How good are American roads?

That's amusing to me. My spouse and I fix all our appliances, cars included.

The sentiment resonates with me. I'm the only person under 50 I know that changes their own oil, let alone performs other routine maintenance like air filters and break pads.

Yeah that there, that's getting to be incredibly uncommon.

And it's not hard to see why.

I had a GE washing machine start misbehaving one day. It would fill the tub, do a few spins to try and balance the load, start to spin up for a few minutes, stop. Try and balance the load, spin for a few minutes, stop. Then eventually just give up, without even draining the tub before unlocking the door.

Me knowing appliances pretty well, I already had the knowledge the service manual is probably tucked away inside the shell. Strike one going against most normal people, they wouldn't know to do that. Open that up, see how to get into the diagnostic menu and translate the error codes and run some tests.

Ok, so now I know it's a speed sensing issue. The speed the motor is reporting and the speed the tub speed sensor isn't making sense for the fixed gear ratio so it thinks there's something unsafe going on. That's a decent safety issue, but looking at the tub as it spins it's probably just a sensor issue.

The tub hall effect sensor was like $20 shipped from the GE parts website. Quick and easy to swap out. No dice, still not wanting to spin up. More reading online, it's likely the main motor inverter board. Well, that's pretty deep in the machine, could also be the motor assembly itself which would be covered under warranty, let me call a GE service guy to come.

Service guy comes, he plugs some wireless adapter into a hidden USB port, fumbles with it for a few minutes with an iPad with a shattered screen, gives up diagnosing the issue. Writes up an invoice proposal for $900 worth of parts and labor for him to swap out a ton of things, or a referral code/discount coupon for me to buy a new unit.

I decline the order. Surely not all this shit is wrong with the thing. I find the inverter board online from a third party site for <$100, was available from the official parts site for not much more. Start unplugging it a bunch, and notice the motor hall sensor pin wasn't seated very well. I don't want to put it all together again just to find reseating/gluing the connection together didn't solve the problem, so I just put the new inverter board in. Put it all back together and it's just fine for <$100.

I imagine it was just a loose connection for that sensor. This is probably still a perfectly functional board on my shelf. I'll keep it and the other sensor in case some other issues happens in the future. But it could have been just a loose connection that sent this nearly $1000 unit to the scrapyard if it wasn't for me bothering to look. It could have been an exceptionally cheap part. And the final fix I accepted was just somewhat cheap part.

In the end people generally don't care to actually fix shit, and I imagine the majority of people would have just thrown up their hands before looking for the service manual, called the tech, he would have made it obvious a new unit would be a better deal, and they would have taken it.

I think you and I had a disagreement the other day. It's nice to see we also agree on things.

To be fair I feel like this requires being a homeowner so that you have a garage to work in

I don't have a garage.

I did something similar for a dryer. Even identified the part that failed.

I bought the part-number equivalent part and the prongs didn't fit in the slot. I spent 45 minutes carefully filing down/snipping the prongs to fit the enclosure. Been 5? years without an issue.

Do you own a home? Every apartment I've ever lived in prohibited doing any car maintainance on the property.

Yes, and my unique qualification for owning a 1100 sqft home was “no HOA”

When I rented a room, I did my auto maintenance on the curb. Now that I have a home, I still do that because I don't want oil stains on my driveway.

I get that some people don't have space for an oil pan, but tons do. Brake pad replacement doesn't require anything besides the jack from your car and a socket wrench.

No garage. I have a driveway, but do most of my auto work in the street because I don't want stains on it

Many localities have co-op community workshops where you can use their space to work on your car. They may even have a lift, common tools you can use, and someone there who might know enough about car repair to help you. Or not, but check into it.

Did you get the part on Amazon? I've had really bad luck with third party parts from Amazon. I always pay a bit more for OE or OEM parts now.

There is also old-fashioned community. Most people know a friend or family member with a driveway.

I don’t remember. Probably.

I generally try to avoid Amazon as much as I can these days. Unless I know some supplier only really sells through Amazon I try and buy directly or use another retailer. Far too hard to tell if I'm buying something legit or not.

Once upon a time (more than 5 years ago), I bought a small Bluetooth USB on Amazon that also required some manual work before I was able to stick it into a normal USB port... it was very slightly more massive and careful filing took care of it.

One would expect that there is nothing more standard than USB-A. Nope. There is an exception for every rule.

Some people are just built different.

> In the end people generally don't care to actually fix shit, and I imagine the majority of people would have just thrown up their hands before looking for the service manual, called the tech, he would have made it obvious a new unit would be a better deal, and they would have taken it.

Is that the conclusion to this whole story?

Sure, pretty much. A hired tech didn't bother understanding the deeper issue would prefer me to use his coupon code to buy a new unit of great cost to me. Chances are a simple reseating of a connector and additional support would have prevented several hundred pounds of otherwise perfectly fine materials going to a landfill and cost me almost $1,000 for a similar replacement unit.

And if I didn't have enough knowledge and determination past a standard consumer it would have been trash. Sadly most consumers and support techs don't care enough.

The difficult of dismantling some of these things to fix things is a significant issue though - you have to have the time and interest in a lot of cases, and at the end of the investment might still have a non-functional item.

i.e. if I spend 3 days figuring out my washing machine, I'm trading leisure time (bought at whatever my salary rate is) for the cost of the machine. If the machine is a nightmare to open up and close, then I don't really blame people for just buying a new one.

A bunch of this can obviously be mitigated: right-to-repair is a good start, but we also need incentives for serviceability - the example you give of being able to actually get diagnostic data is one area (IMO: that should just be legally mandated as open-source, make it a national security policy - which it is IMO). Firmware blobs for chips should also be public - i.e. I've got a few things where the microcontroller is dead, I can source a replacement, but there's no way to get a copy of the onboard programming.

And then obviously, if we could somehow encourage design which means components are easy to remove, that would be great (i.e. logic and control boards should always be mounted accessibly).

I mean, I get it. I'm a nerd that enjoys tackling problems. But the normal response I've seen from appliance techs have been the same. They seem more interested in the commission of selling a new unit than actually trying to fix the current one. In the end my unit probably could have been solved for less than an hour of his time to just jiggle the connection of the hall effect sensor on the board, but he couldn't even be bothered to figure out it was the sensors that were the problem or actually try and make the repair.

I've had similar experiences with other appliances over the years. It's not just a GE thing.