Looks like you need one. I’ve been troubleshooting a broken refrigerator and it looks, fingers-crossed, I will be able to repair it myself, as long as the error code is correct.
Here are some distractions:
Open thread.
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rikyrah
I am in awe…you fixing a fridge by yourself.
TaMara
@rikyrah: It’s just a compressor relay, supposedly. What I love to brag about is I FIXED my dryer! It stopped heating. So I watched some videos and crossed my fingers that it was the simple solution. I ordered a fuse set and replaced all the fuses and voila! dryer fixed.
SteveinPHX
Send out progress reports. We may learn something!
Elizabelle
Give the little devil a snack. Come on keepers. Tasmanian devil knows it’s got a high value hostage.
Cameron
Once again, Florida boldly takes public education backwards!
https://www.commondreams.org/news/florida-black-history
Delk
This guy is my neighbor. He currently has the flags of women’s team countries up.
rikyrah
@Cameron:
My lips have been so pursed ever since I read that yesterday.
Heaven forbid any child in Florida learn about ROSEWOOD.
Kathleen
@TaMara: WI’ll you adopt me?
Alison Rose
That’s the sound I make when someone tries to take my phone, too.
trollhattan
@rikyrah: It’s a smart fridge so you must speak to it firmly and clearly, using correct syntax.
TaMara
@Kathleen: LOL! I must confess, I have an electrical engineer friend and he’s on speed dial if I get in over my head.
I’m shocked how many of the fixable problems are, “buy $12 worth of parts, unplug dead part, plug in new part
ETA: Thank heavens for youtube videos and the experts who post instructional videos. I highly recommend https://www.appliancepartspros.com/ they sell the parts AND post the videos on how to install them.
Elizabelle
@Alison Rose: That little animal has quite the personality! I think she/he is playing.
Ruckus
Damn. Ten years old going on 30. Just damn.
They aren’t named Tasmanian Devils for no reason….
Alison Rose
@Elizabelle: It definitely seemed to be enjoying leading the chase, as it were :)
Nancy
@rikyrah: perhaps we can cross our fingers in solidarity.
Can’t imagine thinking I can fix a fridge, but with the heat I sure hope it works.
trollhattan
OMG look at that little guy(?) playing keep-away like a puppy with a purloined shoe! Because I think of Warner Brothers as factual, I expected him to form a tornado at any second.
TaMara
@Ruckus: I’ve always loved H.E.R., so when I saw the video I was blown away.
cope
Thanks to YouTube and a dash of common sense, I have resuscitated our old dryer multiple times, dead elements in two electric ovens, a DE pool filter (also more than once), our electric hot water elements, bad breakers in an old breaker box and countless other appliances and objects. My wife tells the story of the time she left for work and I had the washer, dryer and dishwasher all taken apart. By the time she got home, everything was back together in working order. Of course, that was back in my glory days.
zhena gogolia
@Elizabelle: It’s acting just like a French bulldog of my acquaintance.
Ruckus
@TaMara:
Most of the time things like items we use every day are rather simple, even if they don’t look that way. Because more complicated is more expensive to build. And electronics are far, far better today than they were, not all that long ago. But they will still fail, every thing made by humans can and often will at the most inopportune time. And often it is more expensive to fix it than replace it. At my complex for example if a refrigerator fails, they check it for a couple minutes and if it isn’t obvious and cheap to fix they just replace it and put the old one in the dumpster corral and the guys that salvage parts and repair them stops by and picks it up. It’s easier, faster and in the long run cheaper and the customers – us are happier.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
This is why I go to the grey market, to buy stuff made by Inhumans. Lifetime guarantees.
TaMara
@Ruckus: All so true! My EE friend, as he is now “retired” from HP, has two passions – teaching people how to fix their old pinball machines and teaching people how to fix their appliances that would otherwise be too expensive to fix and cheaper to replace.
He’s kind of my inspiration. Also, my frugal side doesn’t want to pay $150 an hour for a $12, 30-minute fix. And I sure don’t have $2K to replace this refrigerator right now.
bbleh
@Brachiator: well, HUMAN lifetime perhaps.
Elizabelle
@zhena gogolia: French bulldogs make some strange vocalizations!
Sure Lurkalot
@Ruckus:
Point the first, I’m either unlucky or crazy but it is my experience that electronic appliances are far worse than they were before. My first W/D, refrigerator, iron, microwave…all lasted much longer with less repair than anything I replaced them with.
Point the second, built-in function obsolescence has bigly contributed to the pickle our planet is in as thoughtfully discussed below.
The Pale Scot
The wife of the serial killer in Gilgo has filed for divorce, my first thought was she better get a freeze on their accounts because he will suck up every penny for his defense.
And she’s from Iceland, the most peaceful place in world
eldorado
also fixed my fridge. granted it was just replacing a door tray, but i did manage to get the right part and put it in without breaking anything
Ruckus
@TaMara:
She is pretty amazing.
Think about if this was 25 or 35 yrs ago or more. Maybe she could go on to be a performer if she was an adult, but a 10 yr old? This country, for all it’s concept of formation of equality and all the bullshit that’s gone on for most of that time, and which still effects a large portion of the black community to this day. Humanity. If anyone should be discriminated against it should be the racists and haters. What a waste of humanity so many humans are, and it isn’t due to the color of their skin, it’s their brains that tell them that hate is the best emotion.
Jay
@TaMara:
$150 an hour??????????
Here it’s $375 to show up, some where between 8 am and 5 pm.
The $375 cover’s the first hour. It’s $100 for every 30 minutes over that first hour,
and 90% of the time, the machines computer has had a brain fart.
So, they shut the breaker off for 20 minutes while they play Angry Birds, turn it back on, which resets the computer to the factory settings, give it a test. If it works, they then play Angry Birds again while “monitoring the performance” until 1:05 hours have passed, hit you with a $475 plus taxes bill and drive off into the sunset.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Lifetime guarantees.
Worth every penny you didn’t pay for them….
Dangerman
The Tasmanian Devil video kinda reminds me of this dog that has an issue with it’s owner:
You Forgot Something
(h/t Kareem Abdul Jabbar Substack)
Ruckus
@bbleh:
See here’s what people fail to realize that when that part has failed, it’s lifetime is over. Therefore a lifetime guarantee is worth less than the paper it’s printed on.
Ruckus
@Sure Lurkalot:
Like anything else in life there are good products and crap products. Sometimes they come off the same assembly line. As a person who spent most of their life building tools for others to use to make products, every thing humans touch has the possibility to fail. Some products do this far more often. And part of that is that if every thing built was actually perfect, two things would be true. 1st, no human had anything to do with the design or building of it. 2nd, it would never be sold because that $20 item would cost $20K. Or more.
The world IS in trouble. For many reasons. Greed, stupidity, greed, pompous arrogance, greed and likely a few more. Humanity can make it better but it can also make it far worse.
What is your fix for any of this? None of us can have refrigerators because they break? Homes mostly use wood, we shouldn’t use wood for shelter? We could use metal but that has to be mined and smelted and formed, bolted or welded.
You want a perfect world? Where do you think you are going to find it? This one isn’t perfect, we have heat, cold, rain – sometimes monsoons, earthquakes. The last earthquake I experienced the epicenter was less than 4 miles from me and a number of people died within sight of my house.
So is one concept to never design/build anything that might fail ever again? Who is going to make that decision and how much is it going to cost? What do you do about all the humans fucking and creating more humans? China tried to control that and the concept lasted what 2-3 years?
Do we need to do things better? YES WE DO. What, How, How Much will it cost, How Long will it take? What level of perfection will you tolerate?
frosty
@rikyrah: When we drove to Cedar Key there was a little sign that said ROSEWOOD. I would swear it wasn’t a historic marker. More like “Rosewood site thataway”.
Sure Lurkalot
@Ruckus: I apologize, Ruckus, maybe my comment was a bit abrupt. I do not want, need or expect a perfect world where nothing fails. I do think some products have gotten better but there’s no doubt late stage capitalism relies on uber consumerism which requires some level of built in obsolescence. One of my mother’s refrigerators lasted 35 years with one repair. The first one I bought lasted 20, the next 13 and the pieces parts on my current one are cheaper, thinner plastic. I had a $1,200 microwave that didn’t make it 5 years despite replacing the panel twice.
Ruckus
@Sure Lurkalot:
I was expecting this. One of the things that I diid before the Northridge earthquake destroyed my business was I had a machine, first one sold to what is called a job shop, rather than a walled off business that either created a product or 100% supported another company. It cost $256,000. It worked to a 5 place tolerance, that’s .00005,, it cut metal with electricity with electrodes I had to build from graphite. And it did so with 4 axis of movement, 24 hrs a day unattended. I understand about perfection, I build many things about as close to zero tolerance as possible. I made tools for other people to make things with. But the tools I made cost anywhere from approx $25,000 to $200,000 and could often create 1 million parts without reworking. But the parts they made most often cost a few cents to maybe a couple dollars. Making the parts wore out the tools I made, at some point and they had to be replaced. It’s the nature of things, use wears them out. Animals do the same, we are born, we grow, we get old, we wear out, we break. This is the nature of nature. Everything does this. We can often slow it down and just as often we can make it worse. The upholstery in modern cars is often made from recycled PET plastic, 12oz and 2L soda bottles for example. Virgin plastic is used for the bottles but the bottles have a second life, creating a better, longer lasting upholstery for your car. And if someone never told you about this you might never know. It’s not uncommon knowledge but it isn’t widely known either. Things do not have to go to waste, Apple is recycling used EOL Apple cell phones with automatic machines that do all the work in a few seconds to take them back to the bare components so all of it can be recycled. They expect in a short time to be making all their phones from recycled parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUXiYecGZs8 This is a youtube of the process.
Obsolescence is just as often that things improve, rather than planned obsolescence. Cell phones sure have from my first one almost 30 yrs ago to my current one that is 3-4 months old.
JCJ
@trollhattan: Maybe Taz took it because he needed to call Bugs Bunny
WhatsMyNym
Another place to find parts with instructions and diagrams, is Sears PartsDirect.
They’ve been going since 1995 and now have 2.8 million diagrams online: ~420K model parts diagrams with ~5 diagrams per model and ~50k manuals or installation guides. Also YouTube videos.
catclub
@trollhattan:
rhymes with VAX…. hmmm
found it.
“Speak roughly to your little VAX, And boot it when it crashes; It knows that one cannot relax
Because the paging thrashes! Wow! Wow! Wow!”