"Right to repair" appliances.

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 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