Be Your Own Handyman When You Can
Be Your Own Handyman… When You Can
by Damian Brindle
It seems to me that one of the MANY skills we’ve lost as a culture–especially as a result of our “disposable” goods mentality–is the ability to fix things and otherwise to make do with what we have.
Don’t get me wrong, if I could honestly afford to always call a repairman to fix things for me I probably would. But these days we can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars to fix something that we can likely fix ourselves.
In this case, we had to repair our Maytag clothes dryer. After a brief Google search using something like “Maytag [model#] dryer not heating” I was quickly presented with a wonderful website: RepairClinic.com.
This is actually a really neat website that offers repair advice (and parts) for any number of appliances that could go belly-up, from your washer and dryer to a refrigerator or stove. Beyond appliances, they also offer advice for outdoor equipment (such as the lawnmower or chainsaw) as well as for HVAC systems and other things I wouldn’t attempt to touch.
In our case, a clothes dryer is among the easiest appliances to repair–or so they say–and as such I decided (with prompting from my wife) to follow the RepairClinic.com advice and wound up figuring out that the heating coil was broken as shown here (I exaggerated the break in the photo to make it obvious):
No problem. RepairClinic.com provides useful repair video tutorials and, of course, sells these parts and for relatively reasonable prices, I’d say. The thing is that we wanted to save as much money as possible and so I did a brief Google product search for the particular Whirlpool product number (Maytag is a subsidiary) and I was able to save about $10 buying from a website that seemed a little shady but ultimately delivered. After about a week and a half of waiting for the new element to arrive we got to work, here’s the new element… isn’t she pretty?
An easy repair, no doubt. RepairClinic.com actually offers quite an array of advice, from testing and replacement videos (meant for your particular appliance) to troubleshooting tutorials, the correct parts to purchase, and probably more that I haven’t even seen yet. The videos even warn you of potential safety hazards and even the anticipated difficulty (from easy to DIY to hire somebody).
Well, at least an hour later and possibly a beer or two we wound up replacing the heating coil. I’ll spare you the gory details and perhaps a few swear words during the process.
The point is simply that we were able to save ourselves quite a bit of money by NOT calling a repairman to fix something that we (I) can do ourselves. Granted, I’m not “Mr. Fix-it” by any means but I’m not completely useless either… and I can follow instructions at times too.
The best part is that with such useful advice as can be readily found online at sites like RepairClinic.com and others there’s no excuse to NOT save yourself plenty of money and maybe even learn a useful skill at the same time.
Of course, if you’re not comfortable attempting such repairs then by all means get some help or hire somebody. After all, the last thing I’d want is for you to seriously injure yourself or others doing something you shouldn’t or repairing an appliance incorrectly.
At the very least there’s no harm in looking into what type of repair may be needed as well as the potential costs and parts involved so that, at minimum, you don’t get “taken” when you call somebody to repair your broken stuff.
That said, it may be useful to also include various home repair books in your library for a rainy day.