A belt is simple to swap, says Wiens, “unless you have one of those super-cheap ones that snaps together and then you have to kind of destroy it to get it open. Often a vacuum cleaner problem will be caused by something like an entangled string, or the belt goes. Repair doesn’t just make sense, it’s all the rage.īut what should you attempt to fix yourself, and what’s best left to the experts? And what really does need replacing? Here’s a quick guide. And look at BBC One’s The Repair Shop, a lovely, if surprising hit. The Restart Project is still running some events online. It’s very inefficient, and as a result of that, we have secondary effects: environmental destruction from mining and e-waste.”īefore the pandemic did for them, repair cafes were springing up, where you could take stuff along and share expertise. When one little thing fails, you have to do all that work over again. “Think about the work and effort that went in, someone put that thing together, then shipped it all around the world to me. “We used not to throw everything away, but now it feels like the default,” says Wiens. In Britain a right-to-repair law will come into effect in the summer, meaning manufacturers will be obliged to make parts for products available, to increase the life expectancy of stuff, while also cutting the costs, energy and the need for new materials. He’s speaking to me via Skype from San Luis Obispo, California, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Never take broken for an answer” – and he thinks it sounds as if the switch is the problem.
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Or maybe not …Ĭould it be repaired? Could I repair it? “It depends on the kettle and how it was put together,” says Kyle Wiens, a co-founder of iFixit, which publishes free repair guides for consumer electronics and gadgets, as well as selling kits and parts. Put another way, the Polly component still functions well, but Sukey’s lost it. It still boils water, but it doesn’t switch off – just boils on, converting the kitchen to a sauna, wastefully, expensively.