We’re starting to identify some patterns in things we won’t generally work on at our Beckenham & Penge Repair Cafe events, either for safety or sustainability reasons. I wondered if anyone else has a policy or list which we might be able to build on and communicate to our visitors?
Won’t work on:
three phase electrical items
microwaves (if it involves disassembly)
‘fast fashion’ items
significant adaptations to clothes - we signpost to local businesses for that
We’d also like people to ensure vacuum cleaners are empty before bringing them along but that’s a bit of a losing battle…
Anything else you routinely discourage or refuse to work on as a general policy at your events?
Repair Cafe Lambeth. We won’t deal with microwaves and don’t fix mobile phones other than dealing with a few software issues and factory resets - no screen replacements. Try to discourage clothing “alterations” but they will slip through - not too many though. No knife sharpening.
Toaster crumbs and the contents of vacuums are par for the course.
I think microwaves have been on the banned list for about as long as I’ve been associated with Restart (over 10 years).
At St Albans we discourage power washers because of the risk of spillage and because we’d need a water supply to test them.
Our stitcher-in-chief (I don’t call them sewers because of the possible confusion with sanitary engineering) would have us ban zips as they can be tricky and very time consuming. Nevertheless, a few come through. I replaced my gardening anorak zip, and only the other week, a cushion cover zip (a bit trickier than I bargained for). But as I always say, my sewing looks its best on the end of 100ft of kite string.
She would also have us ban all alterations, and we have had one or two people bring new items needing alteration before being worn, but if someone has lost or gained a few pounds and would otherwise throw the item away I personally wouldn’t have a problem with that.
We have a FAQ on our booking form saying, amongst other things, what we can and can’t accept, but it seems nobody ever reads it.
The alternative is that it goes to landfill since they’re invariably non-recyclable, so, as repairers, surely it’s our duty to repair anything, no matter how badly it’s made?
We often see cheap-and-nasty electrical items which are analogous to fast fashion, but I’ve never heard of any repair café refusing to attempt to repair such a thing (although they often turn out to be unrepairable).
Surely any adaptations to clothes? It’s a repair café not an alteration service.
The fast fashion point I think is that our lead textile repairer doesn’t want to encourage people to buy disposable, poorly made things but as you say, there are parallels with other types of products.
And yes, perhaps I’ll put ‘all clothing alterations, as opposed to repairs’ on our list. I’ve not seen many - if any? - alteration requests come in, to be fair.
This bag says “Fuck Fast Fashion” and belongs to Jean who runs sustainable clothing workshops in South London. It contains a sewing machine that he brought in to Repair Cafe Lambeth today. Jean says by all means repair and alter fast fashion items but don’t encourage purchasing more of it.
At Solent Repair and Reuse (Gosport, Portchester and Titchfield), we have been updating our document whenever we encounter a new consideration.
We have a list of items we never repair either because we judge it to be too dangerous or because our insurance company excludes it
Items with internal high-voltage sources, ionising radiation, or potentially risky magnetic fields, for example:
Microwaves
Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) televisions and monitors
Plasma lamps
Flash Guns
Smoke Alarms
Antique items with luminous paint contain radium e.g. clock hands or dials
High Powered Electrical Items:
High-powered items, which consume more than 13A, high-powered designed to be part of the wired into an electrical installation, for example, ovens.
Items designed to run on higher supply voltages for example 3-phase supplies.
Items with flammable or chemical systems:
Portable fridges - it is acceptable to repair the electrical systems, such as the thermostat but the coolant circuit must not be approached
Any petrol-powered item e.g. chain saws
Items which may not meet product safety requirements at the time of sale. Items with high-powered rechargeable batteries are of particular concern:
Escooters
Electric bikes
Ride of Hoverboards
Items which have a safety function to protect human life:
Motorcycle or bicycle helmets
Car seats
Carbon Monoxide alarms
Smoke Alarms
We also have a policy not to compete with local repair businesses; therefore, we generally don’t repair the following items, unless the guest will largely do the task themselves (just wants to borrow tools) or in cases of serious financial hardship:
We definitely do laptops. Especially those that have been taken to local repair shops and come back in a worse state than before.
Some examples of laptops that I have dealt with at Repair Cafe Lambeth:
visitor went in for a memory upgrade, was charged £27, got it back with no RAM at all and was refused refund.
another was “upgraded” to Windows 11 with only 4GB RAM, crippling the entire OS.
another sold a visitor a used dog of a laptop for £200, with a charger that failed visual PAT as it had obviously been prised open.
another visitor had their Linux OS wiped. They were not happy. (Actually a PC not laptop)
Am all up for supporting local businesses if they operate legitimately but sadly many of the local IT repair shops are cowboys. They excel in selling vapes though. There are no doubt some excellent shops around the place, I know of one in Brighton that is recommended by the repair cafe there, and a good chap with a shop somewhere around Euston who attends Fixfest and supports community repair. This discussion has reminded me to see if I can find a reputable shop locally, one that we can recommend.
We usually refuse. Coffee machines. Large TVs.. karcher pressure washers because there not easily fixes if at all and can take many hours of investigation to conclude end of life due to parts unavailable.
Vacuums & electric mowers we insist that the owners bring them cleaned or provide a brush and bin on site for them to clean up.. no Fixers should have to work on about Health and Safety hazard
I have repaired two Karcher pressure washers at RC. On had a failed motor capacitor, the other a burst outlet pipe. The latest models are designed so that the pipes most likely to burst when frozen can be replaced without tools after the casing is removed. I fixed my own after I got it cheap at a car boot sale. I saved a MacAllister from landfill by identifying the correct hose after the owner was sold the wrong type - there are three near identical types of fitting which need accurate measurement to distinguish. They fit in the connector but leak.
A lot of it depends on the individual cafe, there isn’t one red-list and this occasionally throws up problems but, as seen in this thread, it can also lead to unpopular items getting fixed because the problem is not related to the dangerous/unfixable bit.
The rejections tend to be more “accurate” when a repairer is available to triage items for the organisers.
We WILL accept microwaves! At least, we don’t impose a blanket ban, because I would say that most cases of “it’s sparking when cooking things” are burned food buildup on the “waveguide cover”. Many people don’t realise this is a user-replaceable part (technically doesn’t need a repair cafe!).
I know a lot of our repair cafes have independently decided to stop taking them, most often because of the space they need. My own feeling is that we should go a bit further than this because:
We’re not supporting the right people: Anyone who relies on their bike needs it fixed faster than a repair café can offer. This leaves us fixing bikes for people who don’t really need them, like low-value shed finds. These are less enjoyable to fix as there tend to be a litany of problems.
Repairing them isn’t addressing our core mission: Repair cafés exist because there are few avenues for repair for many items. Where viable repair businesses exist, we should be supporting that circular economy, not competing with it.
They need a lot of resources:
Availability of parts: We don’t carry the parts needed to complete most bike repairs in a single visit.
Bike repairs need a lot of space and a floor protector if done indoors.
The strong counterpoint is that bike shops usually won’t teach you to do the repair yourself. While we struggle to teach for electronic repairs,* bike repairs are something that I think are quite approachable and are a skill that people will need repeatedly but never get taught.** So there is a real value in us teaching people to fix bikes, and it would make people see us less as “free way to avoid paying for a bike shop”, solving 2 of my biggest issues at once.
So my idea is that bikes are offered only on a “you hold the spanner” basis. We’ll accept them to repair cafes, on the condition that the person bringing it in holds the tools under direction of the repairer.
Interesting point on microwaves and valid replacement parts. Think our blanket ban is simpler even though we do have a detector to look for leaks.
Bikes, we have a separate charity that run simple repairs at the same time we are open as it is specialist tools, mats, bike stands, brake cables and other things we don’t hold. One bike was repaired incorrectly by one of our volunteers once. Used the wrong hydraulic brake fluid apparently. So some niche skills for bikes.
I’ve compiled a reference document for cambs repair cafes - something I’ve been meaning to do for a year. It’s intended only for cambridgeshire repair cafes but others are welcome to copy your own version and comment on ours if you have any thoughts
I have sent it out to our advisory group to make edits and will hopefully remember to post the V1.0 here after I get that feedback.
@Guy this is an interesting document thank you for sharing. How do you determine “expert” do volunteers self-determine this or is there a competency assessment?
We normally open these items to show guests the challenges in identifying the fault but adjust the time given to attempting to investigate items like TVs based on the interest of the volunteer and how busy the event. At a busy event we may only take a cursory look explaining that we are looking for burnt out components whereas if we have time we may go further.
Why? I (and many other repairers) have fixed many coffee machines. It is sometimes something really simple (cleaning, descaling, tightening loose connections, …).
