Repair vs Replace; Wasted Resources

[YoungManGW]

Reading the post about the TV and radio repair shop in Swords closing down, I was reminded of recent thoughts on the above. It seems to be increasingly the case, frustratingly, that it is cheaper to replace various items than repair them, which absolutely goes against the grain. Or to find that materials being thrown away cannot be quarried for re-use. Two recent personal examples:

Chainsaw chain. £6.29 to buy a new one online, price including delivery. £7.50 to have an existing one sharpened.

Timber. I need a load of short lengths of timber to use as noggins in a deck. Many such lengths of suitable timber in the rubbish skip of a nearby house redevelopment. But I'm not allowed to take it, due to alleged health and safety reasons. Accordingly, the skipped timber will get burned, and I'll have to buy new.

The world really has gone mad.

Regards,
Richard

[G6Tanuki]

I go entirely the other way.

Maybe it's because I grew up with parents who'd lived through WWII and the aftermath [the "Make-do-and-Mend" promulgations of the Man-from-the-Ministry-of-Supply/The BBC so parents were always saying "Don't throw that away, it could come in useful" and "Turn that light off - it's not dark enough yet!"] but I positively rejoice in being able to order a new part or thing for less than it would cost to have the old failed one patched-up.

I rebelled against tolerating patched-up stuff at an early age - I took-on a 5AM milk round so I could have a new school-blazer rather than one with leather patches sewed onto the elbows.

[dave walsh]

The play safe advice is always to ask Richard but that's you get!
I'd advise a Balaclava and big overcoat. In the unlikely event of capture, they'd have to prove intent to deprive. You might just be borrowing a few lengths to see if they'd fit

In work I used to park my car near a firm of Solicitors who had their trees trimmed. The team left a very few logs behind in a small pile. They were there for 8 months. Eventually I asked the receptionist if it would be ok to clear them. She looked at me as if I was demanding money with menaces and came back with the decision that the Partners would need to be consulted. This was an outfit that I was required to use in my Local Authority role. They had a reputation as grasping, self serving and monied. This confirmed it. Three hours later the logs had gone

Dave W.

[Radio Wrangler]

They probably had to pay someone to move the logs. Those sort of people don't upset me in the slightest - I just think how much less they must enjoy life than everyone else. With a mere smile you can raise their blood pressure enough to knock a week or two off their life expectancy.

David

[G6Tanuki]

As ro "running out" of resources, I don't worry about this: the Stone-age didn't end because we ran out of stones; the Iron/Steel age - well, now more than half the world's steel requirements are met by recycling old steel in induction-smelters [so no need for nasty old-fashioned polluting blastfurnces in Port Talbot], traditional oil-importing countries like the US are now nearly oil-import-independent [thanks to shale-oil/fracking] and the more-esoteric minerals, well, there was a bet about these becoming 'unaffordable' back in the 1980s:

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite...years-on/17482

which worked out rather interestingly.

I remember back in the 1970s UK politicians worried that we couldn't mine enough coal to sustain our economy. Then in the 1990s it was "Peak Oil". I'll side with technology and look to enjoy a resource- and energy-rich next few decades.

[One of my favourite music-videos from the 1980s was Timbuk3's "The future's so bright I gotta wear shades"]

[electronicskip]

Dumpster diving is my hobby, I just can't see perfectly good things thrown away. I've asked many times "can I get that out of your skip" and I can't recall ever being told no.
Other times I've just walked up boldly to it and scooped out the offending item.
Latest was a perfect working MIG welder that the owner had dumped because he was having a new garage built.

[RojDW48]

I started as a D&T teacher at a somewhat under-funded comprehensive in 1990. We didn't have much money for materials but the area had quite a few little factories making products out of plastics, wood, mdf, steel etc. They were happy for us to raid their skips and, indeed, a few of them would drop off their offcuts periodically. We hardly ever had to buy any basic materials.

[Cobaltblue]

I still tend to try to repair most domestic appliances until the problems become mechanical rather than electrical then I may or may not repair them.

About 7 years back the hinges failed on my two year old IGNIS fridge they were £38 a set (lowest price I could find and there were no patern parts )

They broke preventing the door from closing.

Both failed within 6 months of each other in the end I replaced 1 and modified the other to remove the broken self closing mechanism its been OK ever since.

The fridge was only £120 new if I had been Joe public faced with a repair bill virtually the same as the fridge I would have chucked it away.

More recently the 8 year old Whirlpool washing machine in my weekday flat, light use only does one wash a week failed with my washing inside. The electronic Programmer was just under £100 from reliable sources cheapest I could find was £80 but I prodded around with a meter and found an open circuit fusible resistor and a dead short circuit LNK304PN on replacing these two bits my washing machine is again fully working the Machine was only £200 new and if faced with a Bill for £150 again I would probably just replace it.
People have to make a living and their work need to carry a warranty I certainly wouldn't repair the module if my living and reputation relied on my work!.

I have probably saved a couple of Thousand pounds in the last 20 years alone repairing my stuff until I cant or SWMBO wants a new one anyway

Cheers

Mike T

[ms660]

Originally Posted by YoungManGW

Chainsaw chain. £6.29 to buy a new one online, price including delivery. £7.50 to have an existing one sharpened.

Cheaper if you can sharpen it yourself, if you can use a file it's easy, normally they only have to have a paid professional sharpen if the chain has hit metal/stone/grit etc or when the operator has never bothered to sharpen it and has been using it until it's gone really dull. The trick is to sharpen little and often and avoid metal/stone/grit etc when cutting or parking it, two or three medium strokes per tooth with a decent file is what I normally do, I only buy a chain if the chain snaps or if the old one has had the teeth filed down to a tiny triangle shape Rakers need taking down less often but don't take too much off otherwise the saw or you might want to go for short walkies.

Lawrence.

[emeritus]

I have found that builders are only too glad for me to take their unwanted timber: fewer skips for them to pay for at £250 a time! In one case I got a number of unused left-over 14' long 4" x 2" joists that I was able to use to make some internal scaffolding for my son to decorate the stairwell of his new flat. The builder said he always bought new stock for every project as it wasn't worth the hassle of storing random lengths of timber, so any unused stuff always ended up in the skip.

Fortunately we still have a local business, run by two brothers, that carries a good stock of spares for white goods and also offers a repair service. When the mechanical programmer of my mother's washing machine failed a few years ago (heat generated by a bad connection on a spade terminal had damaged the insulation beyond repair), they said a new replacement would cost over £120, or I could have a second-hand one with 6 months warranty for £20 from their stock of stuff they had salvaged from scrapped machines. I chose the latter!

I don't know if they are still available, but in the 1970's I bought a Black & Decker chain saw sharpening kit for my B&D chain saw that consists of a file and a steel guide for aligning it with the teeth and rakers to ensure the right amount of metal is removed.

[CambridgeWorks]

The manufacturer where I used to work often had sealed bid tenders at the end of the year to clear surplus from stocktaking and redundant stock. This worked well. Sealed bid, sometimes you bid 10 times the second bidder did, but luck of the draw. All cash raised was put in the pot for the company sponsored charity of the year. One year, a total of £18,000 was raised for Help for the Heroes. Then, (being an AMERICAN OWNED company), someone must have asked the sort of question, "what if a purchaser of said item sells it at a profit, that is unethical"!
Result, All such sales were banned forthwith.
This year by year surplus was then disposed of AT A COST to the company! Once, they even had to get a quote of how much to dispose of probably 100kg of cable on drums by an approved WEEE recycler. Madness indeed!
Rob

[Paul_RK]

Originally Posted by Cobaltblue

...About 7 years back the hinges failed on my two year old IGNIS fridge they were £38 a set...

It was nothing so drastic as that here, about five years ago: we'd been noticing that ice was forming too quickly in our (then) round about 55 year old Lec. When I examined it about a quarter of an inch of monkey metal had worn away from the static part of the hinges, meaning the door was a quarter inch lower than it should be and the seal misaligned. Hinges dismantled, quarter inch thick washers inserted from the spares drawer, and the Lec could chug on with a modest improvement to its efficiency, as it does to this day.

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

I go entirely the other way.

Maybe it's because I grew up with parents who'd lived through WWII and the aftermath...

Mine did too, so there must be something else to account for the difference. I suppose to me there's always been something more interesting to spend money on than a shiny (or otherwise) new replacement for whatever was already doing a job quite well enough: or, failing that, a more interesting use for time than earning the money in the first place.

Paul

[julie_m]

It's always worth talking a chance liberating skip contents. If you don't ask, you can't be told no. And you aren't permanently depriving anyone of anything; they were intending to destroy it, ergo you are only temporarily depriving them of it (i.e., for as long as it would have taken them to do so). In the worst case, I'd expect the authorities to prefer not to prosecute rather than risk this defence being used out loud in court.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by Paul_RK

Mine did too, so there must be something else to account for the difference. I suppose to me there's always been something more interesting to spend money on than a shiny (or otherwise) new replacement for whatever was already doing a job quite well enough: or, failing that, a more interesting use for time than earning the money in the first place.

Paul

Different strokes for different folks: having as a kid been subjected to the enduring post-WWII 'make-do-and-mend' mentality [despite my parents having become distinctly upper-middle-class in the early-1960s] my 'teenage rebellion' phase was to do all I could to think "I can really do better than that" and aspire to always want the the best never the second-best.

When I came to clear-out my late-parental home I needed several skips to take-away the "don't throw that out it may come in useful" legacy of dead kettles/toasters/lawnmowers/clocks/motheaten-carpets/rugs/clothes/furniture.

And to be honest I was glad to see it all go. Life's too short to have to put up with using chipped cups/saucers or a nondescript teapot with an unmatching lid.

[Cobaltblue]

Originally Posted by Paul_RK

It was nothing so drastic as that here, about five years ago: we'd been noticing that ice was forming too quickly in our (then) round about 55 year old Lec. When I examined it about a quarter of an inch of monkey metal had worn away from the static part of the hinges, meaning the door was a quarter inch lower than it should be and the seal misaligned. Hinges dismantled, quarter inch thick washers inserted from the spares drawer, and the Lec could chug on with a modest improvement to its efficiency, as it does to this day.


Paul

Pauls LEC was not built to be thrown away my IGNIS clearly was that's the downside to cheap consumer items.

I sure someone with more time and patience than me could have rebuilt those terrible hinges but they were not designed to be repaired being pressed welded and riveted together.

The part that had actually failed was a small piece of plastic must have cost all of 1P to produce but there was no way to remove it or fit one even if I could have got one. It joined many pieces and had the full force of the closing spring acting upon it. The hinge mechanism being almost totally enclosed.

Cheers

Mike T

[Boom]

Originally Posted by YoungManGW

Many such lengths of suitable timber in the rubbish skip of a nearby house redevelopment. But I'm not allowed to take it, due to alleged health and safety reasons.

I was told it was due to possible transference of woodworm which seemed reasonable to me.

[G6Tanuki]

I question the sanity - in energy terms - of running a 55-year-old fridge on a daily basis.

A few years back I did the cost-spreadsheet for my 15-year-old Lec fridge and found that over 18 months its 'excess' electricity utilisation compared to a modern A+++ rated fridge would pay for the new one.

The path-of-action was obvious - the old Lec went to the skip to be replaced by a new Indesit, which is a lot quieter and a lot colder as well as being £60-a-year cheaper to run!

[mark_in_manc]

Originally Posted by emeritus

...
Fortunately we still have a local business, run by two brothers, that carries a good stock of spares for white goods and also offers a repair service...

Hey, where's that? I know Brentwood. (I was a scholarship boy there, which in retrospect was a pretty odd diversion from the way the rest of life turned out!).

On repair / replace / wasted resources: many of you have contributed a whole load to our ongoing skip-raid-charity-sellup - thanks very much. I used ebay to pass on the latest item, a big Crown PA amp. I just used a trip to relatives to move it to Kent, to a Serb who is delivering to another Serb who had sold it to a third who is a collector who lives in Montenegro. So technology (the internet) helps in strange ways!

[julie_m]

Originally Posted by Boom

I was told it was due to possible transference of woodworm which seemed reasonable to me.

Sounds like clutching at straws to me. Why would they care about exporting a bit of woodworm? It's going to be your problem, not theirs, if it turns out to be infested ..... and even if you do complain, perhaps as a goodwill gesture, they'll refund the £0 you didn't pay for it!

Facilius invenire venia quam licentiam, or better translation.

[emeritus]

Re #18, Mackfields, in Coptfold Road, in the small parade of shops opposite "The Spread Eagle" pub, not far from the Brentwood Boys School (if that it where you were). No connection, other than as a very satisfied customer!