I know EU has the Right to Repair initiative and that’s a step to the right direction. Still I’m left to wonder, how did we end up in a situation where it’s often cheaper to just buy a new item than fix the old?
What can individuals, communities, countries and organizations do to encourage people to repair rather than replace with a new?
The level of technical knowledge needed to repair things has increased, while general technical knowledge has decreased. People aren’t reading Popular Mechanics from the 1950’s where “build a hovercraft from an old lawnmower” the building one.
Parts are also a huge problem. Where previously a car alternator, for example, was three discrete parts, alternator-rectifier–voltage regulator, that is now a single assembly. If one of those parts goes bad you need to replace the whole thing, unless you have used parts you can pull from. For some things the assembly is NLA, no longer available.
As for why it’s cheaper that comes down to manufacturers wanting to sell you a new one, not wanting to have to spend money on repair stock sitting somewhere, and possibly not having access to it themselves since very few manufacturers actually produce a complete product on their own.
For something simple like a Bluetooth speaker, the power supply comes from one company, the Bluetooth module and amplifier from another, the driver, a display board, the housing, someone designs it and puts that all together. If any one of those chains fails you may not be able to source the part to fix something.
There are usually workarounds to this but unless you are doing it yourself it will be cost prohibitive
Example: friend rented a house with a new stove, gas top, electric oven. Two months later the oven stopped working, motherboard was NFG (no fucking good), it was also NLA. So the landlord bought a new stove. The old one could have been made to work, but the complete functionally would not have been there. If my friend owned this I would have said ‘I can make it work, but you will be missing these features’.
I’m one of those people that has the technical knowledge to repair most electronics. I still buy new sometimes.
A while ago, I had to repair a faulty pellet stove. It was obvious that the main control board was bad (there was a single small circuit board connected to a handful of relays and sensors, all of which tested as good). This board contained a small cheap microcontroller, a few MOSFETs, and a handful of discrete components. A replacement was $500. Maybe $10 in parts at the most, and they wanted to charge me half the cost of the entire appliance.
I was able to isolate the problem to a bad MOSFET and order a new one for about 50 cents. Had this been a complex circuit, there’s no way in hell I could have found the problem without a schematic.
So in my opinion, the problem is twofold. Manufacturers want ridiculous prices for replacement parts, and no documentation exists to repair the parts themselves. They obviously have schematics from when they designed the board. They should be forced to release them.
The lack of documentation is a huge problem, if you opened up an old tube amp to fix it there was often a full schematic taped to the cover. Solid state amps often had component values stenciled right on the board.
What’s your background that you’ve developed this knowledge? I fantasize about learning to do some of my own electronics repair, but I wouldn’t know where to begin. I’ve looked at trade school and continuing education programs and some online resources, but I don’t want to be an appliance repair guy. I just want to know which component to order and replace when my Japanese hot water boiler burns out.