By Nathan Proctor
The Open Repair Alliance released a new report in October, written by the Restart Project, which examines data collected about more than 200,000 repairs conducted at community repair events around the world.
Part of the global coalition fighting for your Right to Repair, the Open Repair Alliance helps repair advocates keep track of what people are trying to fix, whether or not repairs are successful, and why.
Repair events are quite obviously a different context than fixing medical devices in a hospital or other medical setting. But there are lessons in this huge data set.
People care about repair in every corner of the world.
Community repair events – including Repair Cafes, Fixit Clinics and Restart Parties – have grown considerably over the last 15 years. The report estimates more than 4,000 community repair groups, operating in 31 countries, now host events that offer free repair help to anyone who wants it, performing an estimated 190,000 successful repairs each year. People not only donate their time to help neighbors fix products, but also catalog hundreds of thousands of repair attempts. That serves as the data for this new report.
People everywhere are passionate about fixing stuff.
Fixers are good at what they do, as a result, most things are fixable.
People are better at fixing things than you might think. Of all the electronic products that get brought to community repair events, 53% get fixed at the event. Furthermore, many of the people whose products are not fixed at the event, make a plan to complete the repair (which might include ordering a part or visiting a repair shop with the needed equipment). One-quarter of the products are deemed “end of life,” without a realistic or cost-effective way to complete the repair.
You might think that older item you have is probably dead … but it might not be. You should bring it to a local repair event and see if a tinkerer can revive it – the odds are pretty good that someone can.
Right to Repair reforms could remedy most of the reasons why things don’t get fixed.
Right to Repair reforms – which require manufacturers to provide fair and reasonable access to spare parts, service manuals and repair tools – can help us fix more of our stuff. Looking at the tens of thousands of products that repair hobbyists could not fix, no spare parts were available for 25%, another 18% had parts available but they were cost-prohibitive, while another 12% lacked repair information, meaning repair might be possible, but technicians were unable to obtain the documentation or instructions they needed.
These are exactly the issues Right to Repair reforms are intended to remedy.
Things last a lot longer than manufacturers tend to think – and people need those older products.
Data from thousands of repair events shows that people hold on to most products for far longer than five years, regardless of intended support. On average, the age of coffee makers, laptops and printers brought in for repairs was seven years old; power tools and hair dryers averaged 10 years old; hi-fi audio systems were 18 years old on average; and projectors (which includes digital, film and slide projectors) averaged an impressive 28 years old.
I think this data is important to our work in medical Right to Repair because it represents the paradigm shift we need to understand. A diverse, distributed system of repair is critical to community resilience – just as it is for a hospital’s resilience. What a manufacturer might consider an “edge case” for repair is viewed pretty differently when that edge case is happening to some product you are relying on.
