The average refrigerator in the U.S.A. lives 12 years before becoming dysfunctional.
Ours is 8 years old, and the main power board has gone out(1).
I am getting it repaired because I refuse to throw it out. It is too young, and I don't want to contribute to unnecessary waste. And I don't want to spend so much money every 8-12 years. And, so, we are living out of a cooler for the last week, and it may stretch into next week.
Repairing a refrigerator is difficult. Not many companies do it anymore. It is also expensive. It will cost us $350, about a third of the price of a comparable refrigerator. That's not it, though. We are ordering more food. That is expensive and generates a lot more waste. We are generating more food waste because we have limited cooler space. We have to buy ice every day. My family is wavering on the precipice of "why don't we just buy a new one?" It is difficult to repair a refrigerator.
#ecocide
#WasteGeneration
#PlannedObselescence
#RightToRepair
#capitalism
(1) I likely broke the control board. My kids were getting ice when the lever return spring for the lever that activates the ice and water dispenser, meaning that it would not stop dispensing ice or water. That happened when I was out of town, and my son came up with a temporary solution of putting a cub behind the lever to hold it out.
When I returned home, I tried to fix it, which means I had to take it apart to find the lever spring. I had to unplug three wire harnesses that led to the user control board. I didn't unplug the refrigerator, and it is likely that I shorted something after I found a broken plastic arm that used to support the return spring and put everything back together. So this is likely a case that is more #RightToRepair than #PlannedObselescence , but the two things are so intricately related - there was no information online I could find about properly assessing the problem in this model, and I had to purchase an entire interface-dispenser kit rather than the simple plastic part I needed.