Monday, June 22, 2015

How to repair German appliances: find an English web site

We have called the German corner of the worldwide web a desert before, an easy metaphor with information being water, the dispersed oases being really useful web sites, the creepy crawly things that come out at night being the trolls, and so forth. Well, maybe not trolls, are there trolls in the desert?

Not sure how to get camels into this imagery without insulting either Germans or camels. So our German web desert has no camels, okay.

We frequently have a hard time finding good information in German. There are simple and complex reasons. Simple ones include the fact that German is not widely used on a global scale, or that many sites out of Germany use English. Then there is the joy of German compounds and the difficulties associated with them:

a) How do you handle them in search code? As a full word, split, stemming, if so how?
b) Technical language is tough in German in many older specialist areas and in law and government.

And finally, there is a cultural aspect of "sparse information" despite a flourishing German language version of Wikipedia, tons of YouTube videos in German and innumerable blogs. Many Germans don't give out good information freely, it seems.

Now would be a good time to give you some hard figures, right? Sorry for not providing any, feel free to gather data and see if we have a point or if we are just too narrow minded or too dumb to do get it right.

We believe, we have one area where our assertion holds true: the repair of household goods, for example, a washer and a dryer. The first is used by the blogster despite a proud tradition of Amish style washing, and the latter sees most action in the winter when hanging up the laundry outside is not an option.

German household appliances, of course, come with operating instructions and a checklist of common failures and potential fixes. Turn on the water, clean the the lint screens, and so on.

What our manuals did not tell us, though, is the meaning of error codes. It would have been easy to explain that E14 means a clogged drain, or to enlighten us on the meaning of x number of blinks of the error LED.
Out of warranty can mean out of luck, especially in the rural reaches of the country because repair folks already charge for the drive.

That's were the English language web is a godsend. You are almost guaranteed to find good information fast. German sites will generally say something along the lines of "if it is not the lint or the water call the repair folks".

English language sites will generally start with a warning like "unplug the appliance, and don't try any of this unless you know what you are doing", followed by nice and detailed information. Much of which applies to most German appliances, too.

If the dryer stops working
Unscrew the back of the dryer, inspect the heating elements, check if the temperature sensor wire is not loose, no wires have come off and no plugs have melted, and finally press the tiny red circuit breaker. Make a test run, then reassemble the back, and you just saved 75 or more Euros.

A mechanic half way around the world just saved us money and - even more important to the author of this post - taught us what a healthy heating element looks like and where to find the internal circuit breaker.

Dear unknown mechanic, thank you.

On your behalf, I delivered just under 1000 trillion flops worth of computer power to one of my favorite volunteer projects at BOINC, the network for distributed grind computing.

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