General > General Technical Chat

Right to Repair - UK and EU making changes to facilitate repairs :)

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CatalinaWOW:
Safety is the issue that is thrown up with repair, and in today's world what can you name that is safe enough to allow anyone to repair it?  A table that falls over, or a chair that collapses can hurt someone.  If someone is changing the filler in a ball point pen and puts the decorative band between sections upside down it could lead to a cut and then infection.

I'm all for the Darwinian answer, but that doesn't seem to be the way our world is going.   

eti:

--- Quote from: Fraser on April 17, 2021, 11:52:08 am ---Some Fun involving piecemeal replacement of component parts.......namely Triggers broom  ;D

https://rhodestothepast.com/2018/07/05/daft-as-a-brush-the-ancient-philosophy-of-triggers-broom/

To me a product remains ‘original’, from a functional point of view, if it has the exact same design and characteristics as when it left the factory. Deviation from that original design and functionality, for better or worse, makes it a modified product  :) For a archaeologist or conservator it is a very different story though.

I have a favourite laptop (Dell Inspiron 3500) that was used until its case plastics began to fatigue crack due to flexing in the chassis. I repaired the case cracks with plastic welding  and all was well. Some years later I saw a company selling original case plastics for my model of Dell laptop. I bought a complete set of case plastics, installed the laptops chassis into them and the laptop looked brand new  :-+ Was it the original laptop ? To my mind yes. It’s internal ‘organs’ were original and I had just provided a new set of ‘clothes’. That said, some years previous I had fitted a faster Processor module so it’s ‘brains’ were changed long before the casing. In terms of the right to repair, I was so pleased to be able to buy a new complete casing kit for my laptop at reasonable cost. It was clear that the casing parts were a clear-out by Dell to a parts reseller as the laptop was long obsolete. Did it make sense for Dell to stock complete laptop casings ? They obviously thought so whilst the laptop was current but it became dead money once the laptop went obsolete. Not many people would pay what Dell would charge for a complete casing. I suspect those parts were purely stocked for warranty claim purposes. Back in the latex 1990’s laptops were so expensive to make and buy that the maths may have justified the storage of ‘consumable’ or failure prone parts. I am not sure the story is the same today though. When my iPad battery died, I paid £80 to the nice chap in the Apple store and he gave me a brand new, not ‘refurbished’ iPad. He commented that even though my original iPad was in mint condition, it did not make financial sense to dismantle and refurbish it for reuse. That sort of suggests that an iPad actually costs Apple less than £80 to manufacture....  just my guess though. In the face of low production costs it is only really viable to refurbish or repair equipment that is special in some way, either in intrinsic production cost, data recovery or system compatibility. There are many elderly industrial Electronic systems in use throughout the World.... why ? Well they cost too much to replace, upgrade or to redesign the system they operate within to use modern replacement technology. Win XP is still alive and well in embedded computers within Industrial systems  :D That is where the right to repair can be essential to support the users of such equipment. I was trained to repair almost anything electronic with, or without a schematic diagram. These days a schematic diagram can be essential for efficiency and success. Then there is is the bespoke software and firmware to be considered ! Repairing modern electronics can be a total nightmare if the fault is not something relatively simple to track down.

Fraser

--- End quote ---

About six years ago I bought an HP ProBook 6460b from eBay (Cash Converters store, so pretty clueless), listed as “Display not working, only mouse cursor visible” - which amused me no end. How can it not be working if there’s a cursor?! Lol. Paid £46 including postage - paid £6 for HDD caddy, put a spare i7 CPU in it and some more RAM. I added an SSD about 3 years ago, and then an optical bay SSD caddy just about a year ago. Recently added a second (512GB) SSD (a gift), and a few weeks ago upgraded the RAM to the max of 16GB.

Apart from the BIOS spazzing out and forgetting it’s serial number and some other oddities of corruption, which I swiftly repaired with a special HP repair utility, it’s been wonderful and is used 24/7 (it’s on as a DLNA server when I’m not in front of it, working)

It’s flies along nicely on Windows 11 too!

timeandfrequency:

--- Quote from: Alti on February 26, 2023, 12:56:23 am ---
--- Quote from: timeandfrequency on February 20, 2023, 07:28:08 pm ---You need to buy/replace the whole boiler+heater assembly which costs 190 bucks. The same (new) appliance costs...180 bucks. Guess what my friend decided to do ?

--- End quote ---
That is an example of B-type appliance that has a very high Q so most likely he disassembled it for parts (sold remaining parts as replacement parts). Feel free to protest or make campaigns for access to repair documentation. It does not matter how easily a $190 component is being replaced in $180 appliance. Once you force screws by law, one thing that changes is that the appliance is going to cost $181 because of greater manufacturing complexity. Then you'll get three separate replacement components instead of this one, $190 each. Of course you can hack with some generic parts from lawn mower and air fryer but this is not an idea for the sustainable future, or the goal of right to repair movement, you know.

--- End quote ---
Hi Alti,

Some additional information about the steam cleaner.
We did not bring the appliance to a repair shop.
"I" was actually the technician who tried to fix it, which means in this case there was no repair charge other than the replacement part.
190 bucks was the best offer we could find across Europe for the 'boiler+heater assembly' spare part.
My friend did not even try to take the appliance to a repair shop.
So we don't know if the latter could have bought the spare part much cheaper than we could, and, by charging a reasonable repair cost, fixing the defective unit would have been significantly cheaper than the price of a new appliance.
Honestly, I hardly believe that asking a professional to repair the unit would have been cheaper than acting by ourselves.


You pinpointed the way to get rid of such very high Q situations : building a 'heater+boiler' assembly is a nonsense because the heaters' lifespan is significantly lower than the boiler. The parts prone to wearing and/or frequent failure have to be sold separately and should be easy to remove and reinstall.
For that particular appliance, the manufacturer chose to tighten the production cost by crimping the heater into the boiler, rather than attaching it with 4 screws and clips.
As you said, this would have changed the selling price only marginally (+ 1$), but, as for the washing machine plastic tanks, the decision to make the appliance more sustainable was not taken. Instead, they opted to run the manufacturing process solely on cost.

dariodario:
Why we don't start to change the things? Bad companies are and bad companies will remain imho, with on without right to repair law.
I'm very angry and tired about 30 years of e-waste and purposely not repairaible device.

As a computer science engineer with an electronic specialization, I thought that someone had to start changing the things. So I started a side project working on an open source washing machine (WM). I already produced a working prototype. I wrote the firmware and made the main board. 

I would run a business around it and I'm searching for the right business model. Is not easy for an open source project, except few cases (https://www.fairphone.com). I'm obsessed about repairability and "repairability by design". I dream to sell my WM with the schematic and the service manual attacched, as in the '80. Few smd components, most "through hole", all documented.   

Currently the board has 2 microcontroller unit. One for the core WM features, one for the external interface and commands (wifi, mqtt, ble, panel, etc). The two MCUs communicate each other by I2C with on top an applicative protocol (to be open) that I'm writing now. The firmware of this MCU should be open. The first micro (main features) could have an open or closed firmware, to be defined (EU directives and IEC compliance here). The mechanical and electronic hardware should be open.
 
I'm not more confortable to proceed alone on this idea. Are there in the forum people a bit exerienced in marketing or 3D modelling/software/electronic interested to create a team with me?

The prototype is in my room and never has left it until now. I only registered a trademark for it. I would like to talk, I and the team, with some business angel...

Regards.
 

nctnico:

--- Quote from: timeandfrequency on February 27, 2023, 09:19:23 pm ---As you said, this would have changed the selling price only marginally (+ 1$), but, as for the washing machine plastic tanks, the decision to make the appliance more sustainable was not taken. Instead, they opted to run the manufacturing process solely on cost.

--- End quote ---
And people keep buying the crap. Our Miele washing machine turns 25 this year. Still going strong with some repairs and these machines are designed to be serviceable.

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