Hey, I volunteer at one of these! We do all sorts of repairs, its a lot of fun and a great way to meet people. I reccomend it.
I used to have a pretty sweet Thinkbook for work. It flipped around into a tablet and had a stylus in a little slot, and a solid casing and everything. The motherboard went bad. I told my company to remove the hard drive and let me fix the computer for myself. I even offered to pay for it. It was a nice machine. They said no. I sent it to IT and it went to the laptop graveyard.
Management doesn’t understand storage. For a while we had to destroy mobo, RAM and drive from departing devices, to ‘protect’ patient information.
Good.
I’ve worked in tech basically all my life. Everything from IT to shuffling wafer around a fab to now working for an aerospace parts supplier as an electrical tech.
The amount of waste is… it’s shocking. A board fails, and half of these companies throw it away. The other half sends it off to be ‘recycled’ as if that’s any better in the long run. Just because one chip is bad or whatever doesn’t mean the rest of the components on the board are bad.
That being said, I understand the massive amount of labor it would take to desolder every component on a board just to add them to stock. That’s why nobody does it. You’d need an army of people to properly remove and test every component on a failed board.
But, like, you don’t have to? All those components are already in a spot where they won’t get lost and can be retrieved when needed: on the failed board. Thankfully the company I work for now understands that buying things to be shipped takes a lot more time than just… taking an hour to steal a chip from a failed board and using that.
I worked for a company before that had at least half of the boards come off the wave solder machines with problems. Excess solder in places it shouldn’t be, failed components everywhere, and basic assembly issues. They’d toss these boards in a corner of the building to be repaired later. The issue is that they just couldn’t quit taking people away from rework and putting them on assembly. The engineers never bothered to come downstairs and actually do their jobs. So the failed boards never got worked on, and they kept generating a mountain of them.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m glad people are actually fixing stuff instead of throwing it away. Were that this would become the norm.
It’s really a good sign of the economic situation. If more people thought about waste before purchase and adopted a make do and mend attitude. That would help. But for a long time it’s been cheap to just replace and not care.
Over the past week, I’ve repaired an air filter that had a corroded trace inside its fan motor controller, a pair of Bluetooth headphones that had sweat ingress bust the power button, and I’m working on rebuilding an LCD driver for an old piece of Mattel electronics.
I’m very interested in this article.
Edit: and I forgot to mention the time a few months ago where a friend ordered a walking treadmill from Amazon that was DOA, so they just sent her a new one and told her to scrap the original. Turns out the power connector was unplugged from the mainboard receptacle.
I still have a floor lamp next to my desk that was given to me broken, which I took apart and fixed. The way the little mechanism works to turn the thing on was (a) not that hard to fix once I looked at it, it’s all just wires my dude (b) absolutely fascinatingly interesting in how simple and clever the design is. I was actually really impressed and happy that I took the trouble to take it apart and muck with it.
still have
There are studies that show that people care for things more if they had a hand in creating/fixing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
Though I personally have more of a love hate relationship with my IKEA furniture.
I would like to subscribe to your blog
Ch00ftech.com though it’s been a hot decade since I’ve published anything.
if repairing random crap around the house is worth a blog, i can take a few pics next time…
There is nothing more worthy of a blog, IMHO
Odds are someone else on the internet will have some of the same broken random crap as you some day
i might just do it. i repair quite a bunch of random crap for me & friends.
The other aspect of this is the community and education value. It gets people together having a cuppa, a chat and likely some awareness and education. Pairing these together with small workshops would be great value. Teaching kids how to tinker and fix stuff should be more promoted.
But why free? Rich countries need repair shops. This should be a viable career.
We’re not replacing expensive parts or anything. If something is beyond the capability of a volunteer, or requires something we don’t have, we refer them to a local repair shop instead.
My guess is because a lot of cheaper electronics are genuinely not worth repairing if you have to pay for it, even if the repair takes literally seconds to do, and anything that’s worth paying to repair can already be taken to eg computer repair places.
The world we live in now is absolutely full of cheap electronics. That stuff breaks more often than better built and thus pricier models, so it should be the first stuff to get fixed. And that kinda requires free repair.
I mean how much would you pay to fix a $20 coffee maker/kettle?
Good logic
Yeah but here’s the catch. If you want them to look at your shit it’s a flat €80 fee here. Whatever the outcome. And then you pay for parts with insane markups. And if it requires thinkering well they don’t do that (my American fridge where the dispenser lever isn’t made anymore- no interest in doing custom print or bypass).
So unless you have happy interested passionate persons which usually is a hacker’s club you only have those kind of services it seems :-/
Got some speakers repaired last month at my local. I had the parts but not a suitable adhesive. Brought them in and got them fixed right up. A son’s friend volunteers there too, I discovered!
Think i may have found my “retirement job” lol
Rossmann and chill
Rossmann is the literal opposite of chill, hearing him talk gives me anxiety. I’d rather just read his writings.
Or just look up Indians
I love this
Light bulbs are not an example of design for obsolescence. This article is ignorant and spreading misinformation
Wym? Many LED lights have components on them that fail waaaaaay before the diode and could certainly be designed to last longer
At one point I invested in a $10 light bulb from Home Depot because the packaging assured me that it would last for years and years and so it was actually better than the big packages of ones that were cheap. It stopped working in a few weeks. I went back and asked one of their valued team members about it, and he said maybe the “board” on it “went out,” which apparently happens to them a lot.
I kind of knew when I bought it that it was bullshit, but I didn’t expect it to be such bullshit.
CFL turned out to be a massive lie/scam.
Pay anywhere from 8x-50x more per bulb… yeah the individual LEDs won’t die but the device itself is usually fried in 3 months. Meanwhile I’ve got $0.25 incandescent bulbs that are 10 years old.
The potential “energy savings” are always trumpeted from the rooftops, but in the actual application you end up spending more because the constant waste/replace cycle vastly offsets any trivial amount of electricity saved.
