Maker Movement / Mending Things

Pre COVID I was volunteering in my local YMCA charity shop as a PAT tester. We regularly had sets of Christmas lights from November through to January. The older ones with incandescent bulbs were usually fine (Working and tested As safe. LED sets sometimes failed class ll insulation test at 1 Megohm despite functioning correctly. What happened to decent  engineering for durability?

Christmas is coming! It's the time of year when friends and others sometimes present me with a set of decoration lights no longer working. I have built a reputation of being able to fix things like this.


A few years ago I was asked if I could fix a set used in our local church. It comprised 40 or more (I forget just how many) miniature capless filament bulbs in series. There were some spare bulbs available but the set was completely lifeless. I had a prod around it with a multimeter and neon testing screwdriver (don't be too horrified!) and located a bulb that had failed and gone open circuit. Normally these bulbs short circuit themselves when they fail, so you can spot them. Result - set working again!


COULD I DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS NOWADAYS?


It's getting more difficult. I have a LED set bought only a few years ago. Some lamps are no longer lighting up. These sets are wired in several groups of a few lamps in series and if a lamp goes open circuit or its connection breaks, then the group does not light up. I managed to get one of the groups working again by wiggling a lamp around. Another group I cannot revive. There are no accessible contacts; I would need to break into insulation - if I knew just where the fault was. And then I shall need to re-insulate after the repair - not easy for something to be used outdoors. 


I don't think I'll be using this set many more years. They don't seem to make these things to last, do they, in spite of the high tech.


I have an "elfin cone" lighting set purchased in 1955, which is still in use (not with the original bulbs, obviously)!

It's less of a problem for me for Desktops and laptops as I can generally fix them and keep them going almost indefinitely. My laptop is a Toshiba satellite which originally had Windows 7, but had been upgraded to Win10 when I bought it a couple of years ago for £200, The battery still holds a full charge and is good for several hours use. I also have an HP Pavilion 10X2 detachable, which is a mix of 2 we had, after onedied with a puffy battery which distorted the case and cracked the screen. (these are basically touch screen tablets with a magnetically attached hinged keyboard).

The Toshiba now runs Mint 19.3 XFCE, the HP now runs Open SUSE Tumbleweed, also XFCE. and my self built desktop is multi booting Mint 19.3, Xubuntu 18.04 and Win 10 Pro. I have two older desktops built in 2009/10, one of which has Ubuntu 20.04 ,which I've resurrected for my son and the other is earmarked to run Owncloud as my own cloud server. Both my printers are 2nd hand HP devices. and my portable CD/Radio/MP3 is second hand, costing a whole £11 from a private EBay seller. I also have a 2nd hand Sony ar stereo waiting to be fitted on my 2001 Honda Civic.

Well, as an unashamedly woke green hippy snowflake I did a similar calculation when I bought my 1.8 DIESEL (shock horror) Civic, which is now 11 years old. Because even pre-covid I didn't drive a huge number of miles and they were mostly dual carriageway / motorway, because I hardly ever do urban driving (diesels in urban areas are not nice), and because I buy 3-5 year old cars and run them into the ground over 15-20 years, then with the technology at the time this seemed to be a pretty efficient solution on all counts compared to, particularly, the battery life in electrics and hybrids. However, the technology's changing all the time, so would the audit on that still work today? To be honest I don't know, probably not, hopefully it will be several years yet before I'll have to do it!


On the more general question, I'm not actually convinced that domestic equipment is more unreliable if compared price-for-price with yesteryear. When we had small children and no money and bought white goods for £100 a time and small appliances for £10s of pounds a time yes the life expectancy was pretty bad. Now, as an example, this site https://www.retrowow.co.uk/social_history/70s/cost_1973.php reckons a twin tub (our first second-hand washing machine) cost £73.36 in 1973 prices, equivalent to £630.00 today. Even now, I wouldn't spend £630 for a washing machine, but by paying something more in the order of that sort of price the white goods we have now have kept going for at least the 10 year mark (i.e. still going today, I'll have to post here again in another 10 years), and spare parts have been available on the rare occasion they have failed. So are appliances really less reliable (and less supported), or is it that it is now possible to produce low cost low reliability appliances for those that want them? 


Even more so with cars, I had my first car in 1978 which was made in 1968, it rusted away a year later. I would say that if anything the life expectancy of cars I've owned has lengthened over those 42 years (remembering as above I've never sold a car as a going concern!). The difference is that I used to have to spend every weekend fixing the blessed things once they were over about 5 years old, now I'm staggered if one fails an MOT on a minor point. What maybe makes the obsolescence proofing of cars look bad is that now when a 15-20 year old car is scrapped (say because the ECU has failed) it looks almost like new, whereas it was always a joke that you could judge the age of, say, a Ford Cortina by how many of the doors were the same colour as the rest of the car. (Yes you could replace the doors from a scrapyard, the problem was that you had to!) 


Of course as you can imagine I don't like the low cost low reliability throw away culture, but then equally I'm very aware that I'm lucky to be able to make the choice...do we want to say that appliances will last twice as long, but most people won't be able to afford them? (Remembering again I grew up in the 1960s/70s, my parents grew up in the 1920s/30s.) There is no simple answer to that question (particularly again for a wghs as stated in the opening sentence!).


BUT I do agree that the obsolescence of serviceable phones and computers due to the expansion of software is really really annoying. (Can't remember if I've said in this thread before: Millar's law of Software Expansion: for any improvement in hardware, the software will expand until the device runs just slightly irritatingly slow.) However unless someone can stop Moore's law that ain't going to end soon.


Cheers,


Andy


 

The same reasoning applies to cars. Mine is a 19 year old Honda Civic 1.6IVTec which has done just over 82K miles. I id about 8K oer year pre-COvid, and very little since March (I've on;y filled up twice since then). Using the whole life Materials, energy & CO2 costs, would I be justified in changing for an EV?

I'm a volunteer on a preserved railway where I look after the signalling systems (mostly electro-mechanical). Most of the machines which operate the signals are 70+ years old (the manual is dated 1928 and most of the machines are stamped GWR!) and were installed 30 years ago after being removed by BR. To say they are overengineered is an understatement. We have some which have been operating 24/7 for the past 30 years without a major problem and I have begun to go through all our installed machines and refurbish them to last another 30, though this just seems to involve stripping them down, cleaning and painting and replacing the asbestos rope seal with something better. The motors and coils all test out okay, the bearings just require greasing and my hardest challenge has been finding some leather pads for the clutch brake. The controlling relays -massive glass cased things on a shelf- are of a similar vintage, again so overengineered that in 30 years of regular use I have only had to replace one out of about 20 despite two lightning strikes near the site which took out a number of fuses on the mains and signalling circuits.


Referring to the boiler comments, it would be interesting to compare the lifetime energy costs of -say- a modern gas boiler against one of the older models which lasted 20-30 years. I would include the energy involved in manufacture and replacement in this as it appears that while the older boilers weren't as efficient the new ones do not last nearly as long. So would it be better to have an old boiler, less efficient, but lasts 30 years or a new one, more efficient but requires replacement after 10?


Should we be demanding that manufacturers of appliances design for a life of 20 years or more, either by designing parts that can be easily replaced or using better quality components which will last the lifetime? Yes, I know this will be anathema to most manufacturers and those companies who'd love you to buy a new appliance every six months but just because your iphone isn't the latest must-have model is that any reason to replace it with another which does exactly the same job?

In my previous home the boiler lasted 21 years, despite British Gas saying it was obsolete when we moved in. Turns out it was an industrial boiler big enough to heat a small factory.

When we move 4 1/2 years ago and had an independent gas engineer to service the boiler, he just said to turn it off as it was dangerous, apparently there was a lot of sooty deposit above the boiler, but not obviously visible.

We managed to get a new pump for our 32 year old Worcester Heat Slave boiler last week. The first fitter who looked at the boiler said it was the heat exchanger which was an obsolete part but we weren't convinced, as my husband whose an engineer thought it was the pump.  Second fitter concurred and new pump was ordered and fitted as that turned out to be a general part used on lots of boilers. Dreading the circuit board going though as they are definitely obsolete now.  Might have to bite the bullet at some point and replace the boiler as we realise it won't be particularly efficient compared to the new ones.