Common fixable items and common unfixable items

Right to repair: policy & activism Repair data
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As asked by @philip over on the thread on Open Data Day:

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Here is an existing question we already have in Metabase that includes the data on numbers fixed, repairable, and end-of-life per category:

It’s interactive so you can hover and see the figures for each category, and can also download them as a CSV with the arrow at the bottom right.

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You might also be interested in %age fixed by category as well @philip:

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Thank you Neil for the analyses you sent me showing the most frequently encountered types of item and fix rates for each type, here and here.

This provoked several thoughts:

  • I presume the Mobiles category includes smartphones. In the events I’ve been to I haven’t seen that many and it’s not that often that the punter brings along the spare part, so both the number and %fixed surprised me a little.
  • I was also surprised by the 42% fix rate for kettles. I’m never very optimistic about anything where water enters into the calculation.
  • You don’t have a category for steam irons. We get a few of those but I’ve never managed to fix one. Even opening it can be pretty challenging.
  • I think it would be well worth splitting the laptops category into hardware and software. We get a fair few running slowly, which are quite a different proposition to hardware problems such as faulty screen, keyboard or power connector. And I don’t see much point in separating laptops according to size - it makes very little difference, though it could be worth splitting out the modern convertible ones from the traditional clamshell variety.
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Hi Philip - I was also a bit skeptical about the fix rate for kettles; digging into the data a bit more, there’s currently 155 kettles seen, and of those repaired the common themes are fuses, leads and connections with the base. Of those that were end of life, the themes include elements and leaks. So I think the figure of 42% fixed sounds plausible.

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That’s great @Steve_Cook - and shows that being able to dig into the fault type helps make sense of the stats! I guess as it’s a small number of records you eyeballed the fault types?

Could be interesting to see it as a diagram, sounds similar fault to status correlation as @Lewis_Crouch did for laptops during ODD. (The last diagram here).

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Yes indeed - we’re looking to add a category for irons. @Stefania has recently been looking into recategorising devices that are recorded as ‘Misc’ - i.e. don’t fit into an existing category - and identified that around 5-10% are irons.

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