Our daily life causes wear and tear on the things we use so they break.
When those things we use and love do break it is usually at super stressful times, and the situation around the break is stressful.
However if you can take just a few minutes when you get a new “thing” you can prepare yourself for the eventuality of your new “thing” breaking. Then when it does you are ready to get to the repair and can cut through the drama that might arise.
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Transcript
Welcome to the fifth episode of the BudDIY Podcast. I’m your host, Buddy Lindsey, and welcome. Today we’re going to talk about preparing to repair your stuff. But before that, if you’re watching on YouTube, please feel free to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you get updates. If you’re listening on the website, you can subscribe to our podcast in most major podcasting applications. Just do a search for budDIY, and if you’ve never been to the website before, you can hit the website at buddiy.net and you can check out the things that I have over there. With that, go ahead and follow me at instagram.com/buddylindseyjr and that’s me. So with that, let’s get into the today’s topic.
I wanted to talk to you today about repairing stuff and preparing to repair stuff. Because I don’t know about you, but whenever I’ve had to fix things around the house, it’s always at the most inconvenient time possible. It’s nine o’clock at night or it’s seven o’clock on a Sunday morning when no one’s open or the power has gone out and it’s blown something. Or you’re about to go on vacation and a pump in your HVAC system leaks and shoves water everywhere. And those are all things that I have literally had happen to me.
And it’s been really stressful because usually when I need to fix something, it’s at the exact wrong time. And now not only do you have the stress of trying to deal with that situation, you have something not working, you have family members that are getting stressed and now you’re also trying to research how to fix that thing while all this is happening and you’re just trying to keep a calm head and get it fixed. So one of the things that I’ve tried to start doing is preparing beforehand to repair something, whether I need to repair it or not. So that way when something happens, I’m not having to be like, “Oh, okay, what do we need to search for? How can I get started doing this thing?” I can go ahead and I can just go to my resource that I have set on my computer and I can open up the appliance that I need to fix and I can start watching videos to be able to start troubleshooting the issues that I have.
Now, I don’t have every possible contingency taken care of, but I have a few things down so that I can easily reference it to get started in a breakdown of what I need to fix. As an example, I’m just going to use me repairing my dryer because I’ve had to fix it like three or four times at this point. Just little things, and it’s kind of the thing that got me there because it’s like it’s super stressful when it breaks because it stops all laundry and normally breaks while you’re doing laundry, so you have to get it back up and going quickly.
So with that, let’s jump into a few things that I suggest that you do to prepare yourself to repair something so you can totally reduce the stress and the overwhelming feeling that you get whenever you need to repair your stuff. The first thing I suggest is to find the manual in PDF form on the internet so that we have it on your computers. Because let’s face it, half the time we just throw the thing away or we put it in that place we’ll never forget where it is and we forget where it is or if you have a PDF file on your computer in a location for you to reference, then it’s there and you can just go reference it there. You don’t have to try to dig it out from somewhere.
Sometimes they’re useless. I have a few things that the manual is totally useless for because it just like, “Oh this is this thing, this is this thing,” don’t have a diagram, don’t have anything. And so it’s not really worth it. But if you do find it and it’s a good one, save it in a location. The place that I found a lot of manuals is manuallibs.com, I’ll leave a link in the show notes so you can get there easily. If you can’t find it on there, I just suggest Googling it, put in the model number, the manufacturer and manual and usually you can find a download link somewhere.
The next thing I recommend is to download the YouTube videos. Not all of them but a few of them like disassembly, reassembly and maybe a couple of major parts just like, go to Google and start typing in your model number and your manufacturer space and you’ll get a bunch of auto suggestions of problems that people are having. Take those and find YouTube videos, solving those problems and then download those videos. If you like to use command line, I use youtube-dl because it downloads videos off of like 200 sites or whatever. If you’re not coming online inclined, I recommend a y2mate.com. You just copy the link to the YouTube video, paste it in there and you’re good to go. Or you can take the URL of your YouTube video you want to download and do youtubepp.com in the URL and it’ll take it to be downloaded as well.
So those are places to get reference material, which is what you need so you can reduce the stress when you’re trying to repair things and you can just get in there and get it done. The next thing you need to figure out is where to actually buy parts. I recommend finding three or four places in your local city or the next town over that you can actually buy parts. If possible, try to find one that is open on Sundays. This can be really frustrating and really hard to get done, and I know I had to call probably 10 different places before I found that magical store that was open on a Sunday and they were open late on a Sunday, so that I could get the parts for my dryer and I’d get it fixed.
In my area, it’s a place called Appliance Parts 2 U. Totally sounds like an online shop thing, but they’re just a local company that exists and they’re open on Sunday for like 12 hours and I’ll bet they get a ton of business from it because I was calling around the different places and several places were like, “Well, we can send a repair technician out.” And it’s like, “No, I just need this part.”
And so if you can’t find a place locally that carries your parts or you need some like reference material a little bit beyond what might in the manual, a good site that I have found is ereplacementparts.com. It is hit or miss on whether they have it, but if they have the model number of everything, then not only they’ll have a breakdown of your entire appliance, but they’ll also be able to sell you individually, all the different parts and you can just order off of there and you’re done. I was super skeptical of them until I needed belts for my unisaw and they actually had the three belts that you needed, which totally surprised me because I couldn’t find it anywhere else on the internet. But for some reason I was skeptical about ereplacementparts.com maybe because of the name. But I ordered, came in, worked, I was happy. I felt like they were a little expensive, but considering they’re the only place I could find that had them, I couldn’t really argue with the price too much.
Another place surprisingly is SearS, searspartsdirect.com. Again, I feel like they had stuff that eReplacementParts doesn’t have and in several cases they’ve had a visual breakdown of all the parts in the appliance in more detail than what you replacement parts had, especially when I was looking at a freezer diagram. And then they’ll also sell you individual parts that you need to do the fixing there. So not only can that be a reference thing for you, it can also be a place where you can order parts if there’s not somewhere local that you can get it and you need to actually order them.
Amazon has a few parts as well. It’s harder to figure out what you need on Amazon unless you know the exact part number. And finally, there’s toolpartsdirect.com. It’s a similar site to eReplacementParts, but again, I feel like some of them each have different things that the other doesn’t have and so you just combine them all together and you start to find what you need. Otherwise, Google.
But I feel like with those resources that can at least give you a jumpstart in finding what you need so that you can purchase it and be on by your way. And you’re not trying to like search Google for hours for one particular part. So I think those are some good resources to have to get reference material and be able to find your parts so that when the day happens and you need to do that repair, hopefully it never actually happens, you just go to your directory on your computer, you open up the PDF file or you open up the videos and you just start going, you find the part that you need and boom, you give them a call to the place that you found locally, you go down, you get the part that you need and boom, two, three hours later, everything’s fixed, everyone’s happy and you’re on about your day like it never even happened.
So with that in mind, let’s go ahead and think about some of the things around the house that you might need to fix that might just break. Some of the quick and easy ones are your microwave, your refrigerator, freezers, washer, dryer, dishwasher, all the stuff that’s in your kitchen and laundry room area. But you also have TVs. I know there’s a particular TV, a Vizio 60″, 65″ TV that literally the only thing you need to do is pull out the board, reconnect a solder point and boom, the thing’s back together. So TVs are something you can look up. If you’re a little more mechanically-inclined or you want to at least try, you want to give it the good old DIY or try, there’s lawn mowers, weed eaters, chainsaws, things with motors in them that you might want to give it a shot on.
There are also HVAC systems, you can do some basic repairs on your own. I know one thing that hit us out of the blue was we have a water pump, a condensation water pump on our HVAC system. And one day the thing just started pouring over in condensation out onto the floor and we’re like, “What’s going on?” And finally got in there and looked and like there was some sediment that had built up on the switch and the switch didn’t switch to be able to tube the stuff out, push the stuff out from the pump, and it just started overflowing. And so now I just check that thing periodically. And for the first couple of times I had to go find the video on YouTube in order to watch it again, but now I have it downloaded so I can just go watch it real fast, I go to the spot that I needed in the video and watch that little segment and boom, I’m ready to go. And five minutes later, the problem is solved.
I need to actually fix the problem permanently but haven’t figured out how I want to do that yet. But if you think about it and you’re trying to understand the things that you need to fix, just think about what are the things that you use every day that break, what are the things that could break, and have a mechanical or electronic parts to them. Your bed in all honesty, it’s probably not going to break. If it does, that’s a little bit of a different issue, but a coffee maker, that might break. So it’s something to think about.
Anyway, I hope that helps on trying to get the thought process going on what to repair and how to prepare for that and be able to fix things. So again, it just totally reduces stress around the household when something breaks unexpectedly and you’re trying to get it fixed. So with that, let’s go ahead and jump over to the last segment and that is a failure. This week I wanted to bring up a failure and it’s something that I have to deal with every now and then in my shop, and it’s really frustrating and it’s something I haven’t been able to fix permanently yet. But this year I plan to fix it. And that is finding random leaks in the roof of our shop. It’s totally annoying.
It’s a metal building. The original people that built it, they put in a plastic where the roof would go, so that there could be a sunroof. Well, that was great until the sun dried the plastic out and now it’s like I don’t know what it’s doing exactly, but it’s starting to leak. And I have about three spots in the shop that they just leak. One of them is really bad. I mean every time it rains, I literally have a bucket that we use for salt for cows and I just have it under there and it’ll get halfway full sometimes depending on how much rain we get in a single raining. Can you imagine that out on the floor? There’s another couple of spots that are similar. Here recently in the last three months ago-ish, a new leak popped up and I totally didn’t expect to be a leak there and it got all over my newly restored unisaw and got surface rust to pop back up on the surface of the table saw. Totally frustrating.
I had to go back out there and get out the sanding paper and sand it all off again, and redo the wax on it and get it all nice. I wasted 45 minutes getting it back to the way it was before that. And if I’d just taken a little time, knowing that I have leaks that randomly pop up. And sometimes we have a roof vent, it’s just sideways wind blowing water up in there and a little bit comes down and droplets on there. Who knows sometimes? Since then I have started covering all my power tools that are out with a tarp so that it protects it. Eventually, I plan to close off some areas but this summer I’m going to fix that roof and it’s going to be a better, more permanent fix.
So that’s a failure. If you have leaks in your roof and you know they’re there and you know where they can pop up, take precautions because where this leak happened, I had never seen anything leak there before. And then all of a sudden, one day it happened. And it is roughly a spot where it leaks and the other part of the building have taken shape, and so everywhere that we have one of those skylights, I’ve just started covering stuff that’s there if needed. So with that, thank you for your time. Please visit the website at buddiy.net and give me some feedback on this episode and we’ll see you next time. Have a great day.
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