R e z i n

What is an hour of your time worth? What do you sell it to your employer for? More importantly, what is the cost of an hour not spent doing something important? It might cost you hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, or may even cost human lives.

A great example of this is an issue that I was having with my clothes dryer. It came with the place when I bought it a few years ago, and I had noticed that it had not been drying well lately. The lint trap was clear and it seemed like it was making heat and the drum was turning and everything. I assumed that the heating element was burning out and wasn’t as strong as it was supposed to be. This is where the financial pain comes in.

For most people they would call a repairman, or just go get a new dryer. The repair man is gonna charge at least a $75 service call and if it needs any parts at all, you’re basically looking at $150 or more for anything simple. In our disposable society, most people would just go buy a new one you might be able to find a cheap dryer on sale for like $400. If you get real lucky you can find a reconditioned used one for like $250. Because I have the means in ability to move appliances I can usually find something that’s good enough or needs a little work and pick it up for free. I came across a good commercial dryer and I already have a commercial washer, so I figured I would complete the set.

When I removed the old one, I figured I might as well open it up and try to see what was going on because I had planned to keep it for inventory as a backup anyway. I popped back open and did a basic investigation, and the problem was immediately apparent. The between the blower motor and the lint trap was full of debris that was interfering with the blower motor, but luckily it was still working. I vacuumed it all out and buttoned it back up. If I had just done this in place in my laundry room, the entire process would’ve definitely taken under an hour, probably closer to a half hour. Now the dryer works good as new. When I went to install the new one, I realized that there was a mismatch in the plugs and my time wasn’t wasted at all, because I ended up putting the old dryer back in.

Let’s explore the potential cost of not spending one hour to maintain an important appliance in any household. The cheapest possibility is $150 service call. Even if they’re not repairing parts from a business perspective, it needs to make sense for the repair person. Aside from the time spent they also had to have a vehicle, tools, knowledge, and other overhead. They had to do some kind of marketing so that you would know who to call. If it doesn’t make sense for them, they won’t be available to do the work for you. Nobody should expect anybody to spend their own money to fix other people‘s problems and everybody needs to make a living. More often than the repair professional is not living better than the customer.

The next possible scenario is the replacement option. Even if a replacement was obtained cheaply, there is still a concern of waste. To make an appliance, there is a significant investment of natural resources and human time with a by-product of pollution. Everything we use has a cost that is much more than just a dollar value. There are so many toxic by-products of manufacturing that are absorbed by our everyday world that we are just now really seeing the human implications of things like micro plastics and forever chemicals. The cost basis for this option is about $250-800, plus the hidden cost of poisoning the Earth. If you end up financing this purchase, you can tack on some interest as well.  Then at the end of all of that, the old one is going to end up at the scrapyard down the street, get smoked like a crack rock at the steel mill, and end up in my lungs.

The easiest way to deal with this situation, would be to just not do anything at all. You could keep running the clothes through over and over until they actually dry but it’s gonna cost you 2 to 3 times as much electricity to dry every load and take a lot more time out of your life. As you keep doing this, the debris will continue to accumulate. Eventually, it will cause the dryer to fail in a variety of different ways. Either the blower motor will burn out or the heating element from getting too hot. The fact that it’s not moving the air right within the device will cause temperatures that can become dangerous to the components and eventually start a fire. Many people run a dryer unattended. A lot of our modern clothes are made out of synthetic materials that once they do actually catch fire will burn like crazy. Spending one hour to clean out the inside of the dryer could potentially prevent your home from being burnt down. The result of this could be the loss of human life, or at the very least pets. Can you really put a price on that cost? The material things, while sentimental, are all replaceable. Imagine knowing that you lost a child in a house fire because you couldn’t find an hour once hour.

According to the US National Fire Prevention Agency, just shy of 4,000 potentially fatal house fires every year are caused by nothing more that the accumulation of lint in clothes dryers. This figure excludes mechanical malfunctions or other causes. Every single house fire is a disaster. Every single house fire comes with a huge cost. Every single house fire can be fatal. Every single house fire has the potential to kill many people, not just one, or the weak. Every single house, fire releases insane amounts of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere and groundwater. Aside from all of these other considerations, replacing a house takes massive amounts of natural resources, time, and labor.

The human calendar year is about 9000 hours long. Is the cost of not finding one of those hours to maintain a device that could potentially kill everybody in your household really a risk? How much time did you take doomscrolling this year? Are you cool with some random firefighter dying to keep your home from burning down the one next to it because you prioritized zesty memes? In general, as a society, you e need to get our priorities straight, and get a better grip on our relationship with consumption of goods. I work in maintenance, and I’ve never had anybody I know tell me they needed to take an hour and open up my dryer and clean it out today. It’s just not a thing that people do. We really do just replace everything. This forces us to lose more of our time and money to the same people that enslave us financially, and profit off of all the insurance these catastrophic events require us to carry. We pay upfront every month for the cost of our own negligence. We have nobody but ourselves to blame.

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