Austrian government launches repair scheme for electronic goods

[Jethro_uk]

[The Natural Philosopher]

All a bit pointless. The better way would be to charge huge VAT on new goods, but not on repairs or spares.

[Jethro_uk]

I tend to agree. Quite aside from the fact the 99% of modern tech is designed to be irreparable no matter what the manufacturers claim.

And I suspect 80% of the repairs will be new screens, batteries and keyboards. In that order.

[Colin Bignell]

EU rules only allow a standard rate and one or two reduced rates. The higher rate was scrapped a long time ago.

[Ottavio Caruso]

Am 30/12/2023 um 09:17 schrieb Jethro_uk:

Well done Australia!

[Theo]

It's an interesting thought. If the cost of labour in China is $X per hour and the cost of labour in Europe is $Y, subsidising to the tune of $Y-X so the European consumer only pays $X labour costs suddenly makes a lot of things economical to repair, and makes the repair industry more competitive with shipping a new one from China.

There is that, but go to the backstreets of places like Pakistan and you'll see a lot of it being repaired. Much of it swapping parts from scrap units, plus a bit of solder rework. The labour costs are low and the price of imported new goods is high, so the numbers work.

Once you have cheap labour, the tools like hot air rework stations can be bought cheap from China and you're in business.

Those are the bits that wear out, so makes sense. On vacuums it'll be motor brushes, on ovens it'll be elements, etc. On cars it's brakes, suspension, exhausts, tyres, batteries that wear out, and the likes of Kwik Fit specialise in that market.

Catching the 80% of simple faults is still a win, even if you can't fix the more complicated ones where you need to replace IC4157 or whatever. That said, it's quite likely that a number of people have had the IC4157 fault before, and with the internet it's quite possible somebody has already documented it.

Theo

[alan_m]

It also assumes that the spares are available from a different country. A manufacturer may provide, say, a complete replacement populated PCB but not a single IC unique to that product.

[Paul]

Identifying the parts, is all part of the "sport".

My dead receiver, when I opened it up, *none* of the IC part numbers, yielded to a Google search. And, you could read the part numbers. The printing was clean.

On the small surface mount stuff, you have those blasted codes, where you need the sheet the guy holds in his hand at the factory, to get the part number.

I actually phoned our factory one day, I was doing visual inspection. And I was like "what is this 87 thing on here ? How am I supposed to tell what to sub for that ? ESP ?"

And on the other end of the phone I hear "I have the sheet right here, 87 is a 2N2222, everybody knows that". Well actually, everybody does not know that, because if you don't know who manufactured the item, there's no way to narrow down which sheet you have to pick up off your desk, to decode it.

We have a long way to go, to make electronics repairable without assistance of chaps holding the sheet in their hand. "Everyone knows that", does not cut it out here.

Some of the parts used on the boards we designed, had as many as

18 suppliers. This leads to no guarantees you can tell what is on there. As the designer of a board, you could pick up your own board, and be faced with a part you'd never seen before. Pin compatible, of course. Except when the database at work had an error in it, and the part wasn't actually pin compatible, and the factory stuffed it without worrying about the details.

*******

For the consumer, select only "popular" items. There will be enough anecdotes about them, to fix them. Buy a fringe item, and good luck with that.

Paul

[The Natural Philosopher]

It can all be repaired but the process of doing it becomes extremely labour intensive. watch this to see whats involved

They will be whatever is cost effective to do.

IME to just locate a fault takes a lot of kit and at least an hours labour by a skilled person who isn't going to charge less than £60/hr

For a £20 alarm clock, it aint worth it.

Fore a £200 i-phone, it is.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Given a SMD appropriate soldering setup - hot air, microscope etc, the problem today is the time to identify the fault and the availability of replacement chips.

If you have scrapp units of the same model then you can use scrap recycled components

[The Natural Philosopher]

We are no longer part of the EU. Oh. Of course the NI protocol means as far as VAT goes, we are.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Manufacturers do not supply ICs. Except if you mean a custom IC like a PGA.

Most manufacturers do not, however, or you can pirate one from another irreparable unit.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well that is down to online documentation being made available.

In terms of cars, that was made a legal requirement.

[Colin Bignell]

Austria is though.

[AnthonyL]

Why? What have they done?

[Fredxx]

Try reading the article and you'll find out.

[Fredxx]

I was thinking the same.

Although I feel that the right to repair through digrams and the same info a service centre would have should be the goal.

[Cursitor Doom]

The EU should have mandated this many years ago; likewise the standarisation of USB charger connectors and whatnot. We throw out

*far* too much stuff for no good reason it should be a source of national shame.The amount of stuff that ends up in landfill is truly shocking.

[Fredxx]

Sadly the UK government has not followed the EU lead when it comes to phone chargers and Apple can still get away with their bespoke chargers.

Of course in NI Apple will move to the USB-C standard:

[charles]

Yes, but Apple are not going to make a special production line for the UK. My new iPad mini uses a USB-C connector.