I'm not saying I'm an expert, but I am saying if I encounter any small engine that won't start I will eagerly start trying to figure it out. It looks fun now. The brain is weird.

Reminds me of all the computer manuals from the 80s that would say something like "YOU CANNOT HURT THE COMPUTER BY USING IT - if you get confused, turn it off and back on".

Except with a gasoline-powered generator you can do some serious damage if you're not careful. Gasoline is no joke.

Could take a finger off with a snowblower too, I get nervous when I change out shear pins even with the starter key in my hand. You gotta have a sense of yourself obviously.

Disconnect the spark plug, it should be easy to access.

That way you can be 100% sure it’s fine if you’re concerned.

To paraphrase my father-in-law: paper is flammable, gas is combustible; most people don't figure out that difference until too late...

It’s no joke, but it’s also not a big risk if you have some common sense and work in a well ventilated space.

We really shouldn’t discourage people from trying to fix thins because of fear.

I don't disagree with your overall sentiment, but working safely with gasoline requires a lot more than just ventilation. In my case, I was fixing a fuel valve, which turns out to be fraught with all manner of peril. I was very lucky in that I had a neighbor who has experience working with ICEs looking over my shoulder. Without that it would have been very dicey.

I mean generally in that case I would simply drain the tank into a gas can, pinching off the line if I had to while disconnecting it from the carburetor. After that it would be pretty trivial.

If you need to try a repair again checkout YouTube, the small engine guys on there are really, really good. They've got tricks even I'd never heard of before.

Yes, of course. But that's because you know what you're doing. Someone who didn't know what they were doing could end up with a puddle of gas on the floor, which could then turn into a cloud of gasoline vapor, which could then turn into a bomb if they dropped a wrench the wrong way.

You are really determined to make the point that caution is warranted, but shouldn't all adults know that?

They should. But look up "accidentally igniting gasoline" on YouTube some time.

That’s an extremely contrived scenario that has never happened in real life. I’m proud of you for fixing your engine, but let’s not pretend it was dangerous.

I refuse to believe someone who is attempting to repair an internal combustion engine does not know that gasoline is flammable and the working area should be ventilated (or outside), particularly if they’re working on the fuel system.

> That’s an extremely contrived scenario

Sure. But people do occasionally ignite gasoline by accident. It's uncommon, but the consequences can be very severe.

Omg, I am reminded about daily that there are buttons all over every UI that you absolutely do not want to push. We're constantly three wrong clicks from completely ruining an app/your data/the entire OS/your entire disk. And it seems like UIs are constantly violating this:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/proximity-consequential-opt...

Just this weekend, I ran into a different situation. I've owned battery powered equipment for 5 or 6 years now using the original batteries. They are interchangeable, and have served me well...until this weekend. The battery will no longer hold a charge and the charger light blinking pattern indicates there are problems with the battery. How do you self-repair that?

Funny thing, the replacement batteries are much larger in capacity now, but the price of a single replacement battery is the same cost of a new powered tool. So, I wound up getting a new tool that I didn't have with a new battery. I have a few LiPo batteries for my cinema camera gear that have died as well. I'm going to try to find someone that can just replace the batteries packs inside the custom housing.

Take the battery case apart and see which cell is tripping the protection circuit?

working with LiPo battery packs just isn't my thing though. I've taken apart the camera battery and can clearly see the type of batteries in it, but they are all glued together in the shape to fit the case. Maybe I'm a just a wuss, but trying to disassemble the pack without piercing a cell is a bit more than I am willing to risk at this time. I'm hoping paying someone with that skill to make the replacement will still be cheaper than buying new. ~$400 for a 14.8V 98Wh 12A max battery.

Corded tools, my friend. Corded tools, a few good extension cords (and a pluggable reel), good hand tools, small/dumb tools with AA/AAA rechargeable batteries.

Very few exceptions to this rule for me, and I generally avoid anything with a Micro-USB charger like the plague if I can, as I can't help but see it becoming e-Waste in 3-5 years.

Corded tools? You must be a city dweller

:-)

My friend has been making some rather major purchases lately, such as a portable air conditioner and a portable generator. She is elderly, retired, and lives with a younger fellow who's technically inclined. She's trying to hedge her bets around an inept landlord, bad house wiring and an unstable grid, and air conditioning that constantly breaks at inopportune times during the summer.

But I kept telling her that she doesn't want these complex mechanical things hanging around. I tried to impress on her (pace Technology Connections) how abysmal that air conditioner is going to be. I also tried to explain to her that if she gets a generator, she'll have to maintain it and fire it up once in a while, and that will not be easy. I explained that I have at least one other friend who decided that owning a truck and an inverter was way easier, because the truck has wheels that you can use to drive it around, the truck is easily maintained by the auto shop on the corner, and the truck will provide plenty of power just the same as the generator.

She really has a prepper streak, though, and I couldn't talk her out of it, especially after the sales lady got talking to her. She doesn't have a car and her roommate doesn't drive either, so I don't know how they'll transport/maintain these machines, but oh well.

I am constantly dismayed that there aren't more electric and PHEVs that are set up to serve as backup power supplies. It seems like such a simple and obvious thing to do. With a big enough network of these we could solve a big part of the storage problem for sustainable energy technologies.

It's being wasted by governments.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8

The hard part is that car batteries have limited cycles before they must be replaced at HUGE cost. For personal backup during power outages it would work, but I have a hard time believing that many car owners would be willing to put the wear and tear on their battery.

EVs use more than an average home's entire daily electricity budget to go 50 miles. In an emergency you could run your lights, fridge, and water heater for weeks on an EV battery. It's really not much wear and tear.

Cars are an immensely inefficient platform.

That seems like a use that Ford is already embracing with things like the lightning.

My comment was more in line with using cars as energy storage infrastructure. I think most car owners don’t want to use their car batteries as grid infrastructure.

I like my standing air conditioner dammit. I can just roll it in the corner on the off season and don’t need to carefully clear a path to the storage closet and practice proper lifting form just to avoid injury using it. And it doesn’t have a chance to drip water everywhere when I take it out once a year.

You're right that a generator must be taken care of, but a truck with an inverter is very different from a generator if you plan to power something significant. The truck+inverter will probably keep your fridge and lights running, but can't power your whole house unless you get an oversized aftermarket alternator, which will cost more than the generator probably will (aftermarket car parts aren't cheap).

Come on, what you were suggesting was ridiculous and not a serious alternative. Buying and maintaining a truck is way more expensive than even multiple portable air conditioners and generators.

Furthermore, only expensive late model trucks even have high capacity inverters built in that are capable of running a separate air conditioner. The little portable inverters that plug into a 12V vehicle outlet can only do about 150W.

The first few plumbing jobs I did myself were a net loss from time, tools, materials. But I've made it up since then. Also, I think it's not always direct - tinkering with the car has made me more confident in plumbing and vice versa. A few years of that and I was happy to install my own dishwasher.

So for me, I'll always spend time on this sort of stuff if it's within my reach to do a decent job.

As far as disposal goes... yeah, most stuff I sell on Marketplace or Gumtree would be a net loss after wasting time dealing with people (and scammers, who belong in their own category). But I hate to have things I used and enjoyed just die alone in landfill.

Yep - there’s a very real benefit for me of the satisfaction of having something reused. It’s a deep seated sense that this is the way. It’s worth the time for me to find a new home for many things.

The other nice thing about doing it yourself is you can do it better than right - a plumber will fix your pipes up to code and it'll work just well, but unless you explicitly ask, he won't do things like add new access doors, make it accessible in the future, etc.

> it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator.

I started rebelling against the idea of "I might as well buy a new one". The way I see it, if (say) my phone screen breaks I have two choices: I spend $150 fixing it, or I spend $150 buying a new phone. In either case I end up with a working phone, but the second case has generated one phone worth of electronic garbage.

Your old phone is closer to wearing out, though.

> How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?

You don’t, constantly comparing time to money is a bad way to live.

If you learned something, tried something new, and maybe even enjoyed it? That’s good enough.

> (...) and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator.

I do a lot of repairs and maintenance at my own house. Last year I built a terrace and an extra room, and only had to pay someone to help me, and this week I painted the all house exterior with the help of my dad. Total costs of painting and entire house: 240€. It would cost north of 2000€ if I had to pay someone to do it.

Yes, my "hourly rate" for that kind of work is sometimes much less than my "regular" work. But I can fix many things, don't need to go find "credible" people to do things for me, I fell an immense pleasure to be self-sustainable (for that kind of things), learn a lot; and my house, cars, electronics, are mostly in top shape.

It is quite interesting to calculate the true cost of doing things itself.

In Denmark the tax system is such that if you subcontract out of personal money they need to be 5 times fast than you.

If we say that you can make your deck in half the time a professional would have don it, the factor is still 2.5x.

Ig. assuming a contractor would do it for 50 USD/h, this would translate to "making" 125 USD on hour by doing it yourself, 250 USD/h if you know what you are doing.

Obviously these things change with tax regimes.

I have the same thing, I feel these high income taxes force me to do repairs and home improvement myself because the converted hourly is higher than my own generous contracting rate.

That is what taxes on trade do, they make trade more expensive. This is why income taxes are counterproductive but they are easy to calculate and enforce so governments rely on them.

I'd like to see the math for your calculations here, I suspect something is a bit iffy. As an example I'll use Swedish taxes which should be comparable to Danish ones.

If we assume I'm a contractor charging $100 per hour and take the cash as salary:

(100/1.3142) * 0.5 = $38 left after payroll tax and the top income tax rate (50%).

So if I'm just as fast and good as a professional, the professional needs to charge $38 per hour or less for it to be worth it. But in reality, a professional is probably at least 2x as fast as me, making it $76. That's probably less than they charge, so it's worth paying for a professional.

The person you contract also pays income tax on the amount. So you need to doubly add the tax.

Then you also need to add some cost of doing business.

Said in another way: The 100SEK you earn becomes 25SEK the contract can use (assuming 50% tax rate) – that's the first factor of 4. The last factor can be found in the details.

I think that's a logical error; I don't care about how much the contractor makes after tax, I only care what the cost to me is.

After all, if the contractor had some strange anomaly where he pays 100% of his income in tax, why would that matter to you?

On the contrary: My initial statement had nothing to do with price negotiation. All I was trying to assert was how the tax implications are when you do something yourself vs. when you subcontract.

Do it yourself: Miss out on that hours worth of salary

Subcontract: 2 times tax is paid.

Obviously this has implications on negotiation. This is exactly the reason why services are considered very expensive in the Nordics (as in 80USD to get your hair cut).

Note that this needs to be compared with a company getting their stuff fixed. Their contractor costs are fully deducted from their income.

The contractors tax situation is irrelevant to you. The only thing that matters is income vs expenditure. Or in this situation, "how many hours do I have to work to pay the contractor's hourly fee?" and "how much faster is the contractor?". The tax stuff are just details around this.

In my example, a contractor who's twice as fast needs to cost $76 or less per hour . Thrice as fast is $114 or less.

You're right in principle though, just not on that calculation. In Sweden we have tax deductions for private citizens exactly to combat this issue: up to a certain amount per year can be deducted from your income, just like a company can, for certain services (such as cleaning or house repairs).

Are there tax implications to doing the work? I don’t understand the need to do the caculation.

No, but you pay an average of 40% income tax, 25% VAT, 150% on cars (+ 25% VAT) and the European gasoline tax. The result is that the tax system disincentivizes these types of transactions when you can not deduct the costs in your personal tax bill.

Said in another way: you don't pay income tax when you paint your own house.

Got it the formula is to figure out the tax reduction for doing one's own labor at an established rate.

This is interesting, do you have some resources on this? (Sorry, I am just a computer scientist with an interest in economics, so I don't know the established theories)

My outsider view is the desire to account for all labor output. If the labor of painting one's own house goes un-accounted for it distorts the view of the current state of the economy.

This is a clever observation thats poorly phrased.

Relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpDnRCeef2CLEFeKM/money-the-...

(Also discussed recently on HN.)

What I found out, is that it takes a painter team two days, and it takes an untrained single person two weeks.

I once wasted my whole holiday on painting the house. And it wasn't well done, because it was my first time. I'll probably not do it again, unless I don't have other work.

What I've found is that it's very often worth doing your own painting, but if you need carpets laying or walls tiled, then get a professional, because the professionals are awe-inspiringly fast and do a better job.

The thing with painting--at least interior/trim/etc.--is that it'd 1.) Not that hard; 2.) You do it repeatedly so it's not the usual: Do it once poorly and never do it again; and 3.) If you're touching up something already painted, you can probably take some shortcuts a professional won't.

I will pay for exterior painters - the cost to my own state of mind with painting a house is too high. I will glady do harder jobs than painting myself, but nothing pisses me off more than painting for some reason.

> I once wasted my whole holiday on painting the house. And it wasn't well done, because it was my first time. I'll probably not do it again, unless I don't have other work.

If you would have to do it again, would you do the same errors, and the paint job would turn out equal? Or would you do better second time?

That is why I never painted an entire house before having painted a bedroom at least one time. And I've never painted a bedroom before I painted a small piece of furniture at least one time. One needs to learn gradually, hopefully with someone who knows how to do things. Last year I built a terrace and room with the (paid) help of a contractor. I started just carrying the trash, then breaking things, then putting cement of the walls, etc. etc. Now I can quite complex things by myself..

The key is to do things gradually..

While I appreciate and share the DIY spirit, some doubts have been creeping in recently.

Firstly, in most cases we are just DIY'ing the final "craftsman" step of the work, we still depend on the materials being available.

Second, if more and more people that actually care about work quality go DIY it leaves people who can't or won't be as involved. Over time unscrupulous tradespeople will take over the market.

On top of that, would you earn your usual rate for that time?

I wouldn't work saturday afternoon anyway because my head is already useless for programming. So I do need to change line-of-work somehow. I can either go for a walk and learn something about nature. Or I can self-repair something and learn something about construction.

Of course spending all free time on self-repairs would be exhausting. But I don't feel like lying on a couch entire weekend either.

> On top of that, would you earn your usual rate for that time?

This is the key! I do these kind of things on my spare time!

On my spare time I could (1) do nothing; (2) try to cram more screen time into my life, and give the money earned to someone to do my repairs for me or; (3) do some things by myself, learn while doing it, and feel like a super-human that can control is own life (well, some of it). I prefer number 3!

I got a young little one, so I've actually needed to take some Mondays off to finish some of the home repair tasks. It's not like I can go around with a hammer while he is trying to nap.

So it is more comparable with the work rates, since I do not have a lot time time to tinker

I bought a half-built house right after the kid was born.

Yes, using power tools while kid is napping is no-go. But after few months kid is not napping that much. And there’re many relatively silent jobs. It’s easy to silicon a window sill while kid is sleeping in another room. Or assemble a drawer with an old good screwdriver instead of a drill. And after a couple years there’re endless learning possibilities. Sure, it goes slowly, but it does happen eventually.

Full disclosure - I did hire handymen for a good portion of jobs for various reasons. Mostly because we were burning a lot of money in rent or some jobs require too many special tools and knowledge to be done right (electricity, drywalls, etc).

The "hourly rate" argument is a bit slippery; you didn't stop working (and being paid) to fix your generator, and unless you could have spent those hours being paid (hard for many people to do) you only "lost" the hourly rate you could have gotten, which is often much lower than your current work hourly rate.

I add an additional component: the embedded energy that was saved by not purchasing a new generator. To me it better reflects the real effort put into making something.

Labour in the west is much more expensive than energy, so it's only natural that your time was worth more than a new unit.

But that's an accident of geography and politics. Someone in a poor country, in the same line of work that you're in, might actually break even on this.

I believe there's value in this sort of self-sufficiency. Especially considering that, as recent years have shown, we're one global supply chain breakdown or war away from plain unavailability of some goods.

Knowledge is valuable. Just knowing you could fix this gives you confidence next time when something else breaks. But I also think it has an intrinsic value. It just feels good to learn. Compared with just, for example, entertainment, I usually prefer to learn. One could ask, what is the marginal cost of viewing Netflix. The monthly cost is one thing. But what could you have done with your time instead?

> what could you have done with your time instead?

Improve my HN karma.

;-)

>it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator.

Not necessarily. It depends on the job and other factors. How much time does it take to find a competent person to hire? And what if you fail, and they do a bad job; how much time does it take you to deal with the situation and fix it (or do you end up paying twice, once for the bad job and again for someone else to redo it)? Do you need to be on-site to supervise them (so they don't steal stuff)? That's more of your time. If it's something portable or that needs to be transported to the professional, how much time and money does that cost?

I suspect it's way more likely that you'd do a bad job yourself and need to hire a professional to fix it.

>>How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?

Don't forget the value of the satisfaction from having fixed something yourself and how good fixing stuff helps with recovering after spending hours in front of a computer

This is so true.

My wife doesn’t understand how I spend my whole day complaining about fixing things (sys admin) for work then seem genuinely happy to work on a car, bike, random electronic thing, etc.

Completely different.

On the selfish side, I might actually get to enjoy what I fix at home.

On the brains are funny side, anything physical hits different. Turning a wrench, busting knuckles, burning myself triggers a satisfaction a screen does not.

I’m not a masochist either. Why is a soldering iron so hard to hold? Probably a me problem.

All those skills transfer around too.

When considering your own wages per hour it can be helpful to consider whether you could have converted those hours into those wages or if that avenue is already saturated.

For example if you are an employee and establish your rate that way, you probably can't work more to get more anyway.

So repairing things for yourself is just cream on top in that case.

I'm glad you took time to fix it. Owning things is almost a debt to keep them running. Stack this experience many times over and behold how valuable simple, robust machines (like a metal pair of scissors!) are so much better than complex software things or plastic throwaway crap. (That metal pair of scissors could literally last until the end of your life!)

> it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator

Don't forget to also factor in the hidden cost of depriving the CS field of many great works during said hours which is incalculable imo.

:-)

Another benefit of knowing how to do it yourself is that if opt to hire someone to do it you can better assess their work.

Also, if you have kids who learn along with you the value is multiplied.

I dunno about there, but here you can just put it at the curb in front of your house and someone is bound to come along and pick it up, even if only to scrap it for the metal.

I surely could have done that. The reason I didn't is that I live in a place where some people leave old cars out in their yards for years, and so I had no assurances that whoever picked the generator up would do something reasonable with it.

> How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?

Well in an emergency scenario (what generators are for generally) the troubleshooting/repair knowledge you gained will be invaluable

> On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?

You need to decide for yourself what is more valuable to you.

Haha get over yourself, your time is worthless.

Not to me it isn't.

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