The oven our house came with has been a bit unreliable since we've had it, which is eight years now. Not broken exactly, but doesn't hold temperature well even with a new thermostat.

Rather than buying a new oven, I decided to buy a used Bosch oven from ~2010 for $50. According to the seller it just needed a new fan, and parts for this model are still available at OK prices.

I figured this oven is computerised but not too smart or too complex. It has good reviews unlike a lot of recent model Bosch ovens that seem to fail for baroque reasons like touchscreen calibration(!)

So we buy this cheap broken oven and it turns out it needs three parts: oven fan, fan heating element, cooling fan.

The first two parts are available new at reasonable prices, the last part is $600 from Bosch... Uh-oh.

Or there's a Taobao vendor selling what looks like an NOS version for $30... what a save!

So I'm still hoping to get a quality used oven for the price of a very cheap new oven, plus a few hours cleaning and repair. Also saving an otherwise good product from e-waste.

The cracks are starting to show in this plan, but I'm still happy enough with it...

🧵 1/