"Right to repair" appliances.

Indeed, in the UK at least there is no legal 'rank' or organization to which one needs to belong to declare oneself a washing machine repair man or whatever, so as with our unprotected title 'engineer' I suspect the information will in effect have to be available to the general public.While you may need to open an account at the distributors to buy spare bits, I'd imagine that to work as intended the bar to do so would need to be set quite low.

Much as it is with car parts already for example, where in the UK anyone in possession of some scruffy overalls and a bit of nerve can wander in to the local motor factors and pick up  brake pads or whatever at the least discounted trade cash price, and then fit them to their car, or anyone else's car for that matter.

Some years ago I spoke to a repair guy who worked for a firm thst had spent a lot of money buying equipment to take components off circuit boards and install replacements as they had a contract to repair satellite tv boxes.


It had not been used and they had not repaired a box a year into the contract,  because none had actually been sent to them for repair with the satellite tv customers just being handed brand new boxes to replace faulty ones that were being stacked up in a shed somewhere. 


Andy Betteridge

My parents use the local white goods repair man , £95 per hour + parts.

in probably 90% of cases it is still cheaper to bin the knackered washing machine than to repair it.

unless parts and labour are subsidies by the manufacturer this new scheme won’t fly here.

im all for repairing old stuff but we are so used to cheap throw away white good now and most people will not shell out 200 quid to fix a 225 quid 3 year old washing machine. They would rather bin it and buy another one...

A few years ago I called Neff's Technical Support line to ask what was really a simple, although embarrassing question. (I had used the grill in the oven with the door open - well that was how our previous Westinghouse oven's instruction book explained how to use the grill - in Neff's case, leaving the door open caused the one push button nearby to distort in the heat.)  So having found a parts diagram/list on Neff's web site purchased a replacement switch button, now all I had to do was to fit it.  I pulled it, tried to lever it off and gave up since I was sure that I was exerting at least 98% breaking force of the switch spindle and did not want to end up red faced and sitting in the naughty corner..


Luckily sometime later a Neff engineer had to attend due to an element failure and it was a case of requiring 99.9% breaking force to remove the knob.


So will be interesting how parts will be obtained by those who are not approved by the manufacturer.


Clive

The link mentions Hansgrohe as an example of a company that has a reputation for supplying spares long after the goods are discontinued.  I can vouch for that as I recently purchased a replacement cartridge for a bathroom tap that I purchased 20 years ago.  It came with full instructions on how to replace it.


I have a GTech vacuum cleaner that is showing signs that the on/off switch is failing.  I wonder if I will be able to get a replacement to fit myself.


David

Dyson sell spare parts for their vacuums

I have just bought a new washing machine.


The drum in the old one was making the devil's own noises so I started to strip it down. That was almost to the last nut and bolt, but eventually, I was able to remove the tub, which allowed me to remove the drum, which revealed that the spider has corroded all the way through. 


Cost of a new one: £450. Then of course, it seemed silly to renew that without new bearings, and the door seal had been a bit chambled and would need to be replaced, so now we are looking at £650 - £700 of parts. I would probably have spent a day putting it together again, which would have left me with a 17 year old washing machine.


That's why I bought a new one.

We were given a Hotpoint tumble dryer as a wedding present in 1973. A couple of months out of guarantee the plastic fan shattered. Bought two replacements, one to fit and one as a spare.  Still had the spare about 20 years later when we scrapped it...


Cheap insurance though! I'm sure if I had not bought the spare the fan would have failed.  What it did do over the years was use up drive belts like they were going out of fashion. A large o-ring style belt similar to those on Hoover Junior vacuum cleaners. I think I managed to find a similar sized vee-belt which then lasted to the end.


Clive

A few years ago I fitted a built in dishwasher  the customers had bought themselves, it would not run through a programme because it was showing a fault code indicating that it wasn’t pumping out, but it did.


Having failed to sort it out by resetting it I spoke to the technical guys and they told me how to do a factory reset, that still didn’t clear the fault code, so they sent an engineer who had to replace a circuit board as he could not clear the fault code either.


At that time the manufacturers generally would not tell anyone other than their own engineers how to clear a fault code, so being told how to do it was exceptional, but it didn’t work anyway.


Now with internet connected appliances and appliances that produce a tone that can be interpreted over a phone link such as my washing machine can, fault diagnosis has become something that can be done in a data centre with the manufacturers being able to tell you when there is a problem with your appliance without an engineers visit.


So will manufacturers allow customers and independent engineers access to the fault diagnosis information they have?


 Andy Betteridge

A few years ago I bought a very small and expensive pocket size Phillips DAB radio. I did not use for about six months towards the end of the 12 month warranty and when I came to use it it would not charge, I diagnosed a faulty charger socket and had a word with Phillips support to see if I could get a new one or get it repaired. They said the item  was not maintainable and if out of warranty, which it was by a couple of months, I would have to buy a new one. Not sure how right to repair would work if the item was manufactured not to be maintainable.


The problem I have with trying to repair appliances is the lack of any diagnostic information even a circuit diagram of some sort would be helpful. This also seems to apply to the manufacturers. A friend had a faulty washing machine under warrantee. Five visits by three different "engineers" who did various tests, all said there was nothing wrong and it was working as it should despite it not completing a complete washing cycle, leaving cloths dirty and wet. She was told they would charge for any further call outs as there was nothing wrong, she lost it at this point and explained the facts of life to the call centre in no uncertain terms. They sent out a senior engineer who said she was right it was faulty, he had not seen the fault before and changed a part he thought may be faulty, it worked for a week before failing again. The same engineer came out again and replaced another part, it still did not work so he authorised a replacement machine. If the manufacturer's engineers can't find faults and have to replace things until something works what chance do we stand. 


Often I can identify the faulty board but without some diagnostic information it is difficult to determine if the  failed board has damaged or was damaged by something else so replacing individual items can become expensive and time consuming. 


While I like the idea of "right to repair" given  the increasing cost of labour and the decreasing cost of components is "right to repair" the right way forward?