should DIY be a green cause

[Clive George]

Which supports his argument.

[Bill Wright]

I threw some carrots away today. The structural decay was widespread so I decided they were beyond repair.

Bill

[Johnny B Good]

In that case, it wouldn't be DIY then, would it?

Possibly not in the case of 3KW flat elements if my recent experience is anything to go by. :-)

The problem with electric kettle spares is more to do with holding a wide enough range of fiddly plastic parts such as the often convoluted operating lever linkage customised to the various shapes of kettle dictated by styling requirements that often have no relation to function.

I did! It was a Tesco 3KW plastic jug kettle bought several years ago for 12 quid less the fiver voucher (almost identical to the Cookworks Kettle - White 3KW jug we bought in our local Argos store this afternoon, also for 12 quid less a penny).

The original repair, just over a year ago, involved gluing the wishbone shaped plastic operating lever back together using thin paxolin splints with a 2 part epoxy resin glue. It just seemed a disgraceful failure mode for the sake of not paying the attention to the detail it deserved in its design (sharp 45 degree bends instead of organic curves to avoid stress concentration mediated failure - it was just begging to fail).

If it had been an element failure, I wouldn't have bothered trying to repair it but since it was just a stupid failure amenable to a glue repair, I repaired it and got another 12 months, possibly longer, before my repair effort finally wore out a just few months ago.

This time I used a half mm drill and a couple of 8mm lengths of stainless steel wire to beef up the second glue repair. Unfortunately, this started acting up again just a few days ago and before I could have yet another go, SWMBI decided it was time for a new kettle, hence the visit to Argos today (actually, yesterday as I type this).

Actually, despite the replacement being almost identical in shape to the black Tesco kettle (the base plates were interchangeable), the subtle changes seem to have improved the fillability via the spout and also the pouring action (plus, it's not in need of a replacement spout filter) and the lid opens up more fully so the extra expense of yet another replacement kettle did offer some additional benefits over the old one.

However, if I care to take a look at the operating lever linkage, I doubt I'll see any improvement in its design. I guess I'd best wait for its one year warranty to expire before taking it apart to "Fix It Before it Breaks". I'm of the opinion that the saying, "If it aint broke, don't fix it." is just plain bullshit, The saying, "A stitch in time saves nine." seems more appropriate these days.

Often, close inspection will reveal that a lot of this stuff is already broken by design and a timely 'repair' (or "Stich in time...") will save it breaking prematurely in relation to components more vital to the gadget's primary function, in this case, the 3KW flat plate element.

Redesigning this plastic part so it outlasts the element is unlikely to add more than a penny to the retail price of the finished product over the lifetime of its production run. There's really no excuse for such shabby design and it's an issue that the greens ought to be addressing - it's more than just electric kettles that exhibit this sort of shortcoming.

[RJH]

Yes, of course. But it's more for hand tools that I'd guess you don't see in hire shops. Things like spanners, spades, and maybe light power tools like a hammer drill.

It is - that's why I'm here, although I'm not so useful on the sharing bit :-)

Ah OK, hadn't heard of them.

Jeremy Hardy used to do a standup routine, lamenting the flat pack, putting furniture makers out of business. A certain logic I suppose, but thinking it through is pretty convoluted. And taken to extremes we shouldn't be doing a lot of things for fear of putting people out of a job - cooking our own food, going to the shops, whatever.

There's a point in there somewhere. Not quite sure what it is.

[Harry Bloomfield]

[e-mail] a écrit :

My list this week, aside from being quite busy with redecorating the whole house...

1. Desktop PC repaired with a new PSU.
2. 8 year old pressure washer repaired with a replacement lance. I paid £300 so opted for a £30 new lance. This is the same PW which had a stuck pressure switch earlier.
3. Rotted out wooden slats all replaced with new on our cast iron garden bench at a cost of £15. The entire bench only cost £25 ten years ago, no doubt it would cost much more now.

There is considerable pleasure to be had, from simply fixing things.

[Jeff Layman]

Lol! I've always thought that BMW's use of "Mini" for their monstrosity should be considered an infringement under the Trades Description Act. And, as far as I can see, with each revised model they are getting bigger and bigger.

Mind you, have you seen a Fiat 500 recently?!

[Tim Lamb]

In message , Harry Bloomfield writes

I have a pair of cast iron? garden seat ends in my scrap pile. They need a new set of hardwood slats and some cap head screws and nuts. Free to collector, Hertfordshire.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well, exactly...

[John Rumm]

;-)

The irony about flat packs is that many people are now prepared to pay for a trader to assemble them, as I am sure TMH will be able to attest.

[tabbypurr]

An example of a product where replacing the caps wouldn't have sufficed.

NT

[tabbypurr]

In fairness if they copied the original it would be a death trap.

NT

[Adrian]

In message , John Rumm writes

Not all of it goes to waste. The previous owner of my house worked for one of the larger building contractors, and when I moved in, there was a large pile of second hand MDF (slightly trimmed down 8x4 15mm sheets) that had clearly been used as temporary partitioning during a refurbishment job (the stickers on it made it fairly clear where). It has made building bookshelves a very cheap pastime.

Adrian

[Chris J Dixon]

I have had a Panasonic bread maker for some time.

The first part to fail was the plastic catch for the dispenser tray, so I fashioned a metal replacement, which was partially successful.

When the rather abrasive seeded mix I use eventually wore off the coating on blade and pan, it was better value to get a complete new unit from ebay.

When the second dispenser latch failed, I came across

Which is just the job. You'd think Panasonic could have done this themselves.

Chris

[Martin Bonner]

*Shudder*

It's why I hate letting SWMBO in the workshop (but she wouldn't do *that*).

[tabbypurr]

idea that it ain't worthwhile is just popular myth.

Today I fixed a microwave. Insulation on HT wires had broken down. Patched it up, all done in about 20 minutes. It would cost at least £20 to replac e, probably more, so that's £60+ per hour. And it saved me time, it would take longer to find/buy/collect one, then dispose of the old one.

NT

[ARW]

I know but Doug looks well.

[John Rumm]

Indeed - if you can be in the right place at the right time, there can be a bonanza of free materials if they people running the site are amenable. I have a mate with a lockup full of ply and OSB from such an encounter!

[Johnny B Good]

====snipped tale of kettle repair====

The cycnic in me informs me that this is just a 'failsafe' way of building in 'planned obsolescence' It's the home computer equivalent of Microsoft's Cockamaimee Pagefile default settings in windows designed to accelerate "System Senility" by aggravating the effects of file system fragmentation due to normal file writing activities further aggravated by the endless file churn from the never ending stream of windows updates and fixes.

Microsoft's partnership deals with the PC hardware manufacturers, effectively a cartel and informally known as "Wintel" on account of the major chip supplier being Intel, benefited both parties in boosting sales. Obviously, wintel would like to sell as much product as possible and this pagefile trick was Microsoft's 'failsafe' contribution to shortening the upgrade cycle to drive such an increase in sales.

Now that the use of SSDs in place of HDDs has become prevalent, the effects of fragmentation have all but completely disappeared, neatly sabotaging the cockamaimee pagefile settings effect on system performance. I've no doubt MSFT have alternative plans in their latest windows 10 to effecting such a desirable steady decline in system performance so as to keep the upgrade cycle artificially shortened to persuade the nicely conditioned consumers to carry on servicing the desires of wintel.

The neat thing about the pagefile stunt as far as MSFT were concerned was that it offered an almost zero cost remedy should they be forced to backpedal on this artificial ageing strategy for whatever reason (eg, a competitor product that didn't exhibit such a failing or a PC computers equivilent of "Ralph Nader" blowing the whistle on such a sneaky trick).

As it happened, MSFT's trick was never embarrassingly exposed in the mass media so they were able to continue this ruse for over two decades. Part of the reason for this success was that they offered the end users pagefile settings options to completely eliminate this particular effect, neatly silencing any outcries from technically competent users who would more likely feel they'd "gotten one over" on "The Dumb Consumers" reinforcing their (justifiable) sense of smugness.

Manufacturers of white goods such as kettles and breadmakers, otoh, don't have quite so cheap a "Backpedal" option as "Wintel"(tm). The best they can do is pick on a cheap part as their built in weak component, preferably one that only costs a few pennies at most and is easily replaced in a modestly equipped "Warranties Repair shop" manned by relatively cheap labour should they have seriously miscalculated on the maximum lifetime of the weak part and find themselves swamped with warranty returns.

Assuming no such miscalculation, the relatively few warranty returns would normally be handled by simply dipping into their reserves of spare inventory of brand new goods set aside for just such warranty purposes. Resorting to actual repair of faulty goods only becomes the more economic solution to servicing warranty obligations when they've seriously miscalculated the planned failure rates of the cheap to replace component elected to sustain sales of the product in question.

There are at least two reasons why the element in a modern jug kettle remains the most reliable component. The first being that it is the most expensive part, the second being that it's the most difficult to design in a limited life time intended to satisfy the minimum warranty period requirement without it exhibiting a dramatic and possibly hazardous failure mode. Indeed, it may actually cost more to manufacture a shorter lived element than a conventionally designed one.

The quieter the failure mode, the better it is for the manufacturer. The "It simply stopped working." report by aggrieved consumers is far less newsworthy than the "It went bang! and tripped all the house electrics, endangering my dear old grandmother's oxygen supply." type of report.

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that such inexpensive "Throwaway" appliances are invariably let down by apparent penny pinching on inexpensive plastic components. The penny pinching to reduce manufacturing costs is a myth designed to deflect the consumers' thinking away from the real purpose of such 'penny pinching' which is to provide a minimal risk method of maintaining a steady demand for replacement appliances.

[T i m]

And I'm still running a very mature installation of XP on a low power Apple Mac Mini (on a 100G partition) and this is my everyday 'go-to' machine and if it was as slow (by now) as suggested I wouldn't still be using it (daily). (I'm using Agent V2 and Thunderbird V0.9). ;-)

Ok, it's now struggling with some Youtube videos but not because it's got slower but the definition of the videos have got higher.

As with your experience, the Mrs runs W7 (again, daily and for everything, including TV from her STB) and the odd time I get on it for a 'tidy up' there is rarely anything to do.

She has Linux a reboot away as I have OSX but we both generally use Windows because it does what we can't do using the alternatives.

Cheers, T i m

[Johnny B Good]

Afaicr, "auto-defrag" was introduced with the ironically named Vista. It may be no coincidence that MSFT removed the graphical display of progress (indeed, no progress indicator at all) at this time since this offered too much by way of a clue as to the distribution of the hundreds of pagefile fragments that could land up spread right across the whole disk volume when using the default pagefile settings. A bare percentage figure of fragmentation tells only a small part of the story.

Back in the days of NT5.x when the defragmentation tool displayed such a graphical representation of the fragmentation state (in a 'before' and 'after' graphic), it was easy to spot where the unmovable system files' fragments (marked in green) were located. Indeed, I used the analyse function to verify that the 4095MB pagefile in my win2k system was occupying the very first half of the 8GB FAT32 partition space (as per my intention) which was occupying the fastest outermost cylinders of the second (1TB) HDD specifically to reduce head contention issues.

I well remember dealing with a winXP system, just a few short years back, which seemed to be performing particularly slowly indeed. After running the initial scans for malware, I ran defrag on the single huge disk volume so classic of a winXP vintage OEM install which, when completed, revealed in its 'after defragmentaion' display, the most grassiest of displays I'd ever seen of the 'free space' area right across the whole disk volume. From the report details, it was quite obvious that virtually all 'the blades of grass' were owned by the pagefile's thousands of fragments. Once I'd remedied the situation, the system became noticeably perkier.

I have to admit that what made this particular job so memorable was the

*unusual* severity of the "Fragmentation Hell" effect of a pagefile still using the default configuration settings (presumably for "Like forever 'n' shit").

Quite frankly, this "Auto-Defrag" feature of NT6.x was little better than a "Band aid Solution" that could be much better addressed by intelligent partitioning and de-cockamaimee-fying of the pagefile settings.

Indeed, such a strategy "To keep on top" of the ongoing fragmentation issue (aggravated not only by the default pagefile behaviour but also by the endless file churn generated by windows updates) seemed to me to be more a pointless game of "Whack-a-Mole" designed to work the poor HDD into an early grave with a less than desirable constant HDD busy lamp activity reducing its usefulness as an indicator of possible malware/ spyware activities.

It's even possible that this "neat feature", seemingly aimed at consumers who had discovered the need to run the defrag utility on a regular schedule to maintain their computer's performance was added more as a sneaky way to disguise covert system activity than as a simple sop to the consumer's desire for MSFT to "Do Something About File System Fragmentation". However, maybe that's just my deep mistrust (gained over the past two decades) of MSFT's motives, colouring my cynical view (aka "paranoia" as you expressed it). :-)

BTW, apropos of nothing, your news client seems to be worth slightly less than you paid for it since it appears unable to handle properly formed sig lines, as per the quotage below. Just possibly there's a setting in regard of sig line handling you might be able to customise.