My personal experience with this was with a blender. The mount that held the motor went bad (turns out it was due to incredibly spindly supports that had broken. It probably saved a few cents in material costs but resulted in the whole thing failing years earlier than it probably should have), but luckily, the mounting bracket was available, and at an eminently reasonable price. Unfortunately, during this process, the mounting bracket holding the control board in place also broke (they did not use very high quality plastic), and unfortunately that piece was only sold as an assembly with the entire control board which was priced basically identically to the whole blender. It's currently sitting in a cupboard waiting for me to get the energy to get a 3d printed replacement, since I am having trouble throwing away what is otherwise a perfectly serviceable blender except for 1 small broken piece of plastic.
Unfortunately, this particular problem is not one that I think can be legislated away (or at least not without the legistlation causing more problems than it fixes). The only way it gets fixed is if consumers start to care and start basing their purchases at least partially on repairability (including price). And that kind of culture shift is hard.
Plastic welding is a thing. I doubt they used thermosets so you should be able to melt the pieces back together with a soldering iron or similar (and for some other plastics, CA glue and other solvents will work too.) You can even embed wires or other metal pieces for reinforcement.
3D printing is the "trendy maker" thing these days but don't forget that you can make a replacement out of a suitable material in many other ways, and one that may even outlast the official part. I have in the past repaired plastic parts of appliances by making a replacement out of scrap sheet metal.
There's no need for official parts when many people can figure out how to fabricate replacements --- which is one of the reasons why companies are so against right-to-repair.
You can do a lot these days with some basic tools (also quite cheap) and YouTube videos.
Good to know, I'll research it. In the past, I've attempted fixing plastic items with soldering iron and other sources of heat, up to and including open flame from a lighter - in every case, it resulted in burning and/or smoking and stinking plastic, and at no point the two parts became attached again. Not sure what I was doing wrong.
This is a really good point. It might end up looking janky (I'm bad at the kind of detail level finesse it might take to look good), but slopping a bunch of glue on there would almost certainly hold it in place well enough to work.
Depending on how it's broken, sometime you'll be able to glue plastic parts together (it was recommended to me to use the gel super-glue, not the regular one).
Another interesting material is two part epoxy (like JB Weld). You can even make small parts out of it, for example redo a broken clip on a bigger plastic piece.
Due to owning and repairing a 20yo car with lots of brittle plastics, I've had to expand my plastic-repair skillset, and it's way deeper than you'd initially assume.
I have a stainless garbage can from Kohler that has a ten year warranty. Appx. four years into owning it, the plastic lid hinge snapped.
Costco told me take it up with the manufacturer. Kohler had a page buried on their website helpfully detailing a Kafkaesque process to send them an RMA request to a physical mailing address, with no info on what to send, no forms, etc.
Instead, I modeled a replacement in OpenSCAD in ~30 minutes, and printed it in glass filled nylon (PA6). Can is still going strong.
That's weird about Costco because in my experience their return policy is incredibly generous. I had a Vizio TV stop working 2 years after purchase, just outside their warranty and Costco took it back, gave me the money back and a new TV cost less than the return
It can be legislated away by requiring all appliances of certain kinds to have 15 or 20 year warranties, perhaps with some extra safeguards to prevent Hollywood accounting tactics from being used.
This seems like a much neater solution than a right to repair. By making all repairs free for consumers, the repair costs are shifted onto the initial price. This allows for much easier repairability comparisons when shopping (items with high repair costs just become more expensive). It also forces manufacturers to consider product quality much more seriously, as unknowingly releasing a faulty product onto the market, without factoring the repair costs into the price, can significantly affect their profits. It would also significantly help with the "the servers have disappeared and my device is now a brick" issue by forcing manufacturers to keep the appropriate IT infrastructure operational.
Another less radical version of this idea is to force manufacturers to prominently feature a "yearly cost of use", which is basically the price divided by the number of years under warranty (we assume here that the product is designed to be thrown away immediately after the warranty expires). This gives manufacturers an incentive to extend warranties, which also forces more repairability.
The EU kind of sort of does this already, most electronic devices there have a mandatory warranty period, but it's only two years.
I wonder if the result of a twenty year warranty would be sturdier devices that are easier to service, or even flimsier devices that are cheap to replace a couple of times. Resources and manufacturing being cheap, labor costs being high.
Part of me loves this idea. I've had things fail, and would have been happy for warranty coverage. But:
* What about the market for truly inexpensive things? Do I get e.g. my plastic knife replaced every time it gets dull, for 20 years? Does a consumer still have the option to buy a truly inexpensive (and low quality) specialized tool, that they know(/expect) they'll only need once? (Or will they all be expensive, because it's now illegal to make something that won't last for 20 years?)
* How does this affect expensive things? What will a car cost, if I have to pay for all the possible issues that will come up with it over 20 years up front?
* How will this be enforced? Just form a corporation that "goes out of business" every year or two, and is magically replaced by another distinct corporate entity. Sure the warranty lasts 20 years but if the company servicing the warranty doesn't ... (The even more significant proliferation of e.g. HOOLEEZOO branded items?)
I’m a fan of this too, essentially the idea would front-load the cost of repairs into the product as a consumption tax at the point of sale. This internalizes the externalities of this planned obsolescence.
But of course it’s not really a fixed price and the manufacturer is tacitly encouraged to compete in total lifecycle price rather than to do the “cheap out on a structural part to save 2 cents” thing. Which is the ultimate goal.
If what you want is for products to last a while, thats the way to do it. Legislate the lifecycle you want and let vendors compete on optimizing their products for that lifecycle. The free market will happily give you planned obsolescence, we are already in a market failure, and it’s not going to work itself out by just “making consumers more informed” or whatever pablum - if that worked you wouldn’t be in a market failure to begin with. Staying the course and “spreading awareness” has always been a vote against actual change.
Kind of a tangent to your point, but this sounds like the sort of thing I fix with Sugru, not a printed part. That stuff has saved me a lot of money over the years.
Would STLs for parts fix this? We could legislate that buying a product gets you personal access to design files for the purpose of repair or enhancement.
Having full service sheets for electronics, and physical design files would make all but the most compact electronics user-serviceable, at no direct cost to manufacturers.
Also, IP laws should only apply when they are of benefit to society as a whole. So if you have a patent on a part you no longer produce, well, that doesn't benefit society so your patent is done.
That sounds like the "open source" argument, and I doubt it'll do any good[1]; don't forget that we used to be able to repair all sorts of things without the original design drawings, and we should still be able to for non-software things. The real problem is that the majority of people are gradually losing the skills to do so.
Watch machinist channels on YouTube and you'll see those skills in action.
[1] What open source has done is created a whole generation of developers who have never heard of disassembly or binary patching techniques, which depending on the situation can be much simpler and easier than trying to figure out how to compile the source code (and not change anything else). It has effectively produced learned helplessness in the absence of source code.
This is how it used to be. When you bought a computer you got a full circuit diagram with it so you could understand how it works. All appliances were like this, and some still are, but the fancier it is the less likely. My stove has a sticker on the back describing how the coils are wired up so a technician can service it better. There's no reason we can't mandate this even if our circuit boards and physical mechanisms are more complicated. It's clearly a net benefit for society.
I'm a fan of this mentality. (Though I'd be happier if the government gets a copy of all designs that are mass produced.) I recently had a 10 year old TV die on me and I was 90% sure that I just needed to swap the power supply. If I'd had some more info I could have tested things on my benchtop before trying to track down an identical replacement board. (Though those options were a bit dubious as well.)
Perhaps a few cents for whole batch production. A lot of it is planned obsolescence. I've had countless things break on hinges or other tiny moving parts, because they were made from 3mm plastic instead of 5mm plastic. Every time it's moved it's under way more stress than it should. Therefore it'll break after around 3 years.
I don't find planned obsolescence isn't a very convincing theory for something like a blender.
It makes sense for them to cheap out to save money, or to not think too hard about design for reliability beyond any guarantee or statutory warranty period.
But it doesn't make sense for them to deliberately design stuff to fail after 3 years. There is no vendor lock in for a blender. If it fails after three years, the number of people giving more custom to the same manufacturer must be miniscule, surely?
Along with plastic welding and epoxies (good things to say about JB Weld) also using baking soda infused with cyanoacrylate glue (the very thin kind) can build up material and becomes approximately rock hard. Can be filed. Just be careful around transparent pieces as the fumes can haze them up.
There's also a commercial product called Q Bond that I believe includes a plastic powder as the "host" material but is used in the same way.
> The only way it gets fixed is if consumers start to care and start basing their purchases at least partially on repairability (including price). And that kind of culture shift is hard.
It is not technically hard. Just hit new goods with a sufficient tax such that buyers have no choice but to start caring about longevity and repairability.
Of course, it is practically impossible since people like being able to buy more stuff.
It's not just that, is it? How do I have any way to know how long a blender will last, besides signals like brand name or price with a rather attenuated relationship to the actual question, before I buy it?
> But these requirements still ignore one of the biggest problems: the price of spare parts.
No, that is short-sighted.
The price of spare parts is the symptom. The root cause is that the part are highly specific to whatever they are going into, and there is a single supplier for them.
For repairs to be easy, things have to be made with generic parts that are available from multiple suppliers.
Not all parts have to be that way, just the ones likely to break, or ones that are expected to require replacement by design.
You're not going to get decent prices for spare parts, if you're vendor-locked, and there is no competition.
Some of the plastic parts on my decades old Cuisinart food processor have started to go but the motor is still great. But Cuisinart doesn't make the parts for what is almost a 50 year old appliance at this point. I was able to buy 3rd party parts for too much money but they don't fit quite right. I make do as it's not something I use that often and can make it work.
This seems tricky to legislate though. How do regulators decide which parts are like this? How do you deal with "generic parts" holding back innovation in cases where someone has invented an improved version of that part but it's not available as a generic part yet?
There are standards for sizes of screws, washers, motors, cables, plugs, sockets, ...
Just create a bunch more of those standards, e.g. for batteries, legislate their use, done. As a side effect, products become cheaper because parts will then be available off-the-shelf at economy-of-scale prices, and supply problems also become less likely because there will be numerous vendors for each part.
However, there will be two problems: some things, like cases and special moldings are hard to standardize. So I would suggest legislating that 3D-printing instructions (STL, material, finishing steps) be made available as soon as the part itself is unavailable or too expensive. And very innovative parts should be exempt for the first few years, provided they are measurably and provably better than the standardized equivalents and that a new standard is being created from them.
It’s the tension between technological progress and societal inertia at its fundamentals. Exact same argument can be applied to many areas including software. You can’t solve it. It’ll be solved when technological progress stops.
The rule should be that the total cumulative cost of all the spare parts for an appliance must be lower than 80% of the price of the appliance brand new.
The price of all the spare parts to build an assembly will always be higher than the finished product, absent some crazy imbalance of very high labor and very low parts costs. (Arguably, a block of wood that you can whittle a product out of would sell for less than the finished product, but anything mass-produced will have spare parts priced at some small multiple of the finished good price.)
Why? It's incredibly labor-intensive and logistics-intensive to track and offer one M10x1.25x12mm bolt or one main PCB for a $30 product. When I'm mass producing 5K units, I need 5K PCBs, 15K bolts, 5K upper case halves, 5K lower case halves, 5K displays, 5K buttons, etc. and I can arrange to have them delivered lineside in kits or whatever form I need and I'm pretty much going to use up everything I order in a very predictable way.
When you need 1 display and 2 bolts, I have no guarantee that I can sell all the spare parts I made and stocked, and each little fiddly item I have to have someone inventory, put away, fetch, box, pack, and ship to you. It's going to cost more or you're not going to get it. (Today, you mostly can't get it.)
This only works if you can only get like half of the assembly in spares. Otherwise, all I have to do to undercut the literal manufacturer is find cheaper labor to assemble the final product.
I like capping the cost of the replacement parts, but you have to factor in the additional labor cost of individually packaging, inventorying, storing, and shipping pieces that are going to go to final assembly either as a kit, or bulked in such a way that a spare-parts shipper cannot just part them out efficiently. So the total cost, before shipping and tax, of a stack of replacement parts to fully rebuild widget X should cost more than the fully assembled thing, but should probably cost less than 2 or 3 widget Xs.
i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.
but i also have no experience in manufacturing or repair. i'd love to hear if there are any successful case studies on the subject
> i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.
Older cars were.
Manufacturers never designed their own brake pads, they picked a caliper design that closely fit an existing wheel.
Carburetors? Just fit one from a carburetor manufacturer (weber, etc).
Steering racks, balljoints ... many fit multiple brands.
Alternators, radiators, various water tanks ... all from a common parts manufacturer, then used in several brands. Thermostats used to be a common design too.
Hell, they don't even do their own transmissions - just get a ZF-whatever.
When Hyundai launched their gen-1 Elantra ~1990, it came with a Mitsubishi engine.
Wheel bearings, CV joints - one design fit many different brands.
The repairability of older cars was amazing in retrospect.
Today it's different - you are unlikely to find brake pads from a Ford that fits a Toyota.
The companies spent extra money on design, to make that internal part significantly different, then extra money on tooling to actually build it, just so that you cannot buy a replacement unless its from them.
With international supply chains, labor hours naturally flowed down to those places with cheapest labor, while maintenance hours (performed in higher standard of living countries) were chopped to basically nothing. Maintenance is where standards get enforced. While it might be possible to dictate standards to a factory in Shenzhen, the odds they're going to be built to spec is vanishingly small. So, as we've seen, far easier to just have the overseas factory build the assembly, then you can reject the nonfunctional assembly, or, better yet, have the consumer find the nonfunctional units directly. The upside of this is you can make all the components completely bespoke to the application, tightening tolerances and (with the potential of) increasing overall reliability.
In industries where maintenance still has to happen, you see these general specs still in use. ARINC is one set that I deal with every day - they publish tons - along with many various MIL-STD things.
> i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.
As the article points out, sometimes the spare parts are extremely simple things like bolts and screws, which should really be standardized across all industries.
Things like motors/switches and other simple electric components can also be (and should be) mostly standardized. It's only once you get to circuits and complex electronic boards that you will run into issues, because they can be custom.
Most consumer products aren't complicated, and if they are, they are only complicated because the company is trying to create huge markups and prevent people from repairing items.
Exactly right! there are a whole lot of after-market part suppliers for major appliances like dishwashers, laundry washing machines etc. Some of them have a parts list and assembly schematic hidden in the machine.
Many washing machines are produced by the Whirlpool group under different brands, so it's not surprising that they would have a lot of parts in common and thus also feed a large aftermarket. Import brands like Samsung and LG tend to be much worse on parts availability and service information (and according to some statistics, also reliability.)
Just about every proposed regulation in this article would dramatically increase the selling price of nearly all goods, and dramatically hinder new entrants from selling new products by increasing the burden to get started.
If that's the set of tradeoffs you want to make, ok, fine. But be up-front about it.
Consumer goods, by and large, are not markets with massive profit margins. They're markets of incredible scale with slim margins that generate large revenue as a result. You're not going to get better, more repairable products out of this. You're going to get fewer, more expensive products.
> dramatically hinder new entrants from selling new products
Armchair product engineering thoughts: A lot of kickstarters seemed to set themselves up for failure by trying to make a hermetically sealed apple-style product and have it produced in china without ever considering if they could build it locally, if they could get it produced in smaller quantities - if at all....
I get the whole "it can't be made at a competitive price if you don't build for an economy of scale" - but what seemed to happen is a startup would attempt to sell a widget with a design that was all hopes and dreams, immediately fly out to china, and spend a whole bunch of time and money coming up with something that looked great on paper.... but then had a fundamental flaw that required them to throw away all of the initial batch of products - maybe even the first few batches, burning up every penny they gathered in their funding campaign.
"Hold on there cowboy" is my take on this - it's easy to throw a design together that looks slick and ends up quickly becoming ewaste... startups (and startup-like projects) are usually some of the worst offenders. Think of things like Ouya or (lol) Google Stadia or any of a plethora of IoT crap that sounded cool, didn't quite achieve the desired results, and ended up in the landfill.
I'd argue that all this "bureaucratic red-tape" would help limit how much ewaste gets produced, at least a little bit.
I’ve made a conscious effort to build our (Kickstarted!) stuff domestically. With the exception of one product in China, which was still an educational PITA. Can’t claim the things are Made in America when a critical component is fabbed overseas, but it’s great to talk with people in my time zone. Going to be even better to drive over to the injection molder to dial in fit and finish.
OTOH, the examples you cite and many more are junked not because they’re made in China but due to a lack of software support/remediation. I’m not sure if there’s a business model that incentivizes this, so I’m rooting for the regulations that are slowing coming along on this.
People's needs for products change, and products themselves improve to gain features, become more energy efficient, etc.
I do not want to be running the air conditioner I had from thirty years ago. It used tons of energy, was noisy as hell, was ugly, didn't have a thermostat or timer or any other features we take for granted today.
Same thing in the way all my lamps have been replaced with LED's, televisions became HD and then large screen and then 4K, office chairs got better ergonomics, and so forth. Making a CD player that lasted 4 decades would have been a total waste of resources.
I honestly think we're at a pretty good balance point today. When something breaks, more often than not it's the case that the new version is a significant upgrade that was worth getting anyways.
Problem is sometimes you can get by with an off-off-brand product (it’s hit and miss). Many folks don’t buy the “spend more and you will get something MUCH better that will last you for years!” sales pitch. Also a lot of people wouldn’t be able to start fronting (or financing) more money for a better, more repairable product.
I just think we should be clear about what tradeoffs are being proposed. This isn't all fairy dust and magic, and the average person doesn't have the background to understand the impact of proposals like this.
That's certainly one way to implement it, no doubt.
I have my doubts that unrepairable, failing products are produced by few enough manufacturers that holding a handful of large ones to these rules would make a big dent in waste. But, maybe I'm wrong!
(Also, good luck convincing people to spend 4x on a vacuum because it's "repairable" when the no-name brand is not. Most people will roll the dice and save the money today.)
That's a feature, not a bug. If we build things to last a bit longer at the expense of a slightly higher cost we can save massive amounts of waste from being produced and use fewer materials. We don't need to crater everything but we also don't need as much -stuff- as we currently buy. Yes there are implications for lower income folks but that's a symptom of a problem that cheap plentiful flimsy shit isn't going to fix at the expense of the planet.
> You're going to get fewer, more expensive products
At this point researching a single electronic device you never looked into before can easily take hours. For example kitchen electronics was a topic for me recently.
I honestly would be happy to have way less choice, may even pay more in general, but can be sure that these products fullfil all EU standards.
My mini Ofen with crazy good isolation, according to recent EU standards, that preheats in less than a minute, will surely pay for itself in power cost :) that's the hardware I want to choose from, f* those 200+ throwaway, mostly relabelled china brands, products in the same category.
The real impact would be that those products wouldn’t be offered in those markets. It’s a big world with a lot of customers out there.
If one region demands a substantially higher bar for entry with only marginal increase in customer base, it gets delayed for a later revision.
We already saw this happen with a lot of GDPR regulations and sites that decided it was easier to block those regions than spend all of the money to confirm their products didn’t put them at risk of violations.
We’re also seeing consumers make these decisions in real-time with things like Amazon knockoffs. I know a lot of people who swear they’re “buy it for life” people but will buy tools from Harbor Freight and get cheap knockoff things from Amazon all the time.
It’s easy for all of us to say we’d gladly pay more for extra quality or upgrade ability, but when it’s time to get the wallet out the decision criteria change.
>I know a lot of people who swear they’re “buy it for life” people but will buy tools from Harbor Freight
Have you bought any tools from Harbor Freight in the last 5 years or so? Their hand tools (socket wrenches, etc.) are quite good, and are made in Taiwan. They're actually quite fantastic tools for weekend mechanics and an excellent value. I can't think of anything that's better for a home mechanic if you live in the US.
I am “buy it for life -or- buy it for this one job”. I’ve got both SnapOn and Pittsburgh (HF Brand) tools in my tool chest.
“After a year, every Harbor Freight tool is a hammer” is less true than it used to be, but even when it was, there are times you need a tool for one job and if it isn’t in the trash bin afterwards, that’s just a bonus.
I mean there has been a new entrant in the past few years, the fairphone, which arrived with a vision and an ethics, and is slowly getting market share, and better products, that are repairable, or new entrant like frame.work, which arrived with a vision, ethics too, and is slowly improving and getting market share. I am not sure why as a society we need to accomodate small vendors who arrive without a plan or anything selling shit shipped from China that is going to last 30 days and just become e-waste, like PinePhone or Librem comes to mind, I am not sure why society needs to accomodate any cowboy who wants to become a manufacturer to sell low effort china phones
My father owns an electronic repair shop specialized in TV, cameras and Music devices.
The company has official agreements with the big brands to offer official technical support for their products, meaning that they have internal access to repair manuals and repair pieces to order from the official brand. Having a spare part more expensive than the product is a usual tactic from the manufacturer to not comply with the current EU law of producing and having stock of that piece for a minimum amount of years.
The 99% of the customers that are notified of the price of the piece, drop the idea of repairing it as is cheaper to have a new one.
The funny part is that some customers still decides to repair them, and if you try to call the manufacturer to order the repair piece, either they delay months the shipment, or they end up sending the full original product from some old stock as replacement to give to the customer (or to disassemble in the repair shop if the customer still wants his one).
If current laws are, how to say this, "creatively (but legally) avoided" by companies, I really doubt that new regulations will help at all.
It's just a matter of closing the loopholes then? I see law/regulation as a lot like releasing software, you need to iterate towards an ideal. Expecting an MVP to be perfect right out of the gate seems counterintuitive.
Not just closing the loopholes; specifically imposing consumer awardable penalties for failing to support a product - something like treble damages for willful infringement should do the trick.
Can't provide a part within a specific time frame at maximum cost of the appropriate fraction of the price, for a defined period of time after the product is sold? Great, the consumer is awarded an amount equal to 3 times the MSRP at product release to ensure they can acquire a replacement product!
The "HPE Battery for real-time clock" (otherwise known as CR2032) from the an official Australian HPE spare-parts supplier was listed at $50AUD. Now, those types of listings are behind a "Request Quote" partially, IMHO, because it was shared around a number of VARs as a joke.
Maybe the extra money was for the oversized boxes and packaging HPE spares are sent in...
The 99% of the customers that are notified of the price of the piece, drop the idea of repairing it as is cheaper to have a new one.
Offer to buy the defective device from the customer, and now you have a source of spare parts to fix others. This was common strategy back then, but of course doesn't help the situation where some parts fail a lot more than others.
How long should a manufacturer being required to provide parts support? Building tons of parts and then warehousing them for decades has a very real cost.
> Building tons of parts and then warehousing them for decades has a very real cost
I wonder how the automotive industry has managed to do just that over decades.
The answer is relatively obvious, laws require them to do so, which in turn limits the amount of "SKU churn" to keep the logistics reasonable. Your usual car design holds on for 3 years, after which it gets a tiny rebrush that fixes usability or other issues that cropped up during the first period, and it will not change too much between the lines internally.
In contrast, we have many manufacturers that are as wasteful as to create "Black Friday" SKUs that are deceptively similarly named to "rest of the year" SKUs but built with slightly worse components.
This is utter, utter madness. There is no reason for this to exist at all.
The article (and comments) don't seem to make what I think are essential points.
* Free-market competition is essential for price-setting. Aftermarket parts must be allowable. IMO no solution will ever work if the prices are set by a single vendor. People get mad, but
* "Parts pairing" and DRM are a real problem. They prevent the establishment of a market for replacement parts. I would like to see a discussion of banning this practice.
* Patents preventing the manufacture of "clone" replacement parts is another issue, but even that takes a back seat to software lock (or hardware lock, as a comment below mentions [1]).
Another issue with this is that the part that fails often is poorly designed or not durable in the first place. So you spend money and time to replace it and then it will just fail again. Zero incentive to improve the part by the manufacturer. I think the solution is requiring manufacturers to sell warranties that cover full labor and materials or replacement. Then at least you could see if a manufacturer selling something cheaply has a very high “full warranty” price, it’s likely because it has a high failure rate. This would be the only way to incentivize fewer failures and repairs.
But 2 years isn't long enough. A washing machine or an oven should last at least a decade.
I'd like to see a legally mandated warranty system where a new appliance should last 5 years with no repairs, and 20 years with repairs that total no more than 25% of the original purchase price.
I've experienced overpriced parts. I've also experienced the inability to acquire parts.
I was able to completely rebuild my Dyson vacuum cleaner, with Dyson parts for a fraction of a new one. My A/C had a control board that went out, and only an authorized dealer could sell a replacement. The catch was, the dealer had to install it. So, since I have the skills, so I thought, I pulled the board, and went to repair it myself. They wanted to charge $1100, when the bad part was $7 dollars including shipping.
But guess what, they have a battery backed latching relay to detect if the boards are disconnected. Those MFr's. I replaced the entire system after this fiasco. There is an Asian company that made fighter planes that escorted bombers to Pearl Harbor, that now make HVAC systems. I would avoid them.
Making your products proprietary is one thing, but intentionally engineering them this way is criminal.
That fits in the same zone as DRM for printer cartridges or coffee flavor cups.
That's asshole design.
I absolutely understand the urge to validate the inputs to make sure the thing will keep working, but leveraging that as a competitive moat is just adversarial to customers.
Is that Mitsubishi?
I would be curious to know how the anti-tamper relay setup was engineered. It would be great to have a hacker's guide on how to disable it!
I try to repair as much as I can because I don't want stuff end up in the trash. If the parts are expensive, we need a way to source the parts from the non-fully functional units out there. From my experience, most people find the repair a daunting task and won't even think about it.
Readit News
Unfortunately, this particular problem is not one that I think can be legislated away (or at least not without the legistlation causing more problems than it fixes). The only way it gets fixed is if consumers start to care and start basing their purchases at least partially on repairability (including price). And that kind of culture shift is hard.
3D printing is the "trendy maker" thing these days but don't forget that you can make a replacement out of a suitable material in many other ways, and one that may even outlast the official part. I have in the past repaired plastic parts of appliances by making a replacement out of scrap sheet metal.
There's no need for official parts when many people can figure out how to fabricate replacements --- which is one of the reasons why companies are so against right-to-repair.
You can do a lot these days with some basic tools (also quite cheap) and YouTube videos.
Good to know, I'll research it. In the past, I've attempted fixing plastic items with soldering iron and other sources of heat, up to and including open flame from a lighter - in every case, it resulted in burning and/or smoking and stinking plastic, and at no point the two parts became attached again. Not sure what I was doing wrong.
Another interesting material is two part epoxy (like JB Weld). You can even make small parts out of it, for example redo a broken clip on a bigger plastic piece.
Due to owning and repairing a 20yo car with lots of brittle plastics, I've had to expand my plastic-repair skillset, and it's way deeper than you'd initially assume.
Costco told me take it up with the manufacturer. Kohler had a page buried on their website helpfully detailing a Kafkaesque process to send them an RMA request to a physical mailing address, with no info on what to send, no forms, etc.
Instead, I modeled a replacement in OpenSCAD in ~30 minutes, and printed it in glass filled nylon (PA6). Can is still going strong.
This seems like a much neater solution than a right to repair. By making all repairs free for consumers, the repair costs are shifted onto the initial price. This allows for much easier repairability comparisons when shopping (items with high repair costs just become more expensive). It also forces manufacturers to consider product quality much more seriously, as unknowingly releasing a faulty product onto the market, without factoring the repair costs into the price, can significantly affect their profits. It would also significantly help with the "the servers have disappeared and my device is now a brick" issue by forcing manufacturers to keep the appropriate IT infrastructure operational.
Another less radical version of this idea is to force manufacturers to prominently feature a "yearly cost of use", which is basically the price divided by the number of years under warranty (we assume here that the product is designed to be thrown away immediately after the warranty expires). This gives manufacturers an incentive to extend warranties, which also forces more repairability.
The EU kind of sort of does this already, most electronic devices there have a mandatory warranty period, but it's only two years.
I'm all for trying, though, don't get me wrong.
* What about the market for truly inexpensive things? Do I get e.g. my plastic knife replaced every time it gets dull, for 20 years? Does a consumer still have the option to buy a truly inexpensive (and low quality) specialized tool, that they know(/expect) they'll only need once? (Or will they all be expensive, because it's now illegal to make something that won't last for 20 years?) * How does this affect expensive things? What will a car cost, if I have to pay for all the possible issues that will come up with it over 20 years up front? * How will this be enforced? Just form a corporation that "goes out of business" every year or two, and is magically replaced by another distinct corporate entity. Sure the warranty lasts 20 years but if the company servicing the warranty doesn't ... (The even more significant proliferation of e.g. HOOLEEZOO branded items?)
But of course it’s not really a fixed price and the manufacturer is tacitly encouraged to compete in total lifecycle price rather than to do the “cheap out on a structural part to save 2 cents” thing. Which is the ultimate goal.
If what you want is for products to last a while, thats the way to do it. Legislate the lifecycle you want and let vendors compete on optimizing their products for that lifecycle. The free market will happily give you planned obsolescence, we are already in a market failure, and it’s not going to work itself out by just “making consumers more informed” or whatever pablum - if that worked you wouldn’t be in a market failure to begin with. Staying the course and “spreading awareness” has always been a vote against actual change.
Having full service sheets for electronics, and physical design files would make all but the most compact electronics user-serviceable, at no direct cost to manufacturers.
Watch machinist channels on YouTube and you'll see those skills in action.
[1] What open source has done is created a whole generation of developers who have never heard of disassembly or binary patching techniques, which depending on the situation can be much simpler and easier than trying to figure out how to compile the source code (and not change anything else). It has effectively produced learned helplessness in the absence of source code.
Perhaps a few cents for whole batch production. A lot of it is planned obsolescence. I've had countless things break on hinges or other tiny moving parts, because they were made from 3mm plastic instead of 5mm plastic. Every time it's moved it's under way more stress than it should. Therefore it'll break after around 3 years.
It makes sense for them to cheap out to save money, or to not think too hard about design for reliability beyond any guarantee or statutory warranty period.
But it doesn't make sense for them to deliberately design stuff to fail after 3 years. There is no vendor lock in for a blender. If it fails after three years, the number of people giving more custom to the same manufacturer must be miniscule, surely?
There's also a commercial product called Q Bond that I believe includes a plastic powder as the "host" material but is used in the same way.
It is not technically hard. Just hit new goods with a sufficient tax such that buyers have no choice but to start caring about longevity and repairability.
Of course, it is practically impossible since people like being able to buy more stuff.
This is a perfect strategy for a politician who is seeking to retire at the next election.
The political problems section is what to read, in general, no one is going to vote this on themselves.
Inflation has your back :-)
No, that is short-sighted.
The price of spare parts is the symptom. The root cause is that the part are highly specific to whatever they are going into, and there is a single supplier for them.
For repairs to be easy, things have to be made with generic parts that are available from multiple suppliers.
Not all parts have to be that way, just the ones likely to break, or ones that are expected to require replacement by design.
You're not going to get decent prices for spare parts, if you're vendor-locked, and there is no competition.
> Astute readers may have noticed one typical element missing from the price setting factors listed above: competitiveness.
Some of the plastic parts on my decades old Cuisinart food processor have started to go but the motor is still great. But Cuisinart doesn't make the parts for what is almost a 50 year old appliance at this point. I was able to buy 3rd party parts for too much money but they don't fit quite right. I make do as it's not something I use that often and can make it work.
This seems tricky to legislate though. How do regulators decide which parts are like this? How do you deal with "generic parts" holding back innovation in cases where someone has invented an improved version of that part but it's not available as a generic part yet?
Just create a bunch more of those standards, e.g. for batteries, legislate their use, done. As a side effect, products become cheaper because parts will then be available off-the-shelf at economy-of-scale prices, and supply problems also become less likely because there will be numerous vendors for each part.
However, there will be two problems: some things, like cases and special moldings are hard to standardize. So I would suggest legislating that 3D-printing instructions (STL, material, finishing steps) be made available as soon as the part itself is unavailable or too expensive. And very innovative parts should be exempt for the first few years, provided they are measurably and provably better than the standardized equivalents and that a new standard is being created from them.
Why? It's incredibly labor-intensive and logistics-intensive to track and offer one M10x1.25x12mm bolt or one main PCB for a $30 product. When I'm mass producing 5K units, I need 5K PCBs, 15K bolts, 5K upper case halves, 5K lower case halves, 5K displays, 5K buttons, etc. and I can arrange to have them delivered lineside in kits or whatever form I need and I'm pretty much going to use up everything I order in a very predictable way.
When you need 1 display and 2 bolts, I have no guarantee that I can sell all the spare parts I made and stocked, and each little fiddly item I have to have someone inventory, put away, fetch, box, pack, and ship to you. It's going to cost more or you're not going to get it. (Today, you mostly can't get it.)
I like capping the cost of the replacement parts, but you have to factor in the additional labor cost of individually packaging, inventorying, storing, and shipping pieces that are going to go to final assembly either as a kit, or bulked in such a way that a spare-parts shipper cannot just part them out efficiently. So the total cost, before shipping and tax, of a stack of replacement parts to fully rebuild widget X should cost more than the fully assembled thing, but should probably cost less than 2 or 3 widget Xs.
i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.
but i also have no experience in manufacturing or repair. i'd love to hear if there are any successful case studies on the subject
Older cars were.
Manufacturers never designed their own brake pads, they picked a caliper design that closely fit an existing wheel.
Carburetors? Just fit one from a carburetor manufacturer (weber, etc).
Steering racks, balljoints ... many fit multiple brands.
Alternators, radiators, various water tanks ... all from a common parts manufacturer, then used in several brands. Thermostats used to be a common design too.
Hell, they don't even do their own transmissions - just get a ZF-whatever.
When Hyundai launched their gen-1 Elantra ~1990, it came with a Mitsubishi engine.
Wheel bearings, CV joints - one design fit many different brands.
The repairability of older cars was amazing in retrospect.
Today it's different - you are unlikely to find brake pads from a Ford that fits a Toyota.
The companies spent extra money on design, to make that internal part significantly different, then extra money on tooling to actually build it, just so that you cannot buy a replacement unless its from them.
In industries where maintenance still has to happen, you see these general specs still in use. ARINC is one set that I deal with every day - they publish tons - along with many various MIL-STD things.
As the article points out, sometimes the spare parts are extremely simple things like bolts and screws, which should really be standardized across all industries.
Things like motors/switches and other simple electric components can also be (and should be) mostly standardized. It's only once you get to circuits and complex electronic boards that you will run into issues, because they can be custom.
Most consumer products aren't complicated, and if they are, they are only complicated because the company is trying to create huge markups and prevent people from repairing items.
If that's the set of tradeoffs you want to make, ok, fine. But be up-front about it.
Consumer goods, by and large, are not markets with massive profit margins. They're markets of incredible scale with slim margins that generate large revenue as a result. You're not going to get better, more repairable products out of this. You're going to get fewer, more expensive products.
Armchair product engineering thoughts: A lot of kickstarters seemed to set themselves up for failure by trying to make a hermetically sealed apple-style product and have it produced in china without ever considering if they could build it locally, if they could get it produced in smaller quantities - if at all....
I get the whole "it can't be made at a competitive price if you don't build for an economy of scale" - but what seemed to happen is a startup would attempt to sell a widget with a design that was all hopes and dreams, immediately fly out to china, and spend a whole bunch of time and money coming up with something that looked great on paper.... but then had a fundamental flaw that required them to throw away all of the initial batch of products - maybe even the first few batches, burning up every penny they gathered in their funding campaign.
"Hold on there cowboy" is my take on this - it's easy to throw a design together that looks slick and ends up quickly becoming ewaste... startups (and startup-like projects) are usually some of the worst offenders. Think of things like Ouya or (lol) Google Stadia or any of a plethora of IoT crap that sounded cool, didn't quite achieve the desired results, and ended up in the landfill.
I'd argue that all this "bureaucratic red-tape" would help limit how much ewaste gets produced, at least a little bit.
OTOH, the examples you cite and many more are junked not because they’re made in China but due to a lack of software support/remediation. I’m not sure if there’s a business model that incentivizes this, so I’m rooting for the regulations that are slowing coming along on this.
That last much longer.
People's needs for products change, and products themselves improve to gain features, become more energy efficient, etc.
I do not want to be running the air conditioner I had from thirty years ago. It used tons of energy, was noisy as hell, was ugly, didn't have a thermostat or timer or any other features we take for granted today.
Same thing in the way all my lamps have been replaced with LED's, televisions became HD and then large screen and then 4K, office chairs got better ergonomics, and so forth. Making a CD player that lasted 4 decades would have been a total waste of resources.
I honestly think we're at a pretty good balance point today. When something breaks, more often than not it's the case that the new version is a significant upgrade that was worth getting anyways.
I just think we should be clear about what tradeoffs are being proposed. This isn't all fairy dust and magic, and the average person doesn't have the background to understand the impact of proposals like this.
I have my doubts that unrepairable, failing products are produced by few enough manufacturers that holding a handful of large ones to these rules would make a big dent in waste. But, maybe I'm wrong!
(Also, good luck convincing people to spend 4x on a vacuum because it's "repairable" when the no-name brand is not. Most people will roll the dice and save the money today.)
At this point researching a single electronic device you never looked into before can easily take hours. For example kitchen electronics was a topic for me recently.
I honestly would be happy to have way less choice, may even pay more in general, but can be sure that these products fullfil all EU standards.
My mini Ofen with crazy good isolation, according to recent EU standards, that preheats in less than a minute, will surely pay for itself in power cost :) that's the hardware I want to choose from, f* those 200+ throwaway, mostly relabelled china brands, products in the same category.
If the OEM doesn't provide parts, they should provide specifications for aftermarket parts to be created and sold.
I believe I read somewhere that after 13 years car parts become available from third parties.
If one region demands a substantially higher bar for entry with only marginal increase in customer base, it gets delayed for a later revision.
We already saw this happen with a lot of GDPR regulations and sites that decided it was easier to block those regions than spend all of the money to confirm their products didn’t put them at risk of violations.
We’re also seeing consumers make these decisions in real-time with things like Amazon knockoffs. I know a lot of people who swear they’re “buy it for life” people but will buy tools from Harbor Freight and get cheap knockoff things from Amazon all the time.
It’s easy for all of us to say we’d gladly pay more for extra quality or upgrade ability, but when it’s time to get the wallet out the decision criteria change.
Have you bought any tools from Harbor Freight in the last 5 years or so? Their hand tools (socket wrenches, etc.) are quite good, and are made in Taiwan. They're actually quite fantastic tools for weekend mechanics and an excellent value. I can't think of anything that's better for a home mechanic if you live in the US.
“After a year, every Harbor Freight tool is a hammer” is less true than it used to be, but even when it was, there are times you need a tool for one job and if it isn’t in the trash bin afterwards, that’s just a bonus.
The 99% of the customers that are notified of the price of the piece, drop the idea of repairing it as is cheaper to have a new one. The funny part is that some customers still decides to repair them, and if you try to call the manufacturer to order the repair piece, either they delay months the shipment, or they end up sending the full original product from some old stock as replacement to give to the customer (or to disassemble in the repair shop if the customer still wants his one).
If current laws are, how to say this, "creatively (but legally) avoided" by companies, I really doubt that new regulations will help at all.
Can't provide a part within a specific time frame at maximum cost of the appropriate fraction of the price, for a defined period of time after the product is sold? Great, the consumer is awarded an amount equal to 3 times the MSRP at product release to ensure they can acquire a replacement product!
Maybe the extra money was for the oversized boxes and packaging HPE spares are sent in...
Offer to buy the defective device from the customer, and now you have a source of spare parts to fix others. This was common strategy back then, but of course doesn't help the situation where some parts fail a lot more than others.
I wonder how the automotive industry has managed to do just that over decades.
The answer is relatively obvious, laws require them to do so, which in turn limits the amount of "SKU churn" to keep the logistics reasonable. Your usual car design holds on for 3 years, after which it gets a tiny rebrush that fixes usability or other issues that cropped up during the first period, and it will not change too much between the lines internally.
In contrast, we have many manufacturers that are as wasteful as to create "Black Friday" SKUs that are deceptively similarly named to "rest of the year" SKUs but built with slightly worse components.
This is utter, utter madness. There is no reason for this to exist at all.
* Free-market competition is essential for price-setting. Aftermarket parts must be allowable. IMO no solution will ever work if the prices are set by a single vendor. People get mad, but
* "Parts pairing" and DRM are a real problem. They prevent the establishment of a market for replacement parts. I would like to see a discussion of banning this practice.
* Patents preventing the manufacture of "clone" replacement parts is another issue, but even that takes a back seat to software lock (or hardware lock, as a comment below mentions [1]).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39096846
> [...] they have a battery backed latching relay to detect if the boards are disconnected [...]
I'd like to see a legally mandated warranty system where a new appliance should last 5 years with no repairs, and 20 years with repairs that total no more than 25% of the original purchase price.
I was able to completely rebuild my Dyson vacuum cleaner, with Dyson parts for a fraction of a new one. My A/C had a control board that went out, and only an authorized dealer could sell a replacement. The catch was, the dealer had to install it. So, since I have the skills, so I thought, I pulled the board, and went to repair it myself. They wanted to charge $1100, when the bad part was $7 dollars including shipping.
But guess what, they have a battery backed latching relay to detect if the boards are disconnected. Those MFr's. I replaced the entire system after this fiasco. There is an Asian company that made fighter planes that escorted bombers to Pearl Harbor, that now make HVAC systems. I would avoid them.
Making your products proprietary is one thing, but intentionally engineering them this way is criminal.
That's asshole design.
I absolutely understand the urge to validate the inputs to make sure the thing will keep working, but leveraging that as a competitive moat is just adversarial to customers.