Remix clone Hacker News

> 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.

Is that the conclusion to this whole story?

▲

542354234235 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I agree. I feel like this story specifically illustrates how much time, labor, and knowledge you need to have to fix a "modern" appliance. Not only basic mechanical and electrical understanding, but having to troubleshoot the combination of circuit board and software problems puts this well out of the realm of most people. I sacrifice features for more repairability in several of my appliances (Speed Queen washer dryer, Dualit toaster, Kitchenaid mixer, etc) but that takes money, and just isn’t a realistic option for all things.

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.

	▲	vel0city 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Outside of some vocabulary that I do agree most random people wouldn't know off-hand (what's a hall sensor? why are there halls in my washing machine?!), most of what I needed to know from this came from the service manual tucked inside the machine. The only knowledge I needed to jump start this repair this was looking up where the first screws were to take off the top cover and the rest of this was mostly covered in this manual. 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.
	▲	keybored 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That’s how I read it as well up until the conclusion.

▲

vel0city 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, pretty much. A hired tech didn't bother understanding the deeper issue would prefer me to use his coupon code to buy a new unit of great cost to me. Chances are a simple reseating of a connector and additional support would have prevented several hundred pounds of otherwise perfectly fine materials going to a landfill and cost me almost $1,000 for a similar replacement unit.

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.