CA, TX, AZ yeah, yeah, yeah but hang on.. New Yorkers!? I hope these are the ones who live in NYC without a car.. otherwise that’s completely insane. Upstate NY gets tons of snow. Buffalo famously so.
They make their payments and trade when the warranty expires. It's an appliance.
I was over giving a neighbour a can of spray foam. The complexity of it was no more than that of spray paint. You point the nozzle into the hole, pull trigger, it fills with foam. Done.
They spent more time asking me how to use it than it would have taken to patch the hole (~10 seconds).
I'd have probably been more comfortable in a garage, wherein: I could leave things as they sat and would know that they'd be exactly where I left them when returning the next day.
But I didn't have a garage nearby that I could use. I kept the area clean and picked up all of my tools and detritus if I went in even for as much as a sandwich, and worked as expediently as my time would allow as I puzzled out this new-to-me problem of "bodywork."
I didn't get hear any complaints. The owner of the place would stop sometimes on his way through to make sure I was doing OK and would ask if I needed anything, and soon enough the car was put together better than it ever was on my watch.
I get that some people don't have space for an oil pan, but tons do. Brake pad replacement doesn't require anything besides the jack from your car and a socket wrench.
And it's not hard to see why.
I had a GE washing machine start misbehaving one day. It would fill the tub, do a few spins to try and balance the load, start to spin up for a few minutes, stop. Try and balance the load, spin for a few minutes, stop. Then eventually just give up, without even draining the tub before unlocking the door.
Me knowing appliances pretty well, I already had the knowledge the service manual is probably tucked away inside the shell. Strike one going against most normal people, they wouldn't know to do that. Open that up, see how to get into the diagnostic menu and translate the error codes and run some tests.
Ok, so now I know it's a speed sensing issue. The speed the motor is reporting and the speed the tub speed sensor isn't making sense for the fixed gear ratio so it thinks there's something unsafe going on. That's a decent safety issue, but looking at the tub as it spins it's probably just a sensor issue.
The tub hall effect sensor was like $20 shipped from the GE parts website. Quick and easy to swap out. No dice, still not wanting to spin up. More reading online, it's likely the main motor inverter board. Well, that's pretty deep in the machine, could also be the motor assembly itself which would be covered under warranty, let me call a GE service guy to come.
Service guy comes, he plugs some wireless adapter into a hidden USB port, fumbles with it for a few minutes with an iPad with a shattered screen, gives up diagnosing the issue. Writes up an invoice proposal for $900 worth of parts and labor for him to swap out a ton of things, or a referral code/discount coupon for me to buy a new unit.
I decline the order. Surely not all this shit is wrong with the thing. I find the inverter board online from a third party site for <$100, was available from the official parts site for not much more. Start unplugging it a bunch, and notice the motor hall sensor pin wasn't seated very well. I don't want to put it all together again just to find reseating/gluing the connection together didn't solve the problem, so I just put the new inverter board in. Put it all back together and it's just fine for <$100.
I imagine it was just a loose connection for that sensor. This is probably still a perfectly functional board on my shelf. I'll keep it and the other sensor in case some other issues happens in the future. But it could have been just a loose connection that sent this nearly $1000 unit to the scrapyard if it wasn't for me bothering to look. It could have been an exceptionally cheap part. And the final fix I accepted was just somewhat cheap part.
In the end people generally don't care to actually fix shit, and I imagine the majority of people would have just thrown up their hands before looking for the service manual, called the tech, he would have made it obvious a new unit would be a better deal, and they would have taken it.
i.e. if I spend 3 days figuring out my washing machine, I'm trading leisure time (bought at whatever my salary rate is) for the cost of the machine. If the machine is a nightmare to open up and close, then I don't really blame people for just buying a new one.
A bunch of this can obviously be mitigated: right-to-repair is a good start, but we also need incentives for serviceability - the example you give of being able to actually get diagnostic data is one area (IMO: that should just be legally mandated as open-source, make it a national security policy - which it is IMO). Firmware blobs for chips should also be public - i.e. I've got a few things where the microcontroller is dead, I can source a replacement, but there's no way to get a copy of the onboard programming.
And then obviously, if we could somehow encourage design which means components are easy to remove, that would be great (i.e. logic and control boards should always be mounted accessibly).
I've had similar experiences with other appliances over the years. It's not just a GE thing.
Is that the conclusion to this whole story?
How many hours of labor did he spend testing, researching, retesting, ordering parts, trying something new, etc. all without a working washer? If that is something you enjoy and take pride in, that is one thing. But as a pure utility proposition for most people, it is way more expensive to rip apart complex machines for the possibility of being able to repair them.
Getting it into the maintenance mode, getting the error code values, deciphering the hex error codes, running the tests and knowing what the tests meant was all in that service manual.
As far as my own personal time actually working on it, I probably spent a total of three hours. Shipping for the parts were overnight and two days. However, I did spend four days waiting from the time I scheduled a tech to come out and had that experience, which probably took less than an hour. All in all it was a hair over a week without a functional washing machine.
This was a $900 washing machine that wasn't quite four years old. There was no way I was going to be down to buy yet another washing machine of similar quality and featureset so soon after.
I do agree, this is probably still a bit much to expect a random person to know/do. I'm more just disappointed in service techs who tend to just throw up their hands and offer to sell someone a new appliance instead of spending even a small amount of time looking into it. The guy was supposedly some top GE certified master technician but could barely even understand it or care to look into it. He spent more time putting together an invoice for parts I didn't need than he did looking into it. He didn't bother reading any of the debugging I had done previously which I saw were in his dispatch case notes.
Theoretically the guy knew what model of device he was going to go repair. He already had some diagnostics. He could have had a few spare parts to test with in his truck. This inverter board is the same one used in a lot of appliances, its not like its a one-off part. But instead he was trying to sell me a new front panel, a new main logic board, the same hall sensor I had already replaced and noted in the case notes, the inverter board, a new wiring harness, and I forget what else.
And if I didn't have enough knowledge and determination past a standard consumer it would have been trash. Sadly most consumers and support techs don't care enough.
I bought the part-number equivalent part and the prongs didn't fit in the slot. I spent 45 minutes carefully filing down/snipping the prongs to fit the enclosure. Been 5? years without an issue.
One would expect that there is nothing more standard than USB-A. Nope. There is an exception for every rule.
Then there is every doofus in a Suburban skidding around like a kid on a 2-ton toboggan rocking summer tires as they tell everyone, "my truck is heavy, it pushes down THROUGH the snow!"
Some people refuse to even buy an all-season even when they know it exists.
Yes, New York like most States is full of dozens and dozens of counties with less than 10,000 people but they add up and while the city proper of Buffalo is like 1/10th a single Borough in population, it too has suburbs and exurbs. Even the area around Fort Drum is just over 100k people.
New England too. At best only a minority of people use snow tires here.
Which should beg the question if these things are as magical as the internet cheerleaders say they are then why doesn't everyone in these sorts of states have them.