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Comment by huang_chung | Hacker News Reader

An interesting consideration next time you balk at the price of a tradesman; or, why the plumber charges $300 to connect a washer in a few minutes when anyone can do it.

$295 of that is knowing to drill the hole in the drain.

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I remember (decades ago) buying a garage door opener at sears, and they offered to install it for $99.

I sort of hemmed and hawed and said ok.

When the guy came by to install it, it was kind of amazing. he opened the box quickly with a box cutter, and started unwrapping stuff. Stuff that was needed came out, extras were discarded into the lid of the box, all within about a minute.

He had a special pole with a carpet covered T at the top to help get the old rail down safely and raise the new one. He ran all the lines quickly and efficiently. Lines that were too long were wrapped around a screwdriver to form a pigtail and efficiently run them with some tension the right length.

I think it was done in ~ 20 minutes and worked right the first time.

Simply amazing to see sometime who has done it before and really knows what they're doing. Made me question every install I would ever do after that.

They did the same thing with a garbage disposal install a year or two later. ba-da-boom, done.

And that is why I don't build my own PCs even though I can. I build a new PC about once every three or four years on average I suppose [1]. In that time processor sockets have changed, RAM has changed, sometimes other things.

I select the parts, but pay the vendor or someone local to assemble and test it. Not only do they do it every week (if not every day), if some part is DoA they have others on hand to swap in and out to find out which part is the problem, but I don't, see: everything changed since I built the last one 5 years before.

[1] 2009 i7-860, 2014 i7-4790K, 2016 i7-6700K (had moved countries, didn't take the old PC, just the SSD), 2019 TR 2990WX (again had moved countries, taking just the SSD), 2024 i9-13900HX laptop (beats the TR in every way, plus sips power and is portable).

Building a PC is just the right amount of challenge (for me). It's fun. I'd do it for my friends, if they let me. And wanted to spend one or two grand every other year. It's just challenging enough to be fun but not so challenging it's actually hard.

I build them, because basically no one offers prebuilts with ECC memory.

Maybe where you live, I don't know. I was living in the US at the time and in early 2019 adamant.com built me a TR 2990WX machine with ECC.

Here's a current catalogue customisable much cheaper machine from them with ECC:

https://www.adamant.com/adamant-custom-intel-xeon-e3-series-...

If I was sure they were going to use good parts, I'd do the same.

I bought my current PC from a company that seems pretty good, and targets gamers with medium-high budgets.

The "liquid cooled" cpu cooler died after being bumped with a vacuum, and I had to replace it.

With that one thing that I was forced to do myself, I had to learn a lot about the system that I'd already have known if I'd ordered the parts myself. Worse, they no longer had a list of the exact parts in the system on their site. I had to pull things apart to find out what they were.

I'll be making my own PC from scratch again next time.

Careful with vacuums near electronics, they tend to build up static.

Best to use a compressor or canned air.

I don't mean a small vacuum. I mean a house vacuum, for the floor. They just rammed the computer. It caused the CPU Cooler to make a ticking sound, which I found was a pretty common thing for that cooler. I replaced it with a standard fan cooler instead and it's been fine.

Presumably a tradesman has knowledge and experience with these blockers, which for them should be largely "known unknowns" and easy to fix at that since they have all the right equipment.

So why do they still charge so much? It's not just "knowing to drill the hole in the drain" but overhead like equipment (they need to buy all the expensive pro stuff, and keep it in working order; whereas you might just need the one tool to get your job done, they need all the tools to get all the jobs done), vehicles, gas, etc. And of course the down time traveling between jobs, office space if they have an office, employees, etc.

All these things bring their prices back up to much higher than it would cost you to do it yourself--if only you knew what to do and had the right equipment.

Let's assume a solo plumber has to spend 10k/year on all their equipment maintenance. If they only do 20 hours of paid work per week, that adds 10 dollars to their hourly rate.

The solo plumber also needs to put a lot of time in the office doing book work, scheduling jobs, restocking their van with parts, driving from job to job. If you are thinking about going into business for yourself either charge what your competition does - don't undercut anyone. If you can't figure out what your competition charges figure out what you need to live on and double it for a starting price and then get an accountant to look over your books in a few months. (though if you have no competition that is generally a sign that you have a bad business)

I think it's interesting to also think about it from the other perspective. If this is someone who is supporting themselves through this work, then what they have to at least charge you is going to depend on how much they need to survive, i.e., buy housing, food, tools, etc. If they get only a few jobs per week, then they kinda have to try to pay their bills off of those jobs. They may also have a spouse, kids, and various others who depend on this income for survival.

Unfortunately, how much a person needs to have a decent living is not really what's driving prices: like all markets, what dictates prices is demand and supply. The job may be very easy for a tradesman to do, but if they're the only ones who know how to do the job, and many people need the job done and really can't just do it themselves, they can charge whatever people who need the job are willing to pay to not go without. For most tradesmen , normally there are many "competitors", so they need to keep prices reasonable otherwise people won't hire them. Some jobs which can be easily DIY'd may just disappear as it's not possible to make a living off them, even if a small percentage of people will never DIY anything and would be willing to pay a small amount for the job to be done. I am currently trying to hire builders for some larger projects at home (kitchen/bathroom renovations, custom car port) and I see wild differences in prices, and presumably quality. For these bigger jobs, it really becomes a bet unless you can actually verify the builder's previous jobs, which can be hard as people are not going to just let you into their houses to check how good/bad their bathrooms look. I've had bad experiences before, so I am being extra careful and trying to figure out the builder's level of expertise and capability by talking to them about lots of details (which I learned from previously building a garage).

what a person needs to make a decent living is an input into the supply part of supply and demand. Thus it puts a floor on prices. Pay me $500/hour and I'm installing washing machines not writing software thus increasing the supply of labor to do that. (but of course nobody will pay that much)

> If they get only a few jobs per week, then they kinda have to try to pay their bills off of those jobs.

I don't think this has been true anywhere for at least several decades. Every single tradesman I've used tells me they are overbooked/overworked and there's no shortage of jobs.

I'm sure they have their less-busy seasons, but overall I doubt any tradesman can't find 40 hours worth of work/week.

Believe it or not, it was this article that solved the same problem I was having with my new sink / washing machine. For the past week, I've been draining the machine into the bathtub, because it wouldn't pump the water into the sink's drain pipe. I assumed the extension was too long, or the pump motor was too weak – turns out, I never cut the hole in the drain pipe. Thanks Chris!

I laughed when I read it, because my father-in-law just finished telling me the same story about a dishwasher he installed in a new house he built in the 90s. Water everywhere the first time it went to drain. He was perplexed until a friend asked him if he drilled out the plug in the p-trap.

Of COURSE you can't just have a hole in the side of a pipe under your sink, but the existence of the fitting gives you a false sense of security that it's plug-and-play.

I’d bet it’s actually a knockout and could’ve been tapped/broken out with a screwdriver and a hammer

Those rates start to make lot more sense if you think how much would I charge to visit 30 minute meeting on other side of city. Or at least how many billable hours my employer would do. Time spend on traveling often ends up making up for the rest. Not to mention on overhead in admin if this would be just single time thing.

Not to even think of materials, tools and such.

Having connected my own washer recently, I'm terrified to ask... what hole in the drain?!

Same. Thankfully, the post explains it as needing to drill open the PVC drain pipe under a sink where the washer drain pipe connects, inside a pre-formed attachment point. See "Solution 5" through "Solution 6".

If your washer is draining and working, there's no latent issue to worry about.

The one mentioned at the very end: the drain pipe the washer's drain connected to had a PVC cover that needed to be drilled/punched out (since if a washer wasn't connected it'd be a hole in that drain!). If you're replacing another washer, it was probably already punched out.

Why wasn't there just a connector with a cap?

Pvc is welded/glued. I would have installed at least a hose clamp on this thing and would never rely on friction to keep it in place.

Even without a cap, gravity "should" prevent the drain leaking - the connection to the hose is some height above where it joins the U-trap.

If the drain backs up and the pressure is high enough to force water out, it might be enough to pop any screwed cap too.

It's cheaper to make it without a hole than add a separate component and screw threads on both components. After all, you will drill the hole zero or one time, as needed.

Because Ikea.

Most PVC under sink siffons have a preformed connection point where most people connect the dishwasher's hose.

The ones I encountered had a tapered pipe point for several diameter drains. You saw off to the matching diameter of your hose.

Often you would also put on a flowback protection valve so dirty water from e.g. draining a full sink would not get into to hose of your appliance.

It's not always that easy. In my case we were moving to a new country. It was very hard to find English speaking tradespeople and the ones we did find told us that they can do it in 3 weeks earliest. So I had to either work as a dishwasher for 3 weeks (we have 2 kids) or connect the dishwasher myself, which took me a whole day and many trips to the hardware store. I still think I did the right thing.

When we had our new w&d set installed (replacing a dead set), we paid a plumber. Part of that was needing the gas hookup for the dryer, and there was no way I was going to DIY that. And yeah, given what it costs just to have them show up, having both done is about the same cost as just one. And it did save me a lot of hassle.

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