Tender Love and Care (for our technology)

Yesterday I repaired our tumble dryer, an Indeset IDC85.

It's twelve years old and has served extremely well. It's been repaired twice.

The heater suddenly stopped working. My wife and I grumbled at the prospect of spending two hundred quid on a new appliance, just before Christmas too! The sensible thing would be to wait until the January Sales.

Something that really bugs me about our current relation to technology is the obscene, colossal waste and disrespect we have for it. So my heart sank thinking of the cost to our planet if another great hunk of white-goods goes into the earth.

Once, repairing things was common. As a teenager I had a weekend job understudying TV and AV repair in a local shop. I quickly learned that repair work is quite formulaic. Most failure has a pattern. Certain brands and models always broke in the same way. For example, the "vertical hold" always failed on some particular Sony model, and always the same capacitor or potentiometer needed changing. Rarely, and always more fun, some sleuthing was needed, with multi-meters and oscilloscopes to track down a fault. Most of the parts were standardised. Electronic components in the 80s were more generic, and the construction more amenable to repair.

As I left to go to 6th form for A-levels the owner thanked me, but now sadly he was closing up the shop and retiring. "There's no need for people like us any more", he said. I was too young to understand the social and economic reality he was naming, but even in 1986 if something electronic broke it was cheaper to buy a new one than pay for repair.

I didn't readily accept this. "But that last Toshiba we fixed up, was just a resistor that cost a penny!", I said. "Ah, but look how long it took you to get to the board", he countered. Hmm, I had removed about fifty tiny screws and grappled with dozens of connectors, taking almost an hour just to get to that resistor. He was right. The older models like the Bush or Telefunken had hinges and circuit boards in drawer like assemblies to make repair easy. The Japanese (and later Chinese) appliances weren't designed to be maintained any more. Even at an apprentices wage of 25 quid a day - five bucks an hour was generous for a kid in those days - it made no sense to repair. So, from the mid 80s until just a few years ago, repair was not an option. For almost 40 years we've been throwing millions upon millions of tons of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE, a.k.a. e-waste) into the soil.

Despite once having been a budding young expert at electronic repair my experience of it throughout the current century was dismal. Usually the parts were "discontinued". Software "no longer supported". At every turn we encounter various tricks and vicious booby traps reminiscent of Juggernaut or Hurt Locker. I grew tired of pitting my wits against an invisible "Professor Moriarty" character somewhere inside Sony or Microsoft, twisting their moustache, laughing maniacally with glee at the thought of me finally getting to the failed component yet being thwarted at the last breath of hope by their ingenious DRM deathtrap or cleverly rigged tripwire.

So, it was with a sneer, as almost a cynical joke, that I typed "heater Indeset replacement" into a search engine just to prove the point to myself - that repair was impossible.

I could hardly believe my luck, and how wrong I was.

There were dozens of local suppliers of standard parts, and it was much cheaper than I expected. After a brief family conference we decided twenty quid was a risk worth taking. If it didn't work at least we'd have a bit of fun, and it would ease our conscience… at least we'd tried. I figured something else might be broken, a fuse, a fan or switch? As a back-up, if I was too dumb to fix it, we'd call a real expert and at least have one replacement part to hand.

Here's one decent tip: Always order from the second supplier on the list as the one in first place clearly spends too much money on website SEO. In this case that was http://yourspares.co.uk.

It arrived 4 days later. I imagined the part would be something substantial, like a large kettle element made of steel. When it arrived, it fitted through the letter box. I was most surprised at its lightness. It actually sat on the hall table for a day, mistaken for a book. Not a "heavy element" (well certainly no Bismuth or Tungsten). On opening the box it seemed surprisingly delicate. Several fingers of wire-wrapped mica sandwiched inside an impressively light alloy frame. What wonders of modern manufacturing!

Contrary to internet humour, do read instructions if there are any. As a rule, bare replacement parts don't come with instructions. What is useful though in my experience is the impressive videos that people make and put online of repairs. Such a wealth of common culture. But since I'd rather scoop my own eyes out with a rusty teaspoon than use Google, I don't use YouTube except in a dire emergency. I hope one day our cultural heritage - the millions of hours of work ordinary people have put into sharing - will be stored elsewhere in genuinely public storage.

The instructions warn that a "properly trained" person should replace the parts. Now, I've no experience with tumble dryers, but "experience" and "training" are relative. Obviously plug it out and move it to a safe place to work on. With things like white goods, crush injuries and getting cut by sharp steel edges are the things to avoid.

It's worth reflecting on your experience before jumping in. Electronic engineering is not electrical engineering. I know that because a housemate in London, holding a PhD in advanced microelectronics, blew up the video recorder because she wired up the plug wrong!

The right tools were surprisingly simple, a cross-head screwdriver and some wire cutters to snip a cable tie. Putting down a towel to avoid scratching the floor tiles and catch any water from the condenser pipe was also a smart move.

Listen. It's a tough universe. There's all sorts of people and things trying to do you, kill you, rip you off, everything. If you're going to survive out there, you've really got to know where your towel is. – Ford Prefect

I removed top of the dryer, which seemed the most obvious entry point, but couldn't see anything like a heater. Also the drum fully filled the cavity and blocked any parts below it. So I started to remove a side panel, with just 4 screws. It seemed very much like repairing a giant tower PC, which boosted my confidence as I've probably built a couple hundred of those.

As I did so there came a moment of "tumble dryer forensics", noticing that not all the screws were exactly the same. Then a memory returned. It had actually been repaired before, back in 2018 costing fifty quid for a new drum bearing after it became very squeaky. The last engineer had used some slightly different cross-heads when reassembling.

With a PC one can never be sure to pick the correct side to open. I got lucky with the right side first time. But still no heater. All the familiar components were there, a clockwork timer, a motor and capacitor, but no heater. Following some wires, I soon realised the heater is actually outside, within a separate housing. I removed the heater shroud and only at that point realised it would have been possible to repair the element with push-fit spade connectors without taking the whole dryer apart! Doh! But I was happy anyway as replacing the cable (a new one was supplied) all the way back to the internal loom seemed the right thing to do.

Just two screw points held the heater element in place. On removing the old heater I noticed broken mica beams (see photo). A huge penny dropped! Finally! This explained intermittent and impossible to trace earth leakage trips that had caused me so many problems the past year.

During twelve long years of use the mica beams had disassembled leaving the heating wire free to touch the grounded steel frame. Evidenced by carbon scoring on the inside housing, I could see how it had slowly failed. When we had a child I'd updated the main electricity wiring board in the house to add residual breakers on every circuit. As the heating wire in the dryer had trembled it must have touched. The ELCB had cut-in so fast (microseconds) as to never allow the wire to fuse… but eventually with time and vibration…

Another health and safety note concerns dust. I remember the TV repairmen telling me that the coating on the inside of electronic equipment is mainly skin cells from the household. Electrostatic charge attracts it to the components. Everyone who repairs old PC towers knows to wear a mask, and thankfully since COVID we have boxes of the things! Dust and fluff can cause fire in hot electrical gear, so a clean appliance inside is a safer appliance.

Also, I remembered to keep my hands away from not just sharp edges but big capacitors. Those things hold a charge for days or weeks and give you a nasty surprise if you touch them.

As I worked I noticed something - perhaps because it was an unfamiliar repair situation. I talk to myself. Well, not exactly; I talk to the machine I'm working on. And now I remember I've always done that, since long before my TV repair days, back to when I was five or six and first learning electronics. In my 50s I still talk to computer programs I'm writing. So I started to talk to the dryer as I gave it a little TLC, cleaning and dusting, hoovering up fluff, checking connections, belts, and switches.

"You're going to love this new heater".

It did.

After reassembly. taking cover behind some sandbags (j/k - just stand back a bit from anything energetic when you switch it on after tinkering… and use your nose), it worked immediately. Oh, and I saved everything on my workstations in my study and ran a disk backup in case the power tripped out.

A brand new element lets off a bit of smoke, which is normal but definitely not something to breathe, so open the window. Ten minutes later it was purring away drying clothes like new!

So let's look at this another way. With one hour of my time I stopped about 30kg of steel, copper, a perfectly good motor, switches and wiring ending up in a landfill.

I am so happy to see the fruits of the "Right to Repair" movement finally hitting home. We're getting there, after decades of disgusting waste forced on us by manufacturers who designed-in obsolescence and failure, who obstructed the availability of spare parts, and who deliberately made devices hard to service. In the end common sense, public pressure, regulation and the law was effective.

The design of the Indeset/Hotpoint unit illustrates the amazing power of generic, simple, serviceable design, backed up by an available market in replacement components. This is how technology should be!

So here's singing the praises of the Indeset/Hotpoint IDC85 for;

• simplicity
• no digital components
• no internet nonsense
• no complex electronics
• serviceable design

Now let's get a little deeper. The point is, fixing electronics makes me feel good. It always has. As an older person who's lived through some of the worst years of reckless, destructive capitalism I have a different perspective. The repair is a victory, not over myself as a learner, as when I was a young engineer, but over a system of greed that set out to defeat ordinary people and rob us of our agency and responsibility for the planet.

That system failed. Or is at least falling… The legislation we've all worked for as the RIGHT TO REPAIR is successful. But we must push further and harder against companies like Apple, Microsoft, John Deer, Newag and many, many more.

The word "materialist" has come to mean a derogatory term for an empty, needy person who amasses material goods to signal status. But what is a materialist, really? In philosophy it's a take on how the universe is composed. In the history of design, for example for William Morris, a materialist is simply someone who loves material. A craftsman. It was a way of talking about a sculptor who loves stone, a furniture maker who loves wood, or a jeweller who loves gold and silver… for more than base commodity value, but for its quality, beauty and workability.

In this same way engineers are people who care for technology. One does not merely have knowledge about technical, mechanical things. There is love. Appreciation for our seat on the shoulders of giants, for centuries of patient calculation, documentation and conferring, for whole lives dedicated to research, education, science and to gradual, continual improvement. Technology can be sacred. To look under a microscope at a modern printed circuit and see cities within cities, or to stare into the glowing heaters of thermionic valves and smell the Bakelite of history is emotional.

We engineers love our machines. And that love naturally extends to the people who use our machines. I can remember great system administrators, before the Eternal September and the era of the Help-Desk, who proactively went around asking "How is your machine running? Is everything okay?". I can remember network administrators who saw their domains not as battlefields swarming with vile aliens, but as peaceful gardens to tend.

Yet something has changed. Today we seem a million miles from that connection to technology, and we must reclaim it urgently. In the deco era of the 1930s we made radios not merely useful but as beautiful walnut furniture.

Now our devices are cold slabs. They are the exploitative weapons of "tech bros" who delight as their machinations harm other people. Extraction, surveillance, manipulation and intrusion are their purpose. Silicon Valley 'values' have not merely betrayed billions of people, they have betrayed technology itself. To the extent the Chinese and Asians have copied our ways they have drunk poison every bit as harmful as in the opium wars.

We should love our machines and care for them. But we can only do that if we fully own them under the very strictest definitions of ownership and all the ancient legal rights that idea confers.

Things like "Digital Rights Management" and deliberate tricks by unethical companies to impede repair or remotely sabotage goods are scandalous and a grave harm to the ecology of our planet. They must be outlawed and the real saboteurs of technology made to pay for the damage they've done.