This year I promoted by habit of fixing things into a recognised hobby. I've always enjoyed the challenge of making repairs so that I can make household items work for longer, save things from land-fill, and also learn something along the way once I've done it. This year I saw some opportunities to repair things that I didn't even own and have bought broken items for a fraction of their normal cost with the express intention of repairing them and so far it has been highly successful.
Hotpoint Heat-pump Tumble Dryer
This is an item I purchase new a couple of years ago but it has been unreliable which I blame on fundamental design flaws. The problem is always that in spite of dual filtering, fine particals of lint build up inside the heat exchanger to the point of failure and in my experience this required a repair every 18 months. The first time was performed by the engineer and I watched the process that involved a near complete disassembly and vacuuming out. The next time it happened I knew exactly what the problem would be. I disassembled the machine, cleaned it out and put it back together. After a month of testing I sold the unit for nearly half the original purchase price and bought a traditional condensing dryer. The problem with the heat pump units is the cooling system runs through the heat exchanger so it cannot be removed for cleaning. I recommend to anyone who has one to run it empty on a timed run for about 45 minutes once a month or so to try dry out and flush through any lint build up. Personally though I'll stick to condensing dryers for as long as they allow me to buy one.
Dualit Architect 4 slice toaster
I saw that Dualit toasters were known for their repairability and I fancied giving it a go. I saw one come up for £20 delivered on eBay with one side not working that was only 2 years old and looked brand new. This model retails for £120 so it's a healhy discount.
When I received it I did a test on the bench and indeed it only heated on one side. I also noticed that if I held down the handle on the broken side, it did actually heat up but one of the plates only heated up at the bottom half and was much brighter than the working side of the toaster. This indicated a short and the brighter elements were handling too much current as a result of not enough resistance in the remaining circuit.
Once I opened the case I found two of the wires fused together and I was able to prise them apart with a screwdriver and moved them back into position with enough separation to avoid a repeat. We've since used this toaster daily for 6 months and it works flawlessly. The repair took less than 10 minutes but saved 80% of retail price for a virtually new toaster.
In hindsight the Architect series are not serviable in the same way the Dualit classic models are, and having opened it up I wasn't massively impressed with the build quality over a £30 model, but it does toast well and look nice.
I have since bought another broken 6 slice dualit classic and this is a tank of a toaster, very heavy and well built. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much of a fault with it and I can run it just fine. The seller told me it was blowing her circuit breakers when it was used but it doesn't do that in my house. One potential issue is that when on full power it draws 13.4 amps, which is out of spec for the toaster and a BS1363 plug but not so much it blows the fuse. I suspect there is a plate in there that is due for replacement so I'm going to take that apart soon and try to find it but I haven't yet got around to it.
Asus P2B motherboard
Earlier in the year I talked about rebuilding my first PC and the Asus P2B was part of this build. It arrived with a fault and after some probing with a multimeter I was able to trace back to what appeared to be a zero-ohm resistor near the super I/O chip that had voltage on only one side, the floating side having continuity to the power pins so it looked like a smoking gun. I very carefully heated up the resistor and nudged it out of the way, it was tiny, truely miniscule, like it wouldn't look out of place in a pile of sand. I then bridged the pads with solder and fired up the motherboard and it worked! This motherboard is now part of my PII 400MHz system and has seen fairly regular use this past few months.
John Lewis pre-lit Christmas tree
Most recently we were in the market for a new fake Christmas Tree since we'd bought real ones for the past few years and I didn't want our new puppy eating the dropped needles. I haven't bought one in a while and the prices were surprisingly expensive for the size we were looking for. My wife then saw a listing for a broken 7 foot John Lewis (upmarket UK department store) pre-lit tree and we made an offer of £30, down from the asking price of £50. When I got it home I tested the lights and there was obviously many failed bulbs. I found though that unlike a lot of pre-lit trees, this one wasn't intertwined with the tree structure, they were just a normal set of fairy lights, split into 3 parts where the tree comes to pieces and wrapped around each branch. I spent a while unravelling it and testing each section but it was quickly clear the problems were extensive and more effort than it was worth, but we do now have a unlit Christmas tree so I just bought a new set of lights and put them up around it so it's as good as new.
Failures
I can't admit everything worked out well. One fault was an old IDE LG DVD ROM drive from 2001 that only reads CD's, it fails to read any DVD. I opened this up expecting maybe it has separate lasers for different discs but it only has the one. I read that adjusting a pot to increase power on ageing lasers can help but there was no obvious pot I could adjust so I left this one as is. It still works fine for CD's which is acceptable for retro machines so I continue to use it.
Community support
I think repairing things is a super power so I've used this to help others where I can, family is obviously a regular user of my services but this year I've also supported one of the mums from my son's school getting her washing machine going again before she took her kids away on holiday this summer. From her description I told her the fault would be the filter but she wasn't able to identify it herself so I dropped by to remove a hairpin and it fired right back up. I've also seen a new repair cafe opened up nearby and I intend to go to this but so far I've been unable to fit it in around my usual parenting demands on a Saturday morning, hopefully next year I'll be able to get down there and help others out too.