Hi everybody,
IMO, the right to repair story is still at the very beginning. Louis Rossmann and others make an immense job to promote and explain how important it is.
However, it will still take many years to apply to most consumer products.
And of course, quite every manufacturer is really reluctant in changing his mindset.
On this forum we often talk about professional equipement.
But the more it concerns consumer products, the less a repair action is feasible and/or economically interesting.
Repairing something like a kitchen appliance is really PITA.
Since end of last year, the french gov
contributes to the repair costs : 10 EUR for a coffee machine, 25 EUR for a washing machine and 45 EUR for a laptop computer.
Let's say it's a reasonable incentive and the beginning of a shift.
[...]
One particular case could be solved easily: Prohibition of welding together plastic tanks of washing machines. That is a realy nasty practice, and there is hardly as much resource saved with it as it destroys.
A similar example.
A friend of mine had a steam cleaner. No more steam came out of the unit. I opened the appliance to see what went wrong : heater resistor dead. But the resistor is crimped into the aluminium boiler during the manufacturing process and cannot be replaced. 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 ?
3D printed spare parts ?I needed to replace the front panel button of a small kitchen owen because its axis was broken.
The renowed kitchen appliance manufacturer claims for years to tacle with obsolesencence of plastic parts by rebuilding the old parts by using their own 3D printers. Great.
But this part was unavailable at any parts shop I could reach, and no 3D STL file could be found on the manufacturers' Internet site.
So I cobbled a new axis for the existing button by using a plastic rod and some glue...
[update #1 : one more repair story]
Built to breakAnother friend bought in 2016 an airless paint sprayer manufactured by a renowed brand (price : about 350 EUR). With his device, he painted all of the inner walls of the house he has bought. After each use, he cleaned the unit thoroughly with adequate solvent.
2 or 3 years later, he wanted to reuse his appliance and noticed a big leak in the main unit. He disassembled the device and cleaned all of the leaked paint. The hose of the peristaltic pump had a significant hole.
He asked me to find a spare hose. So I found a foreign forum where users of the same airless paint sprayer were discussing about their setbacks. Most users complained about a fried peristaltic pump motor. One member claimed that he exchanged the appliance twice under warranty just to paint one single room.
The cherish on the cake was the fact that the manufacturer
had no spare parts for this appliance. You could not even send the appliance back to him for repair. Under warranty, you got a new appliance. Out the the warranty period, you're screwed up.
Back to my friend.
To replace the defective hose (length about 12 cm), I just bought an off-the-shelf PVC hose (1 meter = 2,50 EUR) which was exactely the same as the original part. To avoid frying the pump motor in case the pump was stuck, we added an adequate thermal circuit breaker in series with the pump motor.
Total repair cost for the leak and the improvement : 15 EUR.
And now he still has 7 hoses as spare...