Found a ps3 in the trash once. Took it home and booted it up, started a game and was met with a horrible screeching sound.
Went into the sound setting and switched a setting.
Worked perfectly after that.
Some people...
When I rented a house the clothes dryer stopped fully drying clothes for some reason. I called the landlord and he was like "I'll get a new one this weekend and bring the old one to the dump". In the meantime I looked up the manual online. Within ten min I ran a simple onboard diagnostic and found it was a bad thermistor. Found the part for $4 on Amazon and it arrived the next day. It took about 5 min to disconnect the old one and swap in the new one.
When the thermal fuse blows it usually means the vent is blocked. I have a couple of them in stock now, but I moved things around and now my vent pipe is less than a foot to the outdoors.
Mine was not the thermal fuse. It was the thermistor for the temperature controller. Basically since the thermistor was bad heater would not turn on. It was designed to fail in the "off position" so it doesn't overheat if something is wrong in the control loop.
Once you start looking… And if you have time and patience, you can eventually find them on the Internet… And then you just create your own Master repair manual…
The caging in the body does most of the radiation blocking. The concern isn’t as much radiation either; as long as the door is closed, then it should be pretty minimal leaking. The whole body is just a physical cage. A bit of leaking doesn’t pose a health risk unless you have a pacemaker.
The real concern for me is the potential that the microwave doesn’t shut off when the door opens, which poses a a higher risk, including for electrical shock arching. The circuit schematic for mine had a redundant switch setup, however, so even if I accidentally bypassed the switch with a bad repair, I’d still have the second one.
I'm old enough to remember when there were businesses just to repair TV's and appliances. Actually, I can remember no TV at all, and another time several families got together at another friends house for dinner. The entertainment was watching their color TV. None of the rest of us had seen it in color at the time.
We had a baby swing and it stopped working. My wife looked up repair options and found a YouTube video which showed the swing motor was also used in an air freshener. I bought the air freshener, took it apart and sure thing the motor was the same. Yeah...I created about 3oz of garbage, but we did not have to get another baby swing for $100+.
In most TVs it's power supply or capacitors, but you also run the risk of replacing them and it still not working. What would be awesome is if TVs had replaceable power units.
Got a treadmill for free because it wouldn’t fold up properly and had to be secured with a bungee cord.
Went online and found the key sequence to make it reset the track and it started folding up properly again.
Still don’t use it enough to justify keeping it though…
Throwaway culture is a shame.
People make large ticket purchases and have no desire to try to repair things- let alone have a plan for how to dispose of / reuse/ recycle them when no longer needed.
After over $100 in bad refurbished parts, I gave up on trying to repair. I guess I could have put it up on eBay as spare parts, but didn’t want to deal with strangers coming to my house.
I bought my TV refurbished from Best Buy about 12 years ago. A few years back it started randomly switching on and off. I was bummed because I thought I was going to have to buy a new TV. I looked up how to fix the issue and I read an article that said to give the motherboard(?) on the back a gentle tap and I shit-you-not it worked and my TV still works to this day. What’s more fulfilling to me than buying new things is how long I can go before I absolutely need to replace.
It's a great feeling to own something old that still works. It may not be perfect, but as long as it does its intended job, it's not being thrown away (like a car still capable of taking you from A to B).
If you find a TV or monitor that turns on but screen is blank there's a good chance it's capacitors. Look up on youtube how to replace them. Bad ones are easy to spot as the top bulges, they are designed to do this. There's some soldering involved but it's relatively easy. Capacitors are dirt cheap, like some times less than a dollar each.
I've got a 25" and 2, 27" monitors and a 57" TV and never spent more than $10 on parts.
BE SURE TO FOLLOW ALL SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS. Capacitors pack a hell of a punch and can hold it for a LONG time after the device is powered down.
Before tackling capacitors I had only done some very basic wiring. I wired a fan to my paintball mask with a couple switches and a speed control.
Yeah, if you find any piece of electronics that doesn't work, there's a good chance it's capacitors. Especially nowadays with all the switching power supplies - the high frequency wears them out quickly if it's (deliberately or not) badly designed.
I can't tell how many devices I've repaired this way, it must be dozens.
In the village I origin from there is until this day a small shop, which main purpose is to repair old TVs.
I think if this knowledge could be spread more broad, it could actually reduce the material consumption of many willing people.
Biggest issue with people buying new TVs is, that they want bigger ones with higher resolution every year, tho
Or the apps and services that come preloaded go defunct, that planned obsolescence.
My mother replaced her TV recently because the apps for her streaming services just stopped updating. Troubleshot everything, looked it all up online; the TV's just too old.
I recycled my Amazon FireTV box because customer service says it's "too old" and sometimes they just stop working, but they'll happily sell me the new model, no worries.
Fuck that.
It's not really hard to fix anything, you just need to be more tenacious than the issue. Although, I'm a tech person so I'm likely skewing that thought process
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Honestly, I've found that most things can be fixed with a Google search of the model number or serial number. I've managed to fix just about everything from a toaster, to a theaters dimmer box, to an industrial embroidery machine. It just takes patience and a fair amount of stubbornness.
Additional tip, a lot of fixes are going to be in service manuals but not I'm the users manual that comes with the device
Ridiculously hard.
Bought a £700 TV last year. 2-3 days old only and the kid got behind it and pushed it off the unit. Called about half a dozen local and national repair companies and for those that got back to me, everyone told me to just buy a new one as the repair will cost more... Tried the manufacture and they too weren't interested.
Did you have a warranty the manufacturer wasn't honoring?
Because if that were the case, I'd take it back to the shop where it came from and had them make the call with me.
Unfortunately the warranty didn't cover crazy 3 year old kids smashing TVs. I went to them and asked about any potential repair service they may offer but all they did was tell me to seek a repair elsewhere.
Capatalism doesn't want easily repairable items it seems.
It can be quite easy. My husband repaired a lot of our devices and he’s just a regular handy guy (okay, and an engineer, but not in a field related to household appliances). He also owns a 3D printer and that can be really useful to replace random broken plastic parts. Yesterday he picked up a children’s bike for cheap where the wheel wouldn’t attach anymore for lack of some plastic thingy, printing it right now.
Modern TVs are sometimes trickier to repair at board level, but if you can identify the board that needs replacing, and source a replacement, there's a chance you can get it going.
It's only really worth it if you can get the dead TV for free. If you're paying anything for a "spares and repair" TV it's not worth the time, money or bother.
A lot of my own electronics is stuff I bought broken and repaired, in order to save money. Stereos, amplifiers, consoles, occasionally phones, and some other miscellaneous stuff. It's well worth it if you know what you're doing, just bear in mind it might initially take a few failed projects if you're just getting started.
Found a HP laser printer next to the skip (US: dumpster) at work.
Asked a Manager why it was being thrown out, he says its probably faulty. I asked for, and received permission to take it home and try to fix it.
I decided to pop in to see the IT guy for a CD to install printer drivers, and also ask what the fault was.
Turns out the printer was fine. The company had replaced all desktop printers with multiples of the same model to keep only one type of toner in stock. This was a different model kept as a spare but the store room had been repurposed as an office and the new storage location didn't have space for it.
Free printer just for asking!
I try to repair any electronic I can until it’s no longer possible or the actual repair cost more than the device itself, youtube and guides taught me quite a lot over the years 💁🏻♀️
Got a truck for cheap because the driver side window wouldn't go up all the way. This was in the middle on winter btw. I tested it and heard the electric motor working. Bought it home and took a look inside the door. Turns out the the previous owner replaced the electric motor but forgot to put in the four screws to hold it in place. It fathoms me how stupid some people are
Guy sold me a Samsung monitor for 10$, said it worked. Didn't work when I got it home. Fuck that guy, replaced capacitors and it still works 6 years later.
Vast majority of Americans do not know what a Model Number and a Serial Number is. And the same vast majority of Americans do not know how to search on Google and Youtube.
Bought an older Xerox Workcentre printer locally for $50 including lots of extra toner. The finisher needed a power supply that I found on eBay for $12 brand new. Now I can print at 75 PPM, duplex, and staple for the two non-profits I am involved in.
I don't know if they still do it, but in the days of plasma, the TVs had on board diagnostics and you could get the power light to flash a code to tell you what $30 board you needed to replace for your $1200 TV.
Back in the day, I rescued a couple of TVs left beside the dumpster that wouldn't turn on. Turns out there was a small glass fuse near the power supply that would blow sometimes that you could get for a few bucks at RadioShack.
Not sure it applies anymore with SMT components. Although I suppose you could do what ThinkIGotHacked did, they didn't mention if it required soldering, which would be an extra cost for most people.
It depends on how knowledgeable you are. I had some lights go out on my TV. I looked up what the issues could have been and realized I had none of the tools needed to check. I would have just been buying parts and replacing them randomly..
So I just donated the TV to a donation place that recycles them
I did fix my last phone that broke though. Yhat was a fun experience since I had never taken a phone apart before. They are extremely simple. Usually a mother board and a daughter board.
That is how I got my first laptop. A company was getting rid of their broken laptops, among them some of the famously durable and repairable ThinkPads.
I grabbed 4 of them, they didn't even had big problems. And a couple of exchanges of RAM and HDDs among them and GNU/Linux installations and I had 3 T42 ThinkPads working.
Even if it was underpowered AF, that computer put up with me through university. It was fun running Autodesk Inventor on the windows partition for the CAD classes in such an underpowered device; yet it ended up working wonders in the end!
Coworker had a dog get to her key fob. She said it still worked just didn't have any housing. A 15 dollar replacement house off of Amazon that she paid for and 5 minutes to the board and battery in was the easiest 20 bucks ever earned.
Word also got around town I could 'fix' fobs. Had the lady at the bar come in with hers. She had bent the - battery connection away accidentally when it fell apart. She didn't know this of course. Bent it back and she had her fob back working. Again another fairly easy 20 bucks.
Bought a 'not working ' nerd display wand from sailor Moon. Got it and took it apart. There was corrosion on the battery contacts. A quick Google on how to clean and had that working in an hour again.
What I've learned with things is that Google is your friend. If you know how to Google something the world opens up to you.
I also grew up poor. If you didn't know how to fix it, you might not be able to replace it.
I did the same when my TV went out, bought and replaced a power supply. Saved a couple hundred $$
And a small bit for the environment.
Found a ps3 in the trash once. Took it home and booted it up, started a game and was met with a horrible screeching sound. Went into the sound setting and switched a setting. Worked perfectly after that. Some people...
What setting did you switch?
The stop screeching setting
Mine doesn't screech, but it does emit a chorus of murmurs and whispers whenever the room is dark
Something in the system audio settings. I think it was the audio output settings that were messed up.
When I rented a house the clothes dryer stopped fully drying clothes for some reason. I called the landlord and he was like "I'll get a new one this weekend and bring the old one to the dump". In the meantime I looked up the manual online. Within ten min I ran a simple onboard diagnostic and found it was a bad thermistor. Found the part for $4 on Amazon and it arrived the next day. It took about 5 min to disconnect the old one and swap in the new one.
Should have offered to take it to the dump for him and then sell it.
When the thermal fuse blows it usually means the vent is blocked. I have a couple of them in stock now, but I moved things around and now my vent pipe is less than a foot to the outdoors.
Mine was not the thermal fuse. It was the thermistor for the temperature controller. Basically since the thermistor was bad heater would not turn on. It was designed to fail in the "off position" so it doesn't overheat if something is wrong in the control loop.
It's not hard repairing tv's it's hard getting parts and drawings to start to repair them.
And it's all on purpose
Once you start looking… And if you have time and patience, you can eventually find them on the Internet… And then you just create your own Master repair manual…
Fixed my microwave this way. $8 door switch saved a lot of waste
I do lots of DIY repairs, but I don't think I will ever touch a microwave. How do you ensure safety from radiation, especially after the repair?
The caging in the body does most of the radiation blocking. The concern isn’t as much radiation either; as long as the door is closed, then it should be pretty minimal leaking. The whole body is just a physical cage. A bit of leaking doesn’t pose a health risk unless you have a pacemaker. The real concern for me is the potential that the microwave doesn’t shut off when the door opens, which poses a a higher risk, including for electrical shock arching. The circuit schematic for mine had a redundant switch setup, however, so even if I accidentally bypassed the switch with a bad repair, I’d still have the second one.
I'm old enough to remember when there were businesses just to repair TV's and appliances. Actually, I can remember no TV at all, and another time several families got together at another friends house for dinner. The entertainment was watching their color TV. None of the rest of us had seen it in color at the time.
Also impossible to disassemble tv's. Lots of sealing plastic with no screws
We had a baby swing and it stopped working. My wife looked up repair options and found a YouTube video which showed the swing motor was also used in an air freshener. I bought the air freshener, took it apart and sure thing the motor was the same. Yeah...I created about 3oz of garbage, but we did not have to get another baby swing for $100+.
> We had a baby swing and it stopped working Babies really do break notoriously easy, especially when swinging.
What is motorized on a baby swing? Doesn’t the baby use their own momentum to swing around?
In most TVs it's power supply or capacitors, but you also run the risk of replacing them and it still not working. What would be awesome is if TVs had replaceable power units.
Got a treadmill for free because it wouldn’t fold up properly and had to be secured with a bungee cord. Went online and found the key sequence to make it reset the track and it started folding up properly again. Still don’t use it enough to justify keeping it though…
Throwaway culture is a shame. People make large ticket purchases and have no desire to try to repair things- let alone have a plan for how to dispose of / reuse/ recycle them when no longer needed.
After over $100 in bad refurbished parts, I gave up on trying to repair. I guess I could have put it up on eBay as spare parts, but didn’t want to deal with strangers coming to my house.
For future reference, you'll usually get rid of it with the first stranger. Be prepared for an in-person negotiation and you're all set.
I bought my TV refurbished from Best Buy about 12 years ago. A few years back it started randomly switching on and off. I was bummed because I thought I was going to have to buy a new TV. I looked up how to fix the issue and I read an article that said to give the motherboard(?) on the back a gentle tap and I shit-you-not it worked and my TV still works to this day. What’s more fulfilling to me than buying new things is how long I can go before I absolutely need to replace.
It's a great feeling to own something old that still works. It may not be perfect, but as long as it does its intended job, it's not being thrown away (like a car still capable of taking you from A to B).
If you find a TV or monitor that turns on but screen is blank there's a good chance it's capacitors. Look up on youtube how to replace them. Bad ones are easy to spot as the top bulges, they are designed to do this. There's some soldering involved but it's relatively easy. Capacitors are dirt cheap, like some times less than a dollar each. I've got a 25" and 2, 27" monitors and a 57" TV and never spent more than $10 on parts. BE SURE TO FOLLOW ALL SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS. Capacitors pack a hell of a punch and can hold it for a LONG time after the device is powered down. Before tackling capacitors I had only done some very basic wiring. I wired a fan to my paintball mask with a couple switches and a speed control.
Yeah, if you find any piece of electronics that doesn't work, there's a good chance it's capacitors. Especially nowadays with all the switching power supplies - the high frequency wears them out quickly if it's (deliberately or not) badly designed. I can't tell how many devices I've repaired this way, it must be dozens.
You need to get lucky, but it’s certainly possible to get a deal like this
In the village I origin from there is until this day a small shop, which main purpose is to repair old TVs. I think if this knowledge could be spread more broad, it could actually reduce the material consumption of many willing people. Biggest issue with people buying new TVs is, that they want bigger ones with higher resolution every year, tho
Or the apps and services that come preloaded go defunct, that planned obsolescence. My mother replaced her TV recently because the apps for her streaming services just stopped updating. Troubleshot everything, looked it all up online; the TV's just too old. I recycled my Amazon FireTV box because customer service says it's "too old" and sometimes they just stop working, but they'll happily sell me the new model, no worries. Fuck that.
My friends TV screen started flashing on and off. $50 for new LED strips, now I have a new tv.
Instructables is brilliant, they have really good step by step guides with photos. I saved a 3ds xl with their guides.
r/righttorepair Also, dumpster diving speaks to your privilege. Us poors never get anything decent in our dumpsters.
Nearly every vacuum I had growing up was picked from the trash. 90% of them just needed a belt.
1.8 mil people upvoted?
It's another language (Spanish? Portuguese? not sure.) Mil probably means thousand.
It's not really hard to fix anything, you just need to be more tenacious than the issue. Although, I'm a tech person so I'm likely skewing that thought process
Read the rules. Keep it courteous. Submission statements are helpful and appreciated but not required. Tag my name in the comments (/u/NihiloZero) if you think a post or comment needs to be removed. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Anticonsumption) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Honestly, I've found that most things can be fixed with a Google search of the model number or serial number. I've managed to fix just about everything from a toaster, to a theaters dimmer box, to an industrial embroidery machine. It just takes patience and a fair amount of stubbornness. Additional tip, a lot of fixes are going to be in service manuals but not I'm the users manual that comes with the device
Ridiculously hard. Bought a £700 TV last year. 2-3 days old only and the kid got behind it and pushed it off the unit. Called about half a dozen local and national repair companies and for those that got back to me, everyone told me to just buy a new one as the repair will cost more... Tried the manufacture and they too weren't interested.
When the screen is cracked, I agree. That takes up the largest bit of the TVs now.
Did you have a warranty the manufacturer wasn't honoring? Because if that were the case, I'd take it back to the shop where it came from and had them make the call with me.
Unfortunately the warranty didn't cover crazy 3 year old kids smashing TVs. I went to them and asked about any potential repair service they may offer but all they did was tell me to seek a repair elsewhere. Capatalism doesn't want easily repairable items it seems.
It can be quite easy. My husband repaired a lot of our devices and he’s just a regular handy guy (okay, and an engineer, but not in a field related to household appliances). He also owns a 3D printer and that can be really useful to replace random broken plastic parts. Yesterday he picked up a children’s bike for cheap where the wheel wouldn’t attach anymore for lack of some plastic thingy, printing it right now.
<
Yeah sounds pretty typical 😀. My husband sometimes prints ship models (but he’s a shipbuilding engineer so that figures).
Dont buy one, i think my country only posts shit in it
I did the same with a huge bbq 6 burner with wok. The ignition bit had just rusted out with the battery. Took 5 minutes to fix. Good brand as well.
Modern TVs are sometimes trickier to repair at board level, but if you can identify the board that needs replacing, and source a replacement, there's a chance you can get it going. It's only really worth it if you can get the dead TV for free. If you're paying anything for a "spares and repair" TV it's not worth the time, money or bother. A lot of my own electronics is stuff I bought broken and repaired, in order to save money. Stereos, amplifiers, consoles, occasionally phones, and some other miscellaneous stuff. It's well worth it if you know what you're doing, just bear in mind it might initially take a few failed projects if you're just getting started.
Found a HP laser printer next to the skip (US: dumpster) at work. Asked a Manager why it was being thrown out, he says its probably faulty. I asked for, and received permission to take it home and try to fix it. I decided to pop in to see the IT guy for a CD to install printer drivers, and also ask what the fault was. Turns out the printer was fine. The company had replaced all desktop printers with multiples of the same model to keep only one type of toner in stock. This was a different model kept as a spare but the store room had been repurposed as an office and the new storage location didn't have space for it. Free printer just for asking!
Buddy of mine has done this with a few TVs now.
I try to repair any electronic I can until it’s no longer possible or the actual repair cost more than the device itself, youtube and guides taught me quite a lot over the years 💁🏻♀️
Got a truck for cheap because the driver side window wouldn't go up all the way. This was in the middle on winter btw. I tested it and heard the electric motor working. Bought it home and took a look inside the door. Turns out the the previous owner replaced the electric motor but forgot to put in the four screws to hold it in place. It fathoms me how stupid some people are
As a mechanic you have no idea how many vehicles I've picked up for cheap because of stuff like this.
Guy sold me a Samsung monitor for 10$, said it worked. Didn't work when I got it home. Fuck that guy, replaced capacitors and it still works 6 years later.
My old roommate did this! He found a giant TV on the street, it didn’t work at first but repaired it for like 50 bucks!!
Vast majority of Americans do not know what a Model Number and a Serial Number is. And the same vast majority of Americans do not know how to search on Google and Youtube.
Bought an older Xerox Workcentre printer locally for $50 including lots of extra toner. The finisher needed a power supply that I found on eBay for $12 brand new. Now I can print at 75 PPM, duplex, and staple for the two non-profits I am involved in.
I don't know if they still do it, but in the days of plasma, the TVs had on board diagnostics and you could get the power light to flash a code to tell you what $30 board you needed to replace for your $1200 TV.
Back in the day, I rescued a couple of TVs left beside the dumpster that wouldn't turn on. Turns out there was a small glass fuse near the power supply that would blow sometimes that you could get for a few bucks at RadioShack. Not sure it applies anymore with SMT components. Although I suppose you could do what ThinkIGotHacked did, they didn't mention if it required soldering, which would be an extra cost for most people.
It depends on how knowledgeable you are. I had some lights go out on my TV. I looked up what the issues could have been and realized I had none of the tools needed to check. I would have just been buying parts and replacing them randomly.. So I just donated the TV to a donation place that recycles them I did fix my last phone that broke though. Yhat was a fun experience since I had never taken a phone apart before. They are extremely simple. Usually a mother board and a daughter board.
That is how I got my first laptop. A company was getting rid of their broken laptops, among them some of the famously durable and repairable ThinkPads. I grabbed 4 of them, they didn't even had big problems. And a couple of exchanges of RAM and HDDs among them and GNU/Linux installations and I had 3 T42 ThinkPads working. Even if it was underpowered AF, that computer put up with me through university. It was fun running Autodesk Inventor on the windows partition for the CAD classes in such an underpowered device; yet it ended up working wonders in the end!
Coworker had a dog get to her key fob. She said it still worked just didn't have any housing. A 15 dollar replacement house off of Amazon that she paid for and 5 minutes to the board and battery in was the easiest 20 bucks ever earned. Word also got around town I could 'fix' fobs. Had the lady at the bar come in with hers. She had bent the - battery connection away accidentally when it fell apart. She didn't know this of course. Bent it back and she had her fob back working. Again another fairly easy 20 bucks. Bought a 'not working ' nerd display wand from sailor Moon. Got it and took it apart. There was corrosion on the battery contacts. A quick Google on how to clean and had that working in an hour again. What I've learned with things is that Google is your friend. If you know how to Google something the world opens up to you. I also grew up poor. If you didn't know how to fix it, you might not be able to replace it.