Repairing Small Appliances
| Field | Home repair, frugal living |
| Went Obsolete | Beginning in 1940s, greatly accelerated in electronic age |
| Made Obsolete By | Tamper-proof designs, microprocessors in simple items |
| Knowledge Assumed | Awareness that if something is broken, taking it apart can't hurt anything, and might help find and fix the problem; knowing when to unplug appliance; ability to ignore warnings printed on case (e.g. “no user servicible parts inside”) |
| When useful | Items from thrift stores, yard sales, etc. can often be fixed easily |
Beginning in the 1940s, manufacturers patented designs that could not be disassembled by users for repair. It would be intresting to know if there was pushback from consumers at the time, but nowadays it is often impossible to fix certain appliances because they rely on microprocessors. Even so, items from yard sales or thrift stores are often discarded for trivial reasons. For example, consumers will typically replace relatively inexpensive items when something simple, like a battery, wears out, or even when the item is improperly configured or when the user can't figure out how to make it work. The thrift store item can then be purchased for next to nothing, and for the price of the needed part, made to work like new.
This skill will come back into usefulness as the 21st Century leads us to a time when simply discarding carbon-intensive products no longer makes sense.
