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Yeah, this. A few years ago we bought a generator. A few months after the warranty expired, it broke. There are no small-engine repair shops in my area, and

by lisper 3y ago

Yeah, this. A few years ago we bought a generator. A few months after the warranty expired, it broke. There are no small-engine repair shops in my area, and it's too big to fit in my car anyway. Having someone come to our house to repair it would cost more than buying a new one. But... how do you get rid of a broken generator? It weighs 45 kg and it has four gallons of gasoline in the tank. You can't just chuck it in the trash. (FYI, I decided to take it apart and was actually able to get it running again. It turned out to be an easy fix -- broken fuel valve. But success was far from guaranteed, and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?)

ExoticPearTree 3y ago
> On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge? You need to decide for yourself what is more valuable to you.
jventura 3y ago
> (...) and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. I do a lot of repairs and maintenance at my own house. Last year I built a terrace and an extra room, and only had to pay someone to help me, and this week I painted the all house exterior with the help of my dad. Total costs of painting and entire house: 240€. It would cost north of 2000€ if I had to pay someone to do it. Yes, my "hourly rate" for that kind of work is sometimes much less than my "regular" work. But I can fix many things, don't need to go find "credible" people to do things for me, I fell an immense pleasure to be self-sustainable (for that kind of things), learn a lot; and my house, cars, electronics, are mostly in top shape.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  It is quite interesting to calculate the true cost of doing things itself. In Denmark the tax system is such that if you subcontract out of personal money they need to be 5 times fast than you. If we say that you can make your deck in half the time a professional would have don it, the factor is still 2.5x. Ig. assuming a contractor would do it for 50 USD/h, this would translate to "making" 125 USD on hour by doing it yourself, 250 USD/h if you know what you are doing. Obviously these things change with tax regimes.
  - mithras 3y ago
    I have the same thing, I feel these high income taxes force me to do repairs and home improvement myself because the converted hourly is higher than my own generous contracting rate.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      That is what taxes on trade do, they make trade more expensive. This is why income taxes are counterproductive but they are easy to calculate and enforce so governments rely on them.
  - Shaanie 3y ago
    I'd like to see the math for your calculations here, I suspect something is a bit iffy. As an example I'll use Swedish taxes which should be comparable to Danish ones. If we assume I'm a contractor charging $100 per hour and take the cash as salary: (100/1.3142) * 0.5 = $38 left after payroll tax and the top income tax rate (50%). So if I'm just as fast and good as a professional, the professional needs to charge $38 per hour or less for it to be worth it. But in reality, a professional is probably at least 2x as fast as me, making it $76. That's probably less than they charge, so it's worth paying for a professional.
    - madsbuch 3y ago
      The person you contract also pays income tax on the amount. So you need to doubly add the tax. Then you also need to add some cost of doing business. Said in another way: The 100SEK you earn becomes 25SEK the contract can use (assuming 50% tax rate) – that's the first factor of 4. The last factor can be found in the details.
      - Shaanie 3y ago
        I think that's a logical error; I don't care about how much the contractor makes after tax, I only care what the cost to me is. After all, if the contractor had some strange anomaly where he pays 100% of his income in tax, why would that matter to you?
- bartvk 3y ago
  What I found out, is that it takes a painter team two days, and it takes an untrained single person two weeks. I once wasted my whole holiday on painting the house. And it wasn't well done, because it was my first time. I'll probably not do it again, unless I don't have other work.
  - bloak 3y ago
    What I've found is that it's very often worth doing your own painting, but if you need carpets laying or walls tiled, then get a professional, because the professionals are awe-inspiringly fast and do a better job.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      The thing with painting--at least interior/trim/etc.--is that it'd 1.) Not that hard; 2.) You do it repeatedly so it's not the usual: Do it once poorly and never do it again; and 3.) If you're touching up something already painted, you can probably take some shortcuts a professional won't.
    - antod 3y ago
      I will pay for exterior painters - the cost to my own state of mind with painting a house is too high. I will glady do harder jobs than painting myself, but nothing pisses me off more than painting for some reason.
  - jventura 3y ago
    > I once wasted my whole holiday on painting the house. And it wasn't well done, because it was my first time. I'll probably not do it again, unless I don't have other work. If you would have to do it again, would you do the same errors, and the paint job would turn out equal? Or would you do better second time? That is why I never painted an entire house before having painted a bedroom at least one time. And I've never painted a bedroom before I painted a small piece of furniture at least one time. One needs to learn gradually, hopefully with someone who knows how to do things. Last year I built a terrace and room with the (paid) help of a contractor. I started just carrying the trash, then breaking things, then putting cement of the walls, etc. etc. Now I can quite complex things by myself.. The key is to do things gradually..
- thworp 3y ago
  While I appreciate and share the DIY spirit, some doubts have been creeping in recently. Firstly, in most cases we are just DIY'ing the final "craftsman" step of the work, we still depend on the materials being available. Second, if more and more people that actually care about work quality go DIY it leaves people who can't or won't be as involved. Over time unscrupulous tradespeople will take over the market.
- mantas 3y ago
  On top of that, would you earn your usual rate for that time? I wouldn't work saturday afternoon anyway because my head is already useless for programming. So I do need to change line-of-work somehow. I can either go for a walk and learn something about nature. Or I can self-repair something and learn something about construction. Of course spending all free time on self-repairs would be exhausting. But I don't feel like lying on a couch entire weekend either.
  - jventura 3y ago
    > On top of that, would you earn your usual rate for that time? This is the key! I do these kind of things on my spare time! On my spare time I could (1) do nothing; (2) try to cram more screen time into my life, and give the money earned to someone to do my repairs for me or; (3) do some things by myself, learn while doing it, and feel like a super-human that can control is own life (well, some of it). I prefer number 3!
  - Tyr42 3y ago
    I got a young little one, so I've actually needed to take some Mondays off to finish some of the home repair tasks. It's not like I can go around with a hammer while he is trying to nap. So it is more comparable with the work rates, since I do not have a lot time time to tinker
    - mantas 3y ago
      I bought a half-built house right after the kid was born. Yes, using power tools while kid is napping is no-go. But after few months kid is not napping that much. And there’re many relatively silent jobs. It’s easy to silicon a window sill while kid is sleeping in another room. Or assemble a drawer with an old good screwdriver instead of a drill. And after a couple years there’re endless learning possibilities. Sure, it goes slowly, but it does happen eventually. Full disclosure - I did hire handymen for a good portion of jobs for various reasons. Mostly because we were burning a lot of money in rent or some jobs require too many special tools and knowledge to be done right (electricity, drywalls, etc).
- bombcar 3y ago
  The "hourly rate" argument is a bit slippery; you didn't stop working (and being paid) to fix your generator, and unless you could have spent those hours being paid (hard for many people to do) you only "lost" the hourly rate you could have gotten, which is often much lower than your current work hourly rate.
midoridensha 3y ago
>it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. Not necessarily. It depends on the job and other factors. How much time does it take to find a competent person to hire? And what if you fail, and they do a bad job; how much time does it take you to deal with the situation and fix it (or do you end up paying twice, once for the bad job and again for someone else to redo it)? Do you need to be on-site to supervise them (so they don't steal stuff)? That's more of your time. If it's something portable or that needs to be transported to the professional, how much time and money does that cost?
- Shaanie 3y ago
  I suspect it's way more likely that you'd do a bad job yourself and need to hire a professional to fix it.
jtode 3y ago
I used to read all the time, see videos, "you should learn to deal with small engines," but for decades I just leaned on my farm-raised friend when I couldn't get a thing started. Then I moved out of the city and came to a morning when I needed to blow my driveway, the blower wouldn't start, and basically I had no choice but to figure it out. Solution: find a very thin pin and ream out the buildup in the carburetor, and all the steps leading up to being able to do that. The sense of personal (horse)power I felt after reviving that engine was palpable. It's funny cause now, just based on that experience, I'm not saying I'm an expert, but I am saying if I encounter any small engine that won't start I will eagerly start trying to figure it out. It looks fun now. The brain is weird.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Reminds me of all the computer manuals from the 80s that would say something like "YOU CANNOT HURT THE COMPUTER BY USING IT - if you get confused, turn it off and back on".
  - lisper 3y ago
    Except with a gasoline-powered generator you can do some serious damage if you're not careful. Gasoline is no joke.
    - jtode 3y ago
      Could take a finger off with a snowblower too, I get nervous when I change out shear pins even with the starter key in my hand. You gotta have a sense of yourself obviously.
      - BizarreByte 3y ago
        Disconnect the spark plug, it should be easy to access. That way you can be 100% sure it’s fine if you’re concerned.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      To paraphrase my father-in-law: paper is flammable, gas is combustible; most people don't figure out that difference until too late...
hnick 3y ago
The first few plumbing jobs I did myself were a net loss from time, tools, materials. But I've made it up since then. Also, I think it's not always direct - tinkering with the car has made me more confident in plumbing and vice versa. A few years of that and I was happy to install my own dishwasher. So for me, I'll always spend time on this sort of stuff if it's within my reach to do a decent job. As far as disposal goes... yeah, most stuff I sell on Marketplace or Gumtree would be a net loss after wasting time dealing with people (and scammers, who belong in their own category). But I hate to have things I used and enjoyed just die alone in landfill.
- etrautmann 3y ago
  Yep - there’s a very real benefit for me of the satisfaction of having something reused. It’s a deep seated sense that this is the way. It’s worth the time for me to find a new home for many things.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The other nice thing about doing it yourself is you can do it better than right - a plumber will fix your pipes up to code and it'll work just well, but unless you explicitly ask, he won't do things like add new access doors, make it accessible in the future, etc.
Tade0 3y ago
I add an additional component: the embedded energy that was saved by not purchasing a new generator. To me it better reflects the real effort put into making something. Labour in the west is much more expensive than energy, so it's only natural that your time was worth more than a new unit. But that's an accident of geography and politics. Someone in a poor country, in the same line of work that you're in, might actually break even on this. I believe there's value in this sort of self-sufficiency. Especially considering that, as recent years have shown, we're one global supply chain breakdown or war away from plain unavailability of some goods.
mongol 3y ago
Knowledge is valuable. Just knowing you could fix this gives you confidence next time when something else breaks. But I also think it has an intrinsic value. It just feels good to learn. Compared with just, for example, entertainment, I usually prefer to learn. One could ask, what is the marginal cost of viewing Netflix. The monthly cost is one thing. But what could you have done with your time instead?
- lisper 3y ago
  > what could you have done with your time instead? Improve my HN karma. ;-)
qup 3y ago
It would have been incredibly easy to get rid of this by listing it on any online marketplace "free for pickup". There are hundreds of guys who know that many of these will have a simple fix and they get a free generator for a few hours' time. And many other guys who might pull parts or get various other uses out of it. I still think it was the right call to give it a shot. Save my uncle and myself, nobody I know will try to repair anything themselves.
- bombcar 3y ago
  My preferred disposal method of anything that I think has some value is to post it "free for pickup" or if it's a real hot thing (like cut up logs from a tree felling) just put them on the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street - the universal "free" location.
  - positr0n 3y ago
    I usually list it for $5. Free seems to attract too many high maintenance or scary customers.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      I don't even put a phone number or anything resembling an address, just "drive down this street and if you see it, take it".
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
wccrawford 3y ago
I dunno about there, but here you can just put it at the curb in front of your house and someone is bound to come along and pick it up, even if only to scrap it for the metal.
- lisper 3y ago
  I surely could have done that. The reason I didn't is that I live in a place where some people leave old cars out in their yards for years, and so I had no assurances that whoever picked the generator up would do something reasonable with it.
intelVISA 3y ago
> it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator Don't forget to also factor in the hidden cost of depriving the CS field of many great works during said hours which is incalculable imo.
- lisper 3y ago
  :-)
rypskar 3y ago
>>How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge? Don't forget the value of the satisfaction from having fixed something yourself and how good fixing stuff helps with recovering after spending hours in front of a computer
- doubled112 3y ago
  This is so true. My wife doesn’t understand how I spend my whole day complaining about fixing things (sys admin) for work then seem genuinely happy to work on a car, bike, random electronic thing, etc. Completely different. On the selfish side, I might actually get to enjoy what I fix at home. On the brains are funny side, anything physical hits different. Turning a wrench, busting knuckles, burning myself triggers a satisfaction a screen does not. I’m not a masochist either. Why is a soldering iron so hard to hold? Probably a me problem. All those skills transfer around too.
geomark 3y ago
Another benefit of knowing how to do it yourself is that if opt to hire someone to do it you can better assess their work. Also, if you have kids who learn along with you the value is multiplied.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
My friend has been making some rather major purchases lately, such as a portable air conditioner and a portable generator. She is elderly, retired, and lives with a younger fellow who's technically inclined. She's trying to hedge her bets around an inept landlord, bad house wiring and an unstable grid, and air conditioning that constantly breaks at inopportune times during the summer. But I kept telling her that she doesn't want these complex mechanical things hanging around. I tried to impress on her (pace Technology Connections) how abysmal that air conditioner is going to be. I also tried to explain to her that if she gets a generator, she'll have to maintain it and fire it up once in a while, and that will not be easy. I explained that I have at least one other friend who decided that owning a truck and an inverter was way easier, because the truck has wheels that you can use to drive it around, the truck is easily maintained by the auto shop on the corner, and the truck will provide plenty of power just the same as the generator. She really has a prepper streak, though, and I couldn't talk her out of it, especially after the sales lady got talking to her. She doesn't have a car and her roommate doesn't drive either, so I don't know how they'll transport/maintain these machines, but oh well.
- lisper 3y ago
  I am constantly dismayed that there aren't more electric and PHEVs that are set up to serve as backup power supplies. It seems like such a simple and obvious thing to do. With a big enough network of these we could solve a big part of the storage problem for sustainable energy technologies.
  - Etrnl_President 3y ago
    It's being wasted by governments. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    The hard part is that car batteries have limited cycles before they must be replaced at HUGE cost. For personal backup during power outages it would work, but I have a hard time believing that many car owners would be willing to put the wear and tear on their battery.
cramjabsyn 3y ago
> How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge? Well in an emergency scenario (what generators are for generally) the troubleshooting/repair knowledge you gained will be invaluable
BizarreByte 3y ago
> How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge? You don’t, constantly comparing time to money is a bad way to live. If you learned something, tried something new, and maybe even enjoyed it? That’s good enough.
probably_wrong 3y ago
> it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. I started rebelling against the idea of "I might as well buy a new one". The way I see it, if (say) my phone screen breaks I have two choices: I spend $150 fixing it, or I spend $150 buying a new phone. In either case I end up with a working phone, but the second case has generated one phone worth of electronic garbage.
- gowld 3y ago
  Your old phone is closer to wearing out, though.
titzer 3y ago
I'm glad you took time to fix it. Owning things is almost a debt to keep them running. Stack this experience many times over and behold how valuable simple, robust machines (like a metal pair of scissors!) are so much better than complex software things or plastic throwaway crap. (That metal pair of scissors could literally last until the end of your life!)
pseg134 3y ago
Haha get over yourself, your time is worthless.
- lisper 3y ago
  Not to me it isn't.
burnished 3y ago
When considering your own wages per hour it can be helpful to consider whether you could have converted those hours into those wages or if that avenue is already saturated. For example if you are an employee and establish your rate that way, you probably can't work more to get more anyway. So repairing things for yourself is just cream on top in that case.

by lisper 3y ago

ExoticPearTree 3y ago

> On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge? You need to decide for yourself what is more valuable to you.

jventura 3y ago

> (...) and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. I do a lot of repairs and maintenance at my own house. Last year I built a terrace and an extra room, and only had to pay someone to help me, and this week I painted the all house exterior with the help of my dad. Total costs of painting and entire house: 240€. It would cost north of 2000€ if I had to pay someone to do it. Yes, my "hourly rate" for that kind of work is sometimes much less than my "regular" work. But I can fix many things, don't need to go find "credible" people to do things for me, I fell an immense pleasure to be self-sustainable (for that kind of things), learn a lot; and my house, cars, electronics, are mostly in top shape.

madsbuch 3y ago
It is quite interesting to calculate the true cost of doing things itself. In Denmark the tax system is such that if you subcontract out of personal money they need to be 5 times fast than you. If we say that you can make your deck in half the time a professional would have don it, the factor is still 2.5x. Ig. assuming a contractor would do it for 50 USD/h, this would translate to "making" 125 USD on hour by doing it yourself, 250 USD/h if you know what you are doing. Obviously these things change with tax regimes.
- mithras 3y ago
  I have the same thing, I feel these high income taxes force me to do repairs and home improvement myself because the converted hourly is higher than my own generous contracting rate.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    That is what taxes on trade do, they make trade more expensive. This is why income taxes are counterproductive but they are easy to calculate and enforce so governments rely on them.
- Shaanie 3y ago
  I'd like to see the math for your calculations here, I suspect something is a bit iffy. As an example I'll use Swedish taxes which should be comparable to Danish ones. If we assume I'm a contractor charging $100 per hour and take the cash as salary: (100/1.3142) * 0.5 = $38 left after payroll tax and the top income tax rate (50%). So if I'm just as fast and good as a professional, the professional needs to charge $38 per hour or less for it to be worth it. But in reality, a professional is probably at least 2x as fast as me, making it $76. That's probably less than they charge, so it's worth paying for a professional.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    The person you contract also pays income tax on the amount. So you need to doubly add the tax. Then you also need to add some cost of doing business. Said in another way: The 100SEK you earn becomes 25SEK the contract can use (assuming 50% tax rate) – that's the first factor of 4. The last factor can be found in the details.
    - Shaanie 3y ago
      I think that's a logical error; I don't care about how much the contractor makes after tax, I only care what the cost to me is. After all, if the contractor had some strange anomaly where he pays 100% of his income in tax, why would that matter to you?
bartvk 3y ago
What I found out, is that it takes a painter team two days, and it takes an untrained single person two weeks. I once wasted my whole holiday on painting the house. And it wasn't well done, because it was my first time. I'll probably not do it again, unless I don't have other work.
- bloak 3y ago
  What I've found is that it's very often worth doing your own painting, but if you need carpets laying or walls tiled, then get a professional, because the professionals are awe-inspiringly fast and do a better job.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    The thing with painting--at least interior/trim/etc.--is that it'd 1.) Not that hard; 2.) You do it repeatedly so it's not the usual: Do it once poorly and never do it again; and 3.) If you're touching up something already painted, you can probably take some shortcuts a professional won't.
  - antod 3y ago
    I will pay for exterior painters - the cost to my own state of mind with painting a house is too high. I will glady do harder jobs than painting myself, but nothing pisses me off more than painting for some reason.
- jventura 3y ago
  > I once wasted my whole holiday on painting the house. And it wasn't well done, because it was my first time. I'll probably not do it again, unless I don't have other work. If you would have to do it again, would you do the same errors, and the paint job would turn out equal? Or would you do better second time? That is why I never painted an entire house before having painted a bedroom at least one time. And I've never painted a bedroom before I painted a small piece of furniture at least one time. One needs to learn gradually, hopefully with someone who knows how to do things. Last year I built a terrace and room with the (paid) help of a contractor. I started just carrying the trash, then breaking things, then putting cement of the walls, etc. etc. Now I can quite complex things by myself.. The key is to do things gradually..
thworp 3y ago
While I appreciate and share the DIY spirit, some doubts have been creeping in recently. Firstly, in most cases we are just DIY'ing the final "craftsman" step of the work, we still depend on the materials being available. Second, if more and more people that actually care about work quality go DIY it leaves people who can't or won't be as involved. Over time unscrupulous tradespeople will take over the market.
mantas 3y ago
On top of that, would you earn your usual rate for that time? I wouldn't work saturday afternoon anyway because my head is already useless for programming. So I do need to change line-of-work somehow. I can either go for a walk and learn something about nature. Or I can self-repair something and learn something about construction. Of course spending all free time on self-repairs would be exhausting. But I don't feel like lying on a couch entire weekend either.
- jventura 3y ago
  > On top of that, would you earn your usual rate for that time? This is the key! I do these kind of things on my spare time! On my spare time I could (1) do nothing; (2) try to cram more screen time into my life, and give the money earned to someone to do my repairs for me or; (3) do some things by myself, learn while doing it, and feel like a super-human that can control is own life (well, some of it). I prefer number 3!
- Tyr42 3y ago
  I got a young little one, so I've actually needed to take some Mondays off to finish some of the home repair tasks. It's not like I can go around with a hammer while he is trying to nap. So it is more comparable with the work rates, since I do not have a lot time time to tinker
  - mantas 3y ago
    I bought a half-built house right after the kid was born. Yes, using power tools while kid is napping is no-go. But after few months kid is not napping that much. And there’re many relatively silent jobs. It’s easy to silicon a window sill while kid is sleeping in another room. Or assemble a drawer with an old good screwdriver instead of a drill. And after a couple years there’re endless learning possibilities. Sure, it goes slowly, but it does happen eventually. Full disclosure - I did hire handymen for a good portion of jobs for various reasons. Mostly because we were burning a lot of money in rent or some jobs require too many special tools and knowledge to be done right (electricity, drywalls, etc).
bombcar 3y ago
The "hourly rate" argument is a bit slippery; you didn't stop working (and being paid) to fix your generator, and unless you could have spent those hours being paid (hard for many people to do) you only "lost" the hourly rate you could have gotten, which is often much lower than your current work hourly rate.

midoridensha 3y ago

>it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. Not necessarily. It depends on the job and other factors. How much time does it take to find a competent person to hire? And what if you fail, and they do a bad job; how much time does it take you to deal with the situation and fix it (or do you end up paying twice, once for the bad job and again for someone else to redo it)? Do you need to be on-site to supervise them (so they don't steal stuff)? That's more of your time. If it's something portable or that needs to be transported to the professional, how much time and money does that cost?

Shaanie 3y ago
I suspect it's way more likely that you'd do a bad job yourself and need to hire a professional to fix it.

jtode 3y ago

I used to read all the time, see videos, "you should learn to deal with small engines," but for decades I just leaned on my farm-raised friend when I couldn't get a thing started. Then I moved out of the city and came to a morning when I needed to blow my driveway, the blower wouldn't start, and basically I had no choice but to figure it out. Solution: find a very thin pin and ream out the buildup in the carburetor, and all the steps leading up to being able to do that. The sense of personal (horse)power I felt after reviving that engine was palpable. It's funny cause now, just based on that experience, I'm not saying I'm an expert, but I am saying if I encounter any small engine that won't start I will eagerly start trying to figure it out. It looks fun now. The brain is weird.

bombcar 3y ago
Reminds me of all the computer manuals from the 80s that would say something like "YOU CANNOT HURT THE COMPUTER BY USING IT - if you get confused, turn it off and back on".
- lisper 3y ago
  Except with a gasoline-powered generator you can do some serious damage if you're not careful. Gasoline is no joke.
  - jtode 3y ago
    Could take a finger off with a snowblower too, I get nervous when I change out shear pins even with the starter key in my hand. You gotta have a sense of yourself obviously.
    - BizarreByte 3y ago
      Disconnect the spark plug, it should be easy to access. That way you can be 100% sure it’s fine if you’re concerned.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    To paraphrase my father-in-law: paper is flammable, gas is combustible; most people don't figure out that difference until too late...

hnick 3y ago

The first few plumbing jobs I did myself were a net loss from time, tools, materials. But I've made it up since then. Also, I think it's not always direct - tinkering with the car has made me more confident in plumbing and vice versa. A few years of that and I was happy to install my own dishwasher. So for me, I'll always spend time on this sort of stuff if it's within my reach to do a decent job. As far as disposal goes... yeah, most stuff I sell on Marketplace or Gumtree would be a net loss after wasting time dealing with people (and scammers, who belong in their own category). But I hate to have things I used and enjoyed just die alone in landfill.

etrautmann 3y ago
Yep - there’s a very real benefit for me of the satisfaction of having something reused. It’s a deep seated sense that this is the way. It’s worth the time for me to find a new home for many things.
bombcar 3y ago
The other nice thing about doing it yourself is you can do it better than right - a plumber will fix your pipes up to code and it'll work just well, but unless you explicitly ask, he won't do things like add new access doors, make it accessible in the future, etc.

Tade0 3y ago

I add an additional component: the embedded energy that was saved by not purchasing a new generator. To me it better reflects the real effort put into making something. Labour in the west is much more expensive than energy, so it's only natural that your time was worth more than a new unit. But that's an accident of geography and politics. Someone in a poor country, in the same line of work that you're in, might actually break even on this. I believe there's value in this sort of self-sufficiency. Especially considering that, as recent years have shown, we're one global supply chain breakdown or war away from plain unavailability of some goods.

mongol 3y ago

Knowledge is valuable. Just knowing you could fix this gives you confidence next time when something else breaks. But I also think it has an intrinsic value. It just feels good to learn. Compared with just, for example, entertainment, I usually prefer to learn. One could ask, what is the marginal cost of viewing Netflix. The monthly cost is one thing. But what could you have done with your time instead?

lisper 3y ago
> what could you have done with your time instead? Improve my HN karma. ;-)

qup 3y ago

It would have been incredibly easy to get rid of this by listing it on any online marketplace "free for pickup". There are hundreds of guys who know that many of these will have a simple fix and they get a free generator for a few hours' time. And many other guys who might pull parts or get various other uses out of it. I still think it was the right call to give it a shot. Save my uncle and myself, nobody I know will try to repair anything themselves.

bombcar 3y ago
My preferred disposal method of anything that I think has some value is to post it "free for pickup" or if it's a real hot thing (like cut up logs from a tree felling) just put them on the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street - the universal "free" location.
- positr0n 3y ago
  I usually list it for $5. Free seems to attract too many high maintenance or scary customers.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I don't even put a phone number or anything resembling an address, just "drive down this street and if you see it, take it".
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

wccrawford 3y ago

I dunno about there, but here you can just put it at the curb in front of your house and someone is bound to come along and pick it up, even if only to scrap it for the metal.

lisper 3y ago
I surely could have done that. The reason I didn't is that I live in a place where some people leave old cars out in their yards for years, and so I had no assurances that whoever picked the generator up would do something reasonable with it.

intelVISA 3y ago

> it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator Don't forget to also factor in the hidden cost of depriving the CS field of many great works during said hours which is incalculable imo.

lisper 3y ago
:-)

rypskar 3y ago

>>How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge? Don't forget the value of the satisfaction from having fixed something yourself and how good fixing stuff helps with recovering after spending hours in front of a computer

doubled112 3y ago
This is so true. My wife doesn’t understand how I spend my whole day complaining about fixing things (sys admin) for work then seem genuinely happy to work on a car, bike, random electronic thing, etc. Completely different. On the selfish side, I might actually get to enjoy what I fix at home. On the brains are funny side, anything physical hits different. Turning a wrench, busting knuckles, burning myself triggers a satisfaction a screen does not. I’m not a masochist either. Why is a soldering iron so hard to hold? Probably a me problem. All those skills transfer around too.

geomark 3y ago

Another benefit of knowing how to do it yourself is that if opt to hire someone to do it you can better assess their work. Also, if you have kids who learn along with you the value is multiplied.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

My friend has been making some rather major purchases lately, such as a portable air conditioner and a portable generator. She is elderly, retired, and lives with a younger fellow who's technically inclined. She's trying to hedge her bets around an inept landlord, bad house wiring and an unstable grid, and air conditioning that constantly breaks at inopportune times during the summer. But I kept telling her that she doesn't want these complex mechanical things hanging around. I tried to impress on her (pace Technology Connections) how abysmal that air conditioner is going to be. I also tried to explain to her that if she gets a generator, she'll have to maintain it and fire it up once in a while, and that will not be easy. I explained that I have at least one other friend who decided that owning a truck and an inverter was way easier, because the truck has wheels that you can use to drive it around, the truck is easily maintained by the auto shop on the corner, and the truck will provide plenty of power just the same as the generator. She really has a prepper streak, though, and I couldn't talk her out of it, especially after the sales lady got talking to her. She doesn't have a car and her roommate doesn't drive either, so I don't know how they'll transport/maintain these machines, but oh well.

lisper 3y ago
I am constantly dismayed that there aren't more electric and PHEVs that are set up to serve as backup power supplies. It seems like such a simple and obvious thing to do. With a big enough network of these we could solve a big part of the storage problem for sustainable energy technologies.
- Etrnl_President 3y ago
  It's being wasted by governments. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  The hard part is that car batteries have limited cycles before they must be replaced at HUGE cost. For personal backup during power outages it would work, but I have a hard time believing that many car owners would be willing to put the wear and tear on their battery.

cramjabsyn 3y ago

> How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge? Well in an emergency scenario (what generators are for generally) the troubleshooting/repair knowledge you gained will be invaluable

BizarreByte 3y ago

> How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge? You don’t, constantly comparing time to money is a bad way to live. If you learned something, tried something new, and maybe even enjoyed it? That’s good enough.

probably_wrong 3y ago

> it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. I started rebelling against the idea of "I might as well buy a new one". The way I see it, if (say) my phone screen breaks I have two choices: I spend $150 fixing it, or I spend $150 buying a new phone. In either case I end up with a working phone, but the second case has generated one phone worth of electronic garbage.

gowld 3y ago
Your old phone is closer to wearing out, though.

titzer 3y ago

I'm glad you took time to fix it. Owning things is almost a debt to keep them running. Stack this experience many times over and behold how valuable simple, robust machines (like a metal pair of scissors!) are so much better than complex software things or plastic throwaway crap. (That metal pair of scissors could literally last until the end of your life!)

pseg134 3y ago

Haha get over yourself, your time is worthless.

lisper 3y ago
Not to me it isn't.

burnished 3y ago

When considering your own wages per hour it can be helpful to consider whether you could have converted those hours into those wages or if that avenue is already saturated. For example if you are an employee and establish your rate that way, you probably can't work more to get more anyway. So repairing things for yourself is just cream on top in that case.