Kyle Wiens

Repairs to complex kit can be hard in the boonies.  Just because you live off-grid doesn’t mean you want to live in the stone-age.

Quite brilliant low tech devices are sometimes developed to provide modern creature comforts. Only, yesterday we reported on a washing machine made from a bucket and plunger.

But there are areas where only hi-tech will do –most obviously in the field of electronic goods.–computers, phones, MP3 players, consoles and the like.

The problem is that these goodies have increasingly short life cycles and often break down long before most of the components have worn out. That’s bad for the environment, cripplingly expensive and a logistical nightmare if the nearest repair shop happens to be fifty miles away.

I break it, iFixit

So let’s give a big Off-grid cheer to iFixit,  a new or rather, reconditioned web site dedicated to helping people repair their own electronic equipment.

For years iFixit was a ‘teardown’ site, it specialised in providing step by step instructions on how to take apart hardware, especially Apple hardware. Their contribution of Earth Day was to relaunch as “the free repair manual that you can edit”.

It’s a wiki for repairing any device you can think of. It styles itself ‘Repair 2.0’ and its lofty ambition is to become a manual to empower anyone to fix anything.

The iFixit site now boasts 100,000 photos explaining the workings of 1500 different products as well as step by step films and animations.

And that’s only the start says Kyle Wiens the entrepreneur behind iFixit. It will provide instructions –provide by its community of users, for anything from repairing a mobile phone to mending the brakes on your pick-up.

The site makes its living from commission on the components it sells to users. But Wiens claims his aim is primarily environmental. “We can’t keep throwing away cell phones every 18 months, we need to get every last bit of functionality from the things we own before we toss them aside,” he argues on his site.

He says that modern technology has stirred up consumption to almost hysterical levels when it could just as easily have been used to promote more sensible attitudes.

“Repair is stuck in the 20th century. Service manuals are almost never available online, and the few troubleshooting forums that exist are rife with spam and ad-baiting. Reliable parts suppliers that understand e-commerce are few and far between. Making repair accessible to everyone is the best shot we’ve got at reducing e-waste and starting to make our high-tech lives sustainable.”

“What we’re doing,” Wiens told Wired magazine, “is we’re allowing people to join together and help each other save money, help the environment and care for those things.”

You’ve got to say good luck to the man.

www.iFixit.com

Tags: off grid, Kyle Wiens, iFxit, repair wiki, planned obsolescence