23 ms·

The Disappearing Art of Maintenance

Syonyk 4y ago
I work in the tech industry. I'm somewhat rare in that I also work on my own vehicles, do my own maintenance, repair things, build my own stuff around the property, etc. A lot of coworkers at various places I've worked over the years view this as somewhere between "eccentric" and "slightly mad." "Why would you do that yourself, just pay someone else to do it!" is the common sentiment. But even with electronics, in an office full of tech workers, I still seemed to be one of very few who was willing to get my hands dirty. I had a steady side stream of evening projects repairing phones, laptops, etc (or, more usually, buying the broken ones, fixing them or merging them together into working ones, and then selling the working ones). I was also, far as I could tell, the only one in an office of >1000 willing to do things like take a soldering iron to a laptop to repair a failed power jack, or even just do things like taking a laptop substantially apart to replace a power input board with a new one. It never made any sense to me that I was the only one willing to do this sort of stuff. It's paid off well over the years, but it's quite baffling. This, of course, means that a lot of new things seem to be designed by people who've never had to work on things or repair them, with the expected results of "This is more painful to repair than it has any business being, because you never thought about it." Some of the best vehicles I've worked on over the years were old gen Subarus - EA82, so late 80s wagons. Every time I had to do something on them, it felt like the engineers had considered that someone would have to do this, and made it as easy as possible within the design. Things like the fuel filter were on the firewall, instead of under the vehicle out of the way. The fuel pump was on a skid plate in front of the tank, instead of in the tank. There was a storage compartment in the back that would fit a CV axle, should you want to carry your old one. Etc. They were simple, and easy to work on - so I drove them for quite a few years. But even today, I still constantly see the sentiment that "Well, it doesn't matter if it's easy to fix, we'll just recycle it and build a new one!" Usually in fields where recycling is poorly defined, at best - consumer electronics and EVs draw this sort of thing frequently. I view that as complete madness, because it's always going to be cheaper to repair something (at least if it wasn't a glued together hell to repair) than to crush it and replace it, but... again, this is an oddly minority view in the tech industry. I'm not sure how to fix it. We have a lot of people who are afraid to get their hands dirty, designing the things that are supposed to be the future of our civilization. That's a real problem. > No amount of utopian dreaming can make a battery hold any more energy or a piece of steel bear any more weight than it’s designed for. Yeah. That describes an awful lot of the problems we're facing...
- loganwedwards 4y ago
  I am on your same wavelength. Props to you for pursuing this mentality. I believe you would enjoy the book “The Innovation Delusion” by Vinsel and Russell
- donkeybeer 4y ago
  Its deliberate. Things are deliberately made hard to repair so you are forced to buy a new one when it breaks.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    I'd say semi deliberate. Market dynamics evolved to cut prices extremely low.. so manufacturers don't make enough cash to want to design complex and manage parts etc. Most printers are horrible.. even the assembly is hell, but if you pay a pro model (6x times the price) you get a modular and easy to open device.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    That's a cynical take -- I'm not sure it's untrue, but another factor is cost. Things that are not meant to be maintainable also tend to be cheaper to design and build initially. You don't have to worry about maintenance access when you design the product, or making the components replaceable, or using industry-standard parts. By avoiding maintenance concerns in design and production, you can sell a cheaper product, and the vast majority of buyers will look at purchase price and not total cost of ownership when they are evaluating choices.
    - coldacid 4y ago
      Just because it's cynical doesn't mean it's wrong.
      - drstewart 4y ago
        Just because it's cynical doesn't mean it's right either.
    - 4y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> “Maintenance must be valued on its own terms, and that means tearing down the economic system that rejects it.” This is not how you get people to side with you about the importance of maintenance. Honestly, if I have to choose between capitalism and valuing maintenance, I am going to go with capitalism every single time.
- ornornor 4y ago
  First, why? You’ll have to slave away at your job longer to replace things you could have otherwise repaired at a fraction of the cost, thus becoming a slave to your job to maintain your income just to keep on existing. And secondly, why? The pollution this kind of thinking generates is mind boggling and as everyone is becoming aware, we’re running out of time to avoid disaster. So, really, why?
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    It's important to love capitalism, regardless of whether it has a positive effect on anything in particular. It can tell when you love it, and if it feels loved, the more likely it is to favor you.
  - drstewart 4y ago
    This is still an argument for maintenance, not an argument against capitalism. Maintenance and capitalism aren't diametrically opposed.
- rikroots 4y ago
  I don't understand why the article assumes there's an either/or situation here (maybe it's written from a US-centric POV?); there's a lot of good money to be made from maintenance and waste management. For example here in the UK, cars have to pass an annual road-worthiness test, which gives car owners and garage owners a chance to fix things before they break. In homes, it's a requirement to have gas boilers checked annually - again maintenance. Councils and private housing associations regularly come round to check and refurbish exteriors, wiring, plumbing, etc - waiting until the house floods or burns down doesn't make economic sense to them. I worked on England's waste strategy published back in 2000. The waste hierarchy back then was "Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle" - the promotional focus at the time was on recycling (our recycling rates were abysmal), but maintenance ( == Refurbish) was definitely part of the mix.
Animats 4y ago
Is this a US thing? Here's a girl mechanic in China.[1] She's from a small village in the mountains, was able to go to a technical school in Kumming to learn hydropower, and came back to her village. She has a popular YouTube channel, so she's making money off of that, as well as repairing broken engines and generators in the village. Having restored rusty Teletype machines myself, I'm impressed with what she's doing. She routinely rewinds generator armatures, which is almost a dead art in the US. (There's one guy in San Francisco who still does that, and he has a backlog. He never got to the Teletype motors I wanted done. Urgent projects for old freight elevators and industrial equipment keep him busy.) She's an artist with an angle grinder, making parts from sheet steel. She cuts curves with an angle grinder, something usually done with a bandsaw. Her welding is so-so, but she is using a crappy AC welder. The engines she works on, usually small Diesels in the 5-30 KW range, are very basic and maintainable. They're a standard design in China from the Mao era. Look up "R175 Diesel engine". Hand crank start, cooling system is a water tank you have to fill when you refuel, no oil pump. You can buy one on Alibaba for under US$200, shipping not included.[2] There are people who post claiming she's fake. But there are many hours of videos showing her work. Once or twice, there are indications of outside help with heavy lifting, but that's about it. There are more informed nit-picks - getting paint on the mating faces of the cylinder head may cause leaks later, banging on bearings with a claw hammer can damage the bearing races, and those motors really need to go out the door with a motor protection circuit breaker (US$6 on Alibaba) so they don't burn out the windings again. But all this stuff is overbuilt, to survive years of minimal maintenance in agricultural villages. Although her electrical safety is scary. No strain relief where cables enter boxes, plain wires rather than nonmetallic armored behind walls when remodeling, standing in a stream while holding an outlet strip. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpPt42tLH5FRk__ytvMsejw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpPt42tLH5FRk__ytvMsejw [2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/R175-Diesel-Engine-Engine-Single-Cylinder_60393287578.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/R175-Diesel-Engine-En...
- coldacid 4y ago
  >Is this a US thing? If it is, it's also a Canadian thing, and a western European thing, at the very least.
nappy-doo 4y ago
I recently got bit by the pinball bug, and while reading this article all I could think about is that maintenance is part of the hobby. And for some it's all the hobby. Buying a pinball machine is expensive. Prices on used machines range from free to thousands (and ten thousand+ for really in demand ones). After you buy the machine, assuming it works, there's maintenance that occurs on the machine as a direct function of how often the machine is played. Maintaining that machine can be on you for parts and labor, or someone who comes to your home for 100$/hour (or so) +parts. There's no escaping the labor. You have to do it, or the pinball machine stops working. The maintenance ranges from simple cleaning this and that, all the way to removing components from boards, and rewiring destroyed traces. I love this about the hobby, and it's probably my favorite part. I like maintaining the machines probably more than I like playing them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
photochemsyn 4y ago
Making maintenance easier requires a fair amount of industry-wide standardization and interoperability, and many corporations view this a threat to their market share and hence, profitability. This has been widely seen in the computer industry over the years, although the long-term conclusions might oppose the short-term view, i.e. while at first the closed-system strategy might succeed, in the long term having an open-system approach will bring in customers who've been burned in one way or another by the closed-system world. A particular example I'm very familiar with is bicycles - they're fairly easy to maintain and work on relative to automobiles (no fluids, not much electronics until recently etc.). Ideally a bicycle can be maintained easily and replaced piecemeal from a wide variety of suppliers, i.e. everything is swappable and there are no non-standard parts, such as weirdly threaded bottom brackets or non-standard axle widths. Some companies have tried to do things like that - I think Shimano made an integrated brake lever/gear shifter for a while, whereas most bikes allow you to replace each item separately. For example, if your bicycle frame breaks, you should be able to remove all the parts and install them on a roughly similar frame, even from another manufacturer. As far as deliberately making repair more difficult in the hopes that people would toss their old devices and buy new ones, there's good evidence for that with Apple, such as the introduction of pentalobe screws for no other plausible reason than making repair require specialized tools (IFixit's comprehensive screwdriver kit is nice in that regard). The solution is once again, governmental regulation and agreement on certain standards, for example requiring a standard USB-C connection for all phones sold in a given market, etc.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Grease points already have a standard: zerk fittings, but many car parts don’t have them anymore, so you end up replacing all of these “sealed” “lifetime” bearings/joints entirely because they dried out and creak away. Would be cool if a bicycle bottom bracket or hub had those fittings. I volunteer at a bike co-op and between the generations, there’s been a toooooon of “standards”. Frequent mixes of imperial and metric. A French/Italian/British bike may have the opposite threading on parts than you expect. Different widths of spindles and wheel dishing and spoke lengths and oh my! How many mm wide would you like your tire? And will it even fit? Can you use that 700C accessory on your 27” or are you SOL? If we didn’t have a boneyard of bikes to scavenge from/strip for parts, we’d get nowhere. Then the corrosion issues when you “upgrade” to an aluminum seat post or stem on a steel frame… I guess part of this problem is the durability of bicycles. Cars probably have the same problem but their lifespan is a lot more limited. Lots of (small s) specialized tools out there because the manufacturer never intended for you to actually take the thing apart. Every design of freewheels required a different tool to remove. Definitely assembled several Frankenstein-bikes in my lifetime where you’ll need a rather diverse set of tools from different generations of bikes to eventually repair!
ptero 4y ago
I think a missing part for the propagation of those skill is being able to learn it as a hobby / side project. I would love to take some classes (and sign up my teenage son, too), but the adult education classes that I could find in the Boston area do not teach basic woodworking, metalworking, electrical, engines skills anymore (I heard insurance is blamed way more frequently than lack of interest). I would gladly pay good money for tuition and access to a machine shop, but it is impossible to find any options. Edit: to clarify, I am treating this as a hobby (I am happy with my job working on algorithms for things that fly), not a full-time trade program.
- soperj 4y ago
  I've been pretty happy with hand tools for woodworking for what it's worth. Cheap(except for the wood), and it's hard to cut off your own arms with hand tools. Lots of good youtube channels (Paul Sellers is awesome).
  - tomcam 4y ago
    > It's hard to cut off your own arms with hand tools Oh you've obvs never met me
- greedo 4y ago
  The university in my town has an Innovation Studio that has woodworking, metalworking, ceramic, textiles, 3d printing, basically everything maker related. Students get in for a cheap rate, non-students pay around $75/month. Not a bad deal really, to get access to all sorts of equipment and classes on how to use the gear. Even has some fancy CNC mills and laser cutters. Perfect for the hobbyist, or maker wanting to expand their skillset.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  Nevermind adult education, these skills aren't usually taught at even a high school level anymore. My highschool had the most garbage technical curriculum (southwest US).
- mrguyorama 4y ago
Kaibeezy 4y ago
The ice maker in my Samsung refrigerator has failed. Too late, I now know this is common for the brand. The part costs £100 ($100). The fridge was kind of expensive, with a deli drawer, French doors, etc. The refrigerant line for the entire fridge loops naked through the ice mechanism. Apparently, it is all too easy to nick the line, bricking the entire appliance. Accordingly, no repair person will touch it. I’m moderately competent with mechanical and electronic things, and I would try it, but I’d like a second brain, set of eyes and pair of skilled hands. No one is stepping up, presumably to avoid dealing with the hassle we’d have if we fail, myself included. I do like ice. Do I: a) Give it a shot myself risking a £2500 refrigerator. b) Keep trying to find someone who will fix it. Offer them some kind of waiver on replacement cost if they fail. c) Continue to make ice in trays, a few at a time, whilst the broken ice maker mocks me. d) Get a countertop ice maker for £100.
- yason 4y ago
  I approach appliances with the Unix philosophy. One thing to do one thing well -- or at least only one thing to be replaced when one of them breaks. And if I find a genuinely good item I can keep using it even if other machines break.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Or E) Buy the same exact appliance on Gumtree or whatever Craigslist approximator is currently available for probably something like 400 :-) You could also guilt trip Samsung on Twitter and they might replace it for free
  - atoav 4y ago
    I recently fixed a AV switcher (HD cinema stuff with custom programming by a media tech company) this way. The device costed 9k€ back in the day. One day it died and took the whole room with itself. Because it also controlled the lights via DALI no light could be switched on or off in that room. I figured out that the 24V "Medical Grade" (?) Made in China powersupply was toast. The typical bloated and leaking electrolytic capacitors were no surprise after nearly a decade of 24/7 operation. But there was also an exploded SOIC-14 IC by STM that I could not identify because coincidentally it was just the manufacturer part number that had been vaporized. A search for suspect parts didn't yield any results. I checked ebay and found a used device for 100 Euros and bought it. The used device also had a broken PSU. But the IC was working (and yeah, nothing you would be able to buy). So I swapped the capacitors and everything worked again. A replacement for that unit including programming would have costed my company 20k at least.
Melatonic 4y ago
I tell people I still do some of my shit "on prem" these days and get weird looks but its a skill I can't help but think is going to become very useful someday soon
- deathanatos 4y ago
  It's funny because I've been "in cloud" all my career and that experience has taught me the value of "on prem".
mountainb 4y ago
The last time I paid a general appliance repairman to fix my dishwasher, he replaced it with a nonstandard part. It semi-functioned for another couple years, but it generally had a hard time self-cleaning its own filter, which lead to lots of strange and persistent problems. Eventually, the dishwasher failed, causing a leak that required a lot of the flooring around it to be replaced. I should have just purchased a new dishwasher at the time that GE's planned obsolescence part failed, right at the end of its warranty period. So, what the article misses is that a lot of the suppression of maintenance providers is related to how our intellectual property regime has been crafted. The statutes and case law give corporations enormous power that they did not really have in previous eras to control supply chains and documentation. There are other factors feeding into this, but if you are looking for a solution to this set of issues it lies within IP reform first and foremost, although that would have its own set of tradeoffs and consequences.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Designing for maintenance often means designing for failure; for example, I want to design my kitchen under the assumption the dishwasher will fail and flood the room, such that it drains safely away without causing damage.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    Sure, the consequence of our IP regime is that there is a temptation to design to milk those failures as a revenue source. With a different IP regime one could imagine incentives that allowed a "right to repair" where IP violation done as a part of a owner commissioned repair were widely accepted or a manufacturer forfeit's the IP when they cease stocking the part defined as "admit they don't stock it" or "do not have it in stock for 6 total months of a year"
  - mjevans 4y ago
    Then your kitchen (and laundry room, etc) would have to be properly designed and built, with drains, and a floor sloped to them, waterproof and mold proof materials. Maybe even a sub-panel so the major appliances and each wall outlet were each on their own circuit and you could plug in a waffle maker and toaster oven on the same wall without popping a circuit breaker.
maerF0x0 4y ago
fwiw I've noticed that my 2016 vehicle is surprisingly low maintenance compared to previous generations of vehicles. From longer cycles for basic maintenance[2] to parts just not failing as soon as I was used to (eg, check out this article[1] about cv joints lasting 2-3x as long). I wish i could say the same about home appliances. [1]: https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/how-long-should-you-get-out-of-cv-joints.128443/ https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/how-long-should-yo... [2]: eg cars going from 3k to 5k to 8k miles between oil changes, kn&n filters lasting 50k miles on hwy etc.
- mindentropy 4y ago
  How are K&N filters compared to the stock filters? I am thinking of changing my stock filter to K&N filters but I have a lot of hesitation on how long it will last.
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    I think the two main takes are: 1. a tiny bit of horsepower/fuel efficiency and no maintenance -- win 2. It might work by increasing the size of things allowed through, which maybe matters to your engine life? -- loss. YMMV, literally
_trampeltier 4y ago
I work in maintenance in the steel industry. To find good people is hard, today if somebody has more than two brain cells, the do a lot of study and never really start to work with there hands. I see it now, at moment several people get retired at our company. Instead one smart guy who did everything, you need know one guy for paperwork, one guy for his brainwork, one guy for what he did with his hands .. and one guy more to coordinate these three guys. Also today with computer everywhere .. before you changed a setting with a screwdriver on a poti, now with computer everywhere .. your installed version is to old, download the latest version, try to install, it fails because the company has tight security rules on companys computer, try on a airgaped notebook for technic, it fails now because you can't install or license the software because no internet .. to keep software up to date and running for over 10 or 20 years is just a f**ing pain. And it gets worse ever day.
montereynack 4y ago
I guess I’ll take the opportunity to throw in my hat… I’m currently running a very early-stage startup trying to address some of the brain drain and complexity in industrial maintenance. If you’d like to talk/rant about your job and the pain points you have, I’d be all ears! Wouldn’t be a sales call, I’m just trying to talk to people at this point. Feel free to DM me if interested.
hnthrowaway0328 4y ago
I think in general the human mind treats Maintenance as less important or not important at all. The ancient people realized this: When I studied Chinese in primary school, there was one ancient text that spoke about a discussion between a king and a famous doctor. The doctor explained that his brother was superior than him in the medical science but no one heard about him because he could always treat small illnesses before then evolved into terminal ones, so people said, "Oh he is a fine doctor, but he only treats minor illnesses". This text has been resonating with me for many years. Humans simply do NOT appreciate maintenance people TBH. Me as an example: I own a house but whenever I plan maintenance of my house I always tried to push it a bit further because 1) It's expensive, and 2) Manual or company says that I need to do X every Y years, can I push back say 10% and still don't break things? As for my electronics, unfortunately I never maintained them and in my earlier days I never had a computer that lasted for 3+ years -- they always broke down due to this or that reason. And then both of my knees have degenerative issues; I had kidney stones; I need to maintain physical health but I was and still is too lazy to do that. I simply do not have the maintenance mindset. This probably can stretch out to the whole society: We simply do not appreciate Maintenance people. They are usually lowly paid and have low moral because what they work is chore. They also do not get to enjoy creating new things. Basically you need someone who has the mindset to appreciate maintenance to be a good maintenance person, and a society of this mindset to support such work and lower the cost. Nowadays we do not. Nowadays we always doubt the necessity of maintenance and sometimes even accuse other people to charge a large bill for maintenance (sadly, this could be true). There is little trust between.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  When I started as a CS graduate, I was thrilled to be on a complex project as a lowly maintainer. I dove into that code and learned how stuff worked. People avoided those areas because it was too dirty, scary or hard sounding. That's the story of my career. Pick a popular project and be a fish in big pond or pick something others stayed away from and own it. Our future is going to be a shitstorm of breakage. Covid should have taught us a lesson but we're going to go on while infrastructure (physical and virtual) starts to break and no Top 10 grad is going to want to touch it. You're not going to have a choice about plumbing or roof leaks - nobody is coming for a week and you are on your own. On your knees - I look at my classmates now and consider HS sports to be child abuse. My coworkers talk about their kids surgeries. Those 4 or 5 people boarding your plane in wheelchairs now? It's going to be 3X that in a decade. But that'll be fine, because you'll have to wait a couple hours for the rare pilot to show up.
s1mon 4y ago
I've spent 30+ years designing and engineering consumer and medical products, mostly for high volume production. While I detest working on projects I consider "instant landfill", the reality is that so much of our built society whether it be a toy car, a mobile phone, or a house, is designed to appeal to consumers. Consumers who want their phone to be light, waterproof, beautiful and more powerful than the last one they bought, and at the lowest price possible. Prioritizing things like that means that a lot is invested in specialized equipment, fixtures, and training for the labor force which manufactures their new shiny object. Duplicating that equipment and expertise is next to impossible on the scale of maintenance. Maintenance is more of a craft. Think about your local car mechanic vs the factory which produced the car in the first place. Even in the factories where your new shiny consumer electronics products are produced, when Chinese News Year is over, and a bunch of the staff turns over, getting the production line up and running again with the same quality is challenging. Despite there being documented standard operating procedures, incoming and outgoing quality checks, etc... there's a lot which is tribal knowledge and muscle memory of the operators. Even if things are highly automated (and you'd be shocked how much is done by hand despite all those magical How It's Made videos), those machines need to be adjusted and tuned to keep from producing junk. This is all to say that so many things are on the hairy edge of working well. They're not always so easy to disassemble and reassemble without destroying seals, alignment, calibration etc. To a degree, some of this can be blamed on products becoming more and more electronic and miniaturized, but the reality is that so many things involve inseparable assemblies (whether it's an heirloom chair glued out of wood, a PCBA, the drywall in your house, or a welded and painted autobody). While there are rework techniques for these, they're never the same as following the normal process in the factory.
- lapinot 4y ago
  > so much of our built society [..] is designed to appeal to consumers. Consumers who want their phone to be light, waterproof, beautiful and more powerful than the last one they bought, and at the lowest price possible. Nope, i beg to differ. The appeal is built too, it's no secret that our global retail economy is largely driven by marketing and communication, since ww2. Hence it's driven by producers and not by consumers: these criteria are what producers want consumers to want. Which they largely managed to assert. Mass media, mass consumption, all this is guided from the top, not the bottom. Surely there is nuance, the top-down control strives to test if it's not too far from something that would actually be appealing to the bottom. But the main driving force here is to pump up the volume, and to do so by creating markets, by forcefully pushing goods onto consumers habits and by making things short-lived (using forced obsolescence, but more commonly and insidiously by producing pointless new versions all the time). Actually once you go down that path, you see that the whole underpinnings of "consumer"/"producer" duality is biased towards this state of affairs. It's no wonder Marx babbled about taking over the means of productions (and ipso facto destroying passive consumption as a practice). Even Knuth says that the only proper way to make any tool is to design it for your own use (can't remember out the source for this one, probably something about TeX). This is a major reason for grassroots software domination against corporate products, despite the ridiculous imbalance.
doodlebugging 4y ago
The author goes into the whole Reduce, Reuse, Recycle part of things but I think they miss out on a current trend [0] that may be a subset of Reuse. [0] https://www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com/ https://www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com/ This outfit takes in surplus materials, obsolete parts, etc. and sells them either to be reused as originally intended by a new owner or repurposed to accomplish a new task that the designer never considered. Repurposing things allows us to keep a lot of stuff out of landfills and for many of the things they sell, extend the useful life of things that are obsolete in their original purpose but that aren't close to being worn out.
Eleison23 4y ago
I attended community college a few years ago and took a pair of courses designed as preparation for CompTIA A+ certification. Our final project for the class was to refurbish a desktop computer and donate it. Our instructor fired up a compressed air machine and we blew out all the dust. We checked connections and RAM, peripherals, optical drive, HDD, etc. We made sure the things booted and probed OK. We checked cosmetics on the front bezel and around the case. No wiping HDD or installing of OS was necessary here, it was strictly a hardware/BIOS-level project. Then we were graded and the refurbished machines were all shipped off to a local student-run project that provides usable computers to worthy organizations who need them. Definitely a feel-good project, all around!
erwinh 4y ago
Would have expected a namedrop of Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with that title
mikewarot 4y ago
>maintenance has to be valued outside of austerity, and right now it’s unclear if our current economic system is capable of that. As we hit the backside of the carbon pulse that gave many of us a standard of living that Kings could only dream of as few as 200 years ago, the need to build things for the long term will once again take precedent. The ability for governments and institutions to paper over reality shouldn't be underestimated, but we're eventually going to have to trade power coupons for natural resources, and those resources are finite, and the difficulty of extracting them from the earth is increasing. The market driven insanity of freely using virgin material for disposable trinkets will correct itself in time.
throwaway14356 4y ago
design for maintenance.
tomcam 4y ago
I’m all about maintenance, but mostly in a literal sense. It turns out that there’s another definition of that word in the real estate world. I sold a house a few years ago that the real estate agent described as having “deferred maintenance“, which annoyed me. Because I always maintain my houses scrupulously. Fast forward a few years later and I now understand that phrase actually means “it’s not decorated in the current style“. The fact that I don’t spare gigantic expenses such as major electrical or floor repairs, massive septic field projects, replacing large drainage systems, central air conditioning, etc. all at tremendous costs, is irrelevant to people who use the phrase “deferred maintenance“. They don’t care at all whether I just replaced a pool pump or expensive air conditioner just before selling. No one who buys a house from me is going to have to replace their pipes or ducts within the next 20 years, but that just isn’t a selling point.
- stewx 4y ago
  That agent is clearly ignorant. Also not serving their clients well because cosmetic stuff is easy to do, while below-the-surface repairs are often a lot more expensive.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  That was just a bad agent. If you kept proof of recent repairs and capital investments, and showed them to prospective sellers, they would definitely value them. Assuming that the price of the land of your house is not 80% of the price of your house.
mrjin 4y ago
It's all by design as a good maintainability is not good for business for obvious reasons: 1. It's require much more efforts in designing and manufacturing and thus cost would be much higher. 2. It reduces failure rates dramatically and thus leads to much less sales. 3. It reduces revenues from servicing. Examples: 1. Built in non-removable battery in electronics such as phones. 2. Glues instead of screws in electronics such as phones. 3. Soldered on CPU/RAM in laptops.
cafard 4y ago
An unpaid plug for New York Replacement Plumbing Parts: in 2004, we installed faucets from a company that soon went out of business. Were it not for NYRPP, we'd have been forced to buy new faucets after cartridges failed.

I work in the tech industry. I'm somewhat rare in that I also work on my own vehicles, do my own maintenance, repair things, build my own stuff around the property, etc. A lot of coworkers at various places I've worked over the years view this as somewhere between "eccentric" and "slightly mad." "Why would you do that yourself, just pay someone else to do it!" is the common sentiment. But even with electronics, in an office full of tech workers, I still seemed to be one of very few who was willing to get my hands dirty. I had a steady side stream of evening projects repairing phones, laptops, etc (or, more usually, buying the broken ones, fixing them or merging them together into working ones, and then selling the working ones). I was also, far as I could tell, the only one in an office of >1000 willing to do things like take a soldering iron to a laptop to repair a failed power jack, or even just do things like taking a laptop substantially apart to replace a power input board with a new one. It never made any sense to me that I was the only one willing to do this sort of stuff. It's paid off well over the years, but it's quite baffling. This, of course, means that a lot of new things seem to be designed by people who've never had to work on things or repair them, with the expected results of "This is more painful to repair than it has any business being, because you never thought about it." Some of the best vehicles I've worked on over the years were old gen Subarus - EA82, so late 80s wagons. Every time I had to do something on them, it felt like the engineers had considered that someone would have to do this, and made it as easy as possible within the design. Things like the fuel filter were on the firewall, instead of under the vehicle out of the way. The fuel pump was on a skid plate in front of the tank, instead of in the tank. There was a storage compartment in the back that would fit a CV axle, should you want to carry your old one. Etc. They were simple, and easy to work on - so I drove them for quite a few years. But even today, I still constantly see the sentiment that "Well, it doesn't matter if it's easy to fix, we'll just recycle it and build a new one!" Usually in fields where recycling is poorly defined, at best - consumer electronics and EVs draw this sort of thing frequently. I view that as complete madness, because it's always going to be cheaper to repair something (at least if it wasn't a glued together hell to repair) than to crush it and replace it, but... again, this is an oddly minority view in the tech industry. I'm not sure how to fix it. We have a lot of people who are afraid to get their hands dirty, designing the things that are supposed to be the future of our civilization. That's a real problem. > No amount of utopian dreaming can make a battery hold any more energy or a piece of steel bear any more weight than it’s designed for. Yeah. That describes an awful lot of the problems we're facing...

loganwedwards 4y ago
I am on your same wavelength. Props to you for pursuing this mentality. I believe you would enjoy the book “The Innovation Delusion” by Vinsel and Russell
donkeybeer 4y ago
Its deliberate. Things are deliberately made hard to repair so you are forced to buy a new one when it breaks.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  I'd say semi deliberate. Market dynamics evolved to cut prices extremely low.. so manufacturers don't make enough cash to want to design complex and manage parts etc. Most printers are horrible.. even the assembly is hell, but if you pay a pro model (6x times the price) you get a modular and easy to open device.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  That's a cynical take -- I'm not sure it's untrue, but another factor is cost. Things that are not meant to be maintainable also tend to be cheaper to design and build initially. You don't have to worry about maintenance access when you design the product, or making the components replaceable, or using industry-standard parts. By avoiding maintenance concerns in design and production, you can sell a cheaper product, and the vast majority of buyers will look at purchase price and not total cost of ownership when they are evaluating choices.
  - coldacid 4y ago
    Just because it's cynical doesn't mean it's wrong.
    - drstewart 4y ago
      Just because it's cynical doesn't mean it's right either.
  - 4y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> “Maintenance must be valued on its own terms, and that means tearing down the economic system that rejects it.” This is not how you get people to side with you about the importance of maintenance. Honestly, if I have to choose between capitalism and valuing maintenance, I am going to go with capitalism every single time.

ornornor 4y ago
First, why? You’ll have to slave away at your job longer to replace things you could have otherwise repaired at a fraction of the cost, thus becoming a slave to your job to maintain your income just to keep on existing. And secondly, why? The pollution this kind of thinking generates is mind boggling and as everyone is becoming aware, we’re running out of time to avoid disaster. So, really, why?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  It's important to love capitalism, regardless of whether it has a positive effect on anything in particular. It can tell when you love it, and if it feels loved, the more likely it is to favor you.
- drstewart 4y ago
  This is still an argument for maintenance, not an argument against capitalism. Maintenance and capitalism aren't diametrically opposed.
rikroots 4y ago
I don't understand why the article assumes there's an either/or situation here (maybe it's written from a US-centric POV?); there's a lot of good money to be made from maintenance and waste management. For example here in the UK, cars have to pass an annual road-worthiness test, which gives car owners and garage owners a chance to fix things before they break. In homes, it's a requirement to have gas boilers checked annually - again maintenance. Councils and private housing associations regularly come round to check and refurbish exteriors, wiring, plumbing, etc - waiting until the house floods or burns down doesn't make economic sense to them. I worked on England's waste strategy published back in 2000. The waste hierarchy back then was "Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle" - the promotional focus at the time was on recycling (our recycling rates were abysmal), but maintenance ( == Refurbish) was definitely part of the mix.

Animats 4y ago

Is this a US thing? Here's a girl mechanic in China.[1] She's from a small village in the mountains, was able to go to a technical school in Kumming to learn hydropower, and came back to her village. She has a popular YouTube channel, so she's making money off of that, as well as repairing broken engines and generators in the village. Having restored rusty Teletype machines myself, I'm impressed with what she's doing. She routinely rewinds generator armatures, which is almost a dead art in the US. (There's one guy in San Francisco who still does that, and he has a backlog. He never got to the Teletype motors I wanted done. Urgent projects for old freight elevators and industrial equipment keep him busy.) She's an artist with an angle grinder, making parts from sheet steel. She cuts curves with an angle grinder, something usually done with a bandsaw. Her welding is so-so, but she is using a crappy AC welder. The engines she works on, usually small Diesels in the 5-30 KW range, are very basic and maintainable. They're a standard design in China from the Mao era. Look up "R175 Diesel engine". Hand crank start, cooling system is a water tank you have to fill when you refuel, no oil pump. You can buy one on Alibaba for under US$200, shipping not included.[2] There are people who post claiming she's fake. But there are many hours of videos showing her work. Once or twice, there are indications of outside help with heavy lifting, but that's about it. There are more informed nit-picks - getting paint on the mating faces of the cylinder head may cause leaks later, banging on bearings with a claw hammer can damage the bearing races, and those motors really need to go out the door with a motor protection circuit breaker (US$6 on Alibaba) so they don't burn out the windings again. But all this stuff is overbuilt, to survive years of minimal maintenance in agricultural villages. Although her electrical safety is scary. No strain relief where cables enter boxes, plain wires rather than nonmetallic armored behind walls when remodeling, standing in a stream while holding an outlet strip. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpPt42tLH5FRk__ytvMsejw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpPt42tLH5FRk__ytvMsejw [2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/R175-Diesel-Engine-Engine-Single-Cylinder_60393287578.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/R175-Diesel-Engine-En...

coldacid 4y ago
>Is this a US thing? If it is, it's also a Canadian thing, and a western European thing, at the very least.

nappy-doo 4y ago

I recently got bit by the pinball bug, and while reading this article all I could think about is that maintenance is part of the hobby. And for some it's all the hobby. Buying a pinball machine is expensive. Prices on used machines range from free to thousands (and ten thousand+ for really in demand ones). After you buy the machine, assuming it works, there's maintenance that occurs on the machine as a direct function of how often the machine is played. Maintaining that machine can be on you for parts and labor, or someone who comes to your home for 100$/hour (or so) +parts. There's no escaping the labor. You have to do it, or the pinball machine stops working. The maintenance ranges from simple cleaning this and that, all the way to removing components from boards, and rewiring destroyed traces. I love this about the hobby, and it's probably my favorite part. I like maintaining the machines probably more than I like playing them.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

photochemsyn 4y ago

Making maintenance easier requires a fair amount of industry-wide standardization and interoperability, and many corporations view this a threat to their market share and hence, profitability. This has been widely seen in the computer industry over the years, although the long-term conclusions might oppose the short-term view, i.e. while at first the closed-system strategy might succeed, in the long term having an open-system approach will bring in customers who've been burned in one way or another by the closed-system world. A particular example I'm very familiar with is bicycles - they're fairly easy to maintain and work on relative to automobiles (no fluids, not much electronics until recently etc.). Ideally a bicycle can be maintained easily and replaced piecemeal from a wide variety of suppliers, i.e. everything is swappable and there are no non-standard parts, such as weirdly threaded bottom brackets or non-standard axle widths. Some companies have tried to do things like that - I think Shimano made an integrated brake lever/gear shifter for a while, whereas most bikes allow you to replace each item separately. For example, if your bicycle frame breaks, you should be able to remove all the parts and install them on a roughly similar frame, even from another manufacturer. As far as deliberately making repair more difficult in the hopes that people would toss their old devices and buy new ones, there's good evidence for that with Apple, such as the introduction of pentalobe screws for no other plausible reason than making repair require specialized tools (IFixit's comprehensive screwdriver kit is nice in that regard). The solution is once again, governmental regulation and agreement on certain standards, for example requiring a standard USB-C connection for all phones sold in a given market, etc.

Scoundreller 4y ago
Grease points already have a standard: zerk fittings, but many car parts don’t have them anymore, so you end up replacing all of these “sealed” “lifetime” bearings/joints entirely because they dried out and creak away. Would be cool if a bicycle bottom bracket or hub had those fittings. I volunteer at a bike co-op and between the generations, there’s been a toooooon of “standards”. Frequent mixes of imperial and metric. A French/Italian/British bike may have the opposite threading on parts than you expect. Different widths of spindles and wheel dishing and spoke lengths and oh my! How many mm wide would you like your tire? And will it even fit? Can you use that 700C accessory on your 27” or are you SOL? If we didn’t have a boneyard of bikes to scavenge from/strip for parts, we’d get nowhere. Then the corrosion issues when you “upgrade” to an aluminum seat post or stem on a steel frame… I guess part of this problem is the durability of bicycles. Cars probably have the same problem but their lifespan is a lot more limited. Lots of (small s) specialized tools out there because the manufacturer never intended for you to actually take the thing apart. Every design of freewheels required a different tool to remove. Definitely assembled several Frankenstein-bikes in my lifetime where you’ll need a rather diverse set of tools from different generations of bikes to eventually repair!

ptero 4y ago

I think a missing part for the propagation of those skill is being able to learn it as a hobby / side project. I would love to take some classes (and sign up my teenage son, too), but the adult education classes that I could find in the Boston area do not teach basic woodworking, metalworking, electrical, engines skills anymore (I heard insurance is blamed way more frequently than lack of interest). I would gladly pay good money for tuition and access to a machine shop, but it is impossible to find any options. Edit: to clarify, I am treating this as a hobby (I am happy with my job working on algorithms for things that fly), not a full-time trade program.

soperj 4y ago
I've been pretty happy with hand tools for woodworking for what it's worth. Cheap(except for the wood), and it's hard to cut off your own arms with hand tools. Lots of good youtube channels (Paul Sellers is awesome).
- tomcam 4y ago
  > It's hard to cut off your own arms with hand tools Oh you've obvs never met me
greedo 4y ago
The university in my town has an Innovation Studio that has woodworking, metalworking, ceramic, textiles, 3d printing, basically everything maker related. Students get in for a cheap rate, non-students pay around $75/month. Not a bad deal really, to get access to all sorts of equipment and classes on how to use the gear. Even has some fancy CNC mills and laser cutters. Perfect for the hobbyist, or maker wanting to expand their skillset.
Ancalagon 4y ago
Nevermind adult education, these skills aren't usually taught at even a high school level anymore. My highschool had the most garbage technical curriculum (southwest US).
mrguyorama 4y ago

Kaibeezy 4y ago

The ice maker in my Samsung refrigerator has failed. Too late, I now know this is common for the brand. The part costs £100 ($100). The fridge was kind of expensive, with a deli drawer, French doors, etc. The refrigerant line for the entire fridge loops naked through the ice mechanism. Apparently, it is all too easy to nick the line, bricking the entire appliance. Accordingly, no repair person will touch it. I’m moderately competent with mechanical and electronic things, and I would try it, but I’d like a second brain, set of eyes and pair of skilled hands. No one is stepping up, presumably to avoid dealing with the hassle we’d have if we fail, myself included. I do like ice. Do I: a) Give it a shot myself risking a £2500 refrigerator. b) Keep trying to find someone who will fix it. Offer them some kind of waiver on replacement cost if they fail. c) Continue to make ice in trays, a few at a time, whilst the broken ice maker mocks me. d) Get a countertop ice maker for £100.

yason 4y ago
I approach appliances with the Unix philosophy. One thing to do one thing well -- or at least only one thing to be replaced when one of them breaks. And if I find a genuinely good item I can keep using it even if other machines break.
Melatonic 4y ago
Or E) Buy the same exact appliance on Gumtree or whatever Craigslist approximator is currently available for probably something like 400 :-) You could also guilt trip Samsung on Twitter and they might replace it for free
- atoav 4y ago
  I recently fixed a AV switcher (HD cinema stuff with custom programming by a media tech company) this way. The device costed 9k€ back in the day. One day it died and took the whole room with itself. Because it also controlled the lights via DALI no light could be switched on or off in that room. I figured out that the 24V "Medical Grade" (?) Made in China powersupply was toast. The typical bloated and leaking electrolytic capacitors were no surprise after nearly a decade of 24/7 operation. But there was also an exploded SOIC-14 IC by STM that I could not identify because coincidentally it was just the manufacturer part number that had been vaporized. A search for suspect parts didn't yield any results. I checked ebay and found a used device for 100 Euros and bought it. The used device also had a broken PSU. But the IC was working (and yeah, nothing you would be able to buy). So I swapped the capacitors and everything worked again. A replacement for that unit including programming would have costed my company 20k at least.

Melatonic 4y ago

I tell people I still do some of my shit "on prem" these days and get weird looks but its a skill I can't help but think is going to become very useful someday soon

deathanatos 4y ago
It's funny because I've been "in cloud" all my career and that experience has taught me the value of "on prem".

mountainb 4y ago

The last time I paid a general appliance repairman to fix my dishwasher, he replaced it with a nonstandard part. It semi-functioned for another couple years, but it generally had a hard time self-cleaning its own filter, which lead to lots of strange and persistent problems. Eventually, the dishwasher failed, causing a leak that required a lot of the flooring around it to be replaced. I should have just purchased a new dishwasher at the time that GE's planned obsolescence part failed, right at the end of its warranty period. So, what the article misses is that a lot of the suppression of maintenance providers is related to how our intellectual property regime has been crafted. The statutes and case law give corporations enormous power that they did not really have in previous eras to control supply chains and documentation. There are other factors feeding into this, but if you are looking for a solution to this set of issues it lies within IP reform first and foremost, although that would have its own set of tradeoffs and consequences.

bombcar 4y ago
Designing for maintenance often means designing for failure; for example, I want to design my kitchen under the assumption the dishwasher will fail and flood the room, such that it drains safely away without causing damage.
- ticviking 4y ago
  Sure, the consequence of our IP regime is that there is a temptation to design to milk those failures as a revenue source. With a different IP regime one could imagine incentives that allowed a "right to repair" where IP violation done as a part of a owner commissioned repair were widely accepted or a manufacturer forfeit's the IP when they cease stocking the part defined as "admit they don't stock it" or "do not have it in stock for 6 total months of a year"
- mjevans 4y ago
  Then your kitchen (and laundry room, etc) would have to be properly designed and built, with drains, and a floor sloped to them, waterproof and mold proof materials. Maybe even a sub-panel so the major appliances and each wall outlet were each on their own circuit and you could plug in a waffle maker and toaster oven on the same wall without popping a circuit breaker.

maerF0x0 4y ago

fwiw I've noticed that my 2016 vehicle is surprisingly low maintenance compared to previous generations of vehicles. From longer cycles for basic maintenance[2] to parts just not failing as soon as I was used to (eg, check out this article[1] about cv joints lasting 2-3x as long). I wish i could say the same about home appliances. [1]: https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/how-long-should-you-get-out-of-cv-joints.128443/ https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/how-long-should-yo... [2]: eg cars going from 3k to 5k to 8k miles between oil changes, kn&n filters lasting 50k miles on hwy etc.

mindentropy 4y ago
How are K&N filters compared to the stock filters? I am thinking of changing my stock filter to K&N filters but I have a lot of hesitation on how long it will last.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  I think the two main takes are: 1. a tiny bit of horsepower/fuel efficiency and no maintenance -- win 2. It might work by increasing the size of things allowed through, which maybe matters to your engine life? -- loss. YMMV, literally

_trampeltier 4y ago

I work in maintenance in the steel industry. To find good people is hard, today if somebody has more than two brain cells, the do a lot of study and never really start to work with there hands. I see it now, at moment several people get retired at our company. Instead one smart guy who did everything, you need know one guy for paperwork, one guy for his brainwork, one guy for what he did with his hands .. and one guy more to coordinate these three guys. Also today with computer everywhere .. before you changed a setting with a screwdriver on a poti, now with computer everywhere .. your installed version is to old, download the latest version, try to install, it fails because the company has tight security rules on companys computer, try on a airgaped notebook for technic, it fails now because you can't install or license the software because no internet .. to keep software up to date and running for over 10 or 20 years is just a f**ing pain. And it gets worse ever day.

montereynack 4y ago

I guess I’ll take the opportunity to throw in my hat… I’m currently running a very early-stage startup trying to address some of the brain drain and complexity in industrial maintenance. If you’d like to talk/rant about your job and the pain points you have, I’d be all ears! Wouldn’t be a sales call, I’m just trying to talk to people at this point. Feel free to DM me if interested.

hnthrowaway0328 4y ago

I think in general the human mind treats Maintenance as less important or not important at all. The ancient people realized this: When I studied Chinese in primary school, there was one ancient text that spoke about a discussion between a king and a famous doctor. The doctor explained that his brother was superior than him in the medical science but no one heard about him because he could always treat small illnesses before then evolved into terminal ones, so people said, "Oh he is a fine doctor, but he only treats minor illnesses". This text has been resonating with me for many years. Humans simply do NOT appreciate maintenance people TBH. Me as an example: I own a house but whenever I plan maintenance of my house I always tried to push it a bit further because 1) It's expensive, and 2) Manual or company says that I need to do X every Y years, can I push back say 10% and still don't break things? As for my electronics, unfortunately I never maintained them and in my earlier days I never had a computer that lasted for 3+ years -- they always broke down due to this or that reason. And then both of my knees have degenerative issues; I had kidney stones; I need to maintain physical health but I was and still is too lazy to do that. I simply do not have the maintenance mindset. This probably can stretch out to the whole society: We simply do not appreciate Maintenance people. They are usually lowly paid and have low moral because what they work is chore. They also do not get to enjoy creating new things. Basically you need someone who has the mindset to appreciate maintenance to be a good maintenance person, and a society of this mindset to support such work and lower the cost. Nowadays we do not. Nowadays we always doubt the necessity of maintenance and sometimes even accuse other people to charge a large bill for maintenance (sadly, this could be true). There is little trust between.

hindsightbias 4y ago
When I started as a CS graduate, I was thrilled to be on a complex project as a lowly maintainer. I dove into that code and learned how stuff worked. People avoided those areas because it was too dirty, scary or hard sounding. That's the story of my career. Pick a popular project and be a fish in big pond or pick something others stayed away from and own it. Our future is going to be a shitstorm of breakage. Covid should have taught us a lesson but we're going to go on while infrastructure (physical and virtual) starts to break and no Top 10 grad is going to want to touch it. You're not going to have a choice about plumbing or roof leaks - nobody is coming for a week and you are on your own. On your knees - I look at my classmates now and consider HS sports to be child abuse. My coworkers talk about their kids surgeries. Those 4 or 5 people boarding your plane in wheelchairs now? It's going to be 3X that in a decade. But that'll be fine, because you'll have to wait a couple hours for the rare pilot to show up.

s1mon 4y ago

I've spent 30+ years designing and engineering consumer and medical products, mostly for high volume production. While I detest working on projects I consider "instant landfill", the reality is that so much of our built society whether it be a toy car, a mobile phone, or a house, is designed to appeal to consumers. Consumers who want their phone to be light, waterproof, beautiful and more powerful than the last one they bought, and at the lowest price possible. Prioritizing things like that means that a lot is invested in specialized equipment, fixtures, and training for the labor force which manufactures their new shiny object. Duplicating that equipment and expertise is next to impossible on the scale of maintenance. Maintenance is more of a craft. Think about your local car mechanic vs the factory which produced the car in the first place. Even in the factories where your new shiny consumer electronics products are produced, when Chinese News Year is over, and a bunch of the staff turns over, getting the production line up and running again with the same quality is challenging. Despite there being documented standard operating procedures, incoming and outgoing quality checks, etc... there's a lot which is tribal knowledge and muscle memory of the operators. Even if things are highly automated (and you'd be shocked how much is done by hand despite all those magical How It's Made videos), those machines need to be adjusted and tuned to keep from producing junk. This is all to say that so many things are on the hairy edge of working well. They're not always so easy to disassemble and reassemble without destroying seals, alignment, calibration etc. To a degree, some of this can be blamed on products becoming more and more electronic and miniaturized, but the reality is that so many things involve inseparable assemblies (whether it's an heirloom chair glued out of wood, a PCBA, the drywall in your house, or a welded and painted autobody). While there are rework techniques for these, they're never the same as following the normal process in the factory.

lapinot 4y ago
> so much of our built society [..] is designed to appeal to consumers. Consumers who want their phone to be light, waterproof, beautiful and more powerful than the last one they bought, and at the lowest price possible. Nope, i beg to differ. The appeal is built too, it's no secret that our global retail economy is largely driven by marketing and communication, since ww2. Hence it's driven by producers and not by consumers: these criteria are what producers want consumers to want. Which they largely managed to assert. Mass media, mass consumption, all this is guided from the top, not the bottom. Surely there is nuance, the top-down control strives to test if it's not too far from something that would actually be appealing to the bottom. But the main driving force here is to pump up the volume, and to do so by creating markets, by forcefully pushing goods onto consumers habits and by making things short-lived (using forced obsolescence, but more commonly and insidiously by producing pointless new versions all the time). Actually once you go down that path, you see that the whole underpinnings of "consumer"/"producer" duality is biased towards this state of affairs. It's no wonder Marx babbled about taking over the means of productions (and ipso facto destroying passive consumption as a practice). Even Knuth says that the only proper way to make any tool is to design it for your own use (can't remember out the source for this one, probably something about TeX). This is a major reason for grassroots software domination against corporate products, despite the ridiculous imbalance.

doodlebugging 4y ago

The author goes into the whole Reduce, Reuse, Recycle part of things but I think they miss out on a current trend [0] that may be a subset of Reuse. [0] https://www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com/ https://www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com/ This outfit takes in surplus materials, obsolete parts, etc. and sells them either to be reused as originally intended by a new owner or repurposed to accomplish a new task that the designer never considered. Repurposing things allows us to keep a lot of stuff out of landfills and for many of the things they sell, extend the useful life of things that are obsolete in their original purpose but that aren't close to being worn out.

Eleison23 4y ago

I attended community college a few years ago and took a pair of courses designed as preparation for CompTIA A+ certification. Our final project for the class was to refurbish a desktop computer and donate it. Our instructor fired up a compressed air machine and we blew out all the dust. We checked connections and RAM, peripherals, optical drive, HDD, etc. We made sure the things booted and probed OK. We checked cosmetics on the front bezel and around the case. No wiping HDD or installing of OS was necessary here, it was strictly a hardware/BIOS-level project. Then we were graded and the refurbished machines were all shipped off to a local student-run project that provides usable computers to worthy organizations who need them. Definitely a feel-good project, all around!

erwinh 4y ago

Would have expected a namedrop of Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with that title

mikewarot 4y ago

>maintenance has to be valued outside of austerity, and right now it’s unclear if our current economic system is capable of that. As we hit the backside of the carbon pulse that gave many of us a standard of living that Kings could only dream of as few as 200 years ago, the need to build things for the long term will once again take precedent. The ability for governments and institutions to paper over reality shouldn't be underestimated, but we're eventually going to have to trade power coupons for natural resources, and those resources are finite, and the difficulty of extracting them from the earth is increasing. The market driven insanity of freely using virgin material for disposable trinkets will correct itself in time.

throwaway14356 4y ago

design for maintenance.

tomcam 4y ago

I’m all about maintenance, but mostly in a literal sense. It turns out that there’s another definition of that word in the real estate world. I sold a house a few years ago that the real estate agent described as having “deferred maintenance“, which annoyed me. Because I always maintain my houses scrupulously. Fast forward a few years later and I now understand that phrase actually means “it’s not decorated in the current style“. The fact that I don’t spare gigantic expenses such as major electrical or floor repairs, massive septic field projects, replacing large drainage systems, central air conditioning, etc. all at tremendous costs, is irrelevant to people who use the phrase “deferred maintenance“. They don’t care at all whether I just replaced a pool pump or expensive air conditioner just before selling. No one who buys a house from me is going to have to replace their pipes or ducts within the next 20 years, but that just isn’t a selling point.

stewx 4y ago
That agent is clearly ignorant. Also not serving their clients well because cosmetic stuff is easy to do, while below-the-surface repairs are often a lot more expensive.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
That was just a bad agent. If you kept proof of recent repairs and capital investments, and showed them to prospective sellers, they would definitely value them. Assuming that the price of the land of your house is not 80% of the price of your house.

mrjin 4y ago

It's all by design as a good maintainability is not good for business for obvious reasons: 1. It's require much more efforts in designing and manufacturing and thus cost would be much higher. 2. It reduces failure rates dramatically and thus leads to much less sales. 3. It reduces revenues from servicing. Examples: 1. Built in non-removable battery in electronics such as phones. 2. Glues instead of screws in electronics such as phones. 3. Soldered on CPU/RAM in laptops.

cafard 4y ago

An unpaid plug for New York Replacement Plumbing Parts: in 2004, we installed faucets from a company that soon went out of business. Were it not for NYRPP, we'd have been forced to buy new faucets after cartridges failed.