We recently had a bit of a home disaster - both our tumble drier and our hanging clothes rack broke, just as the weather turned autumnal. All we had left was a drying stand, and with the house in disarray due to kitchen renovations, that wasn't rmuch fun to be around.
Our tumble drier is a Zanussi, about 7 years old. Shortly after starting a run, it would stop, showing an error code EH0. A quick search led to Zannussi's support pages, telling me that it was a power supply issue. Their official repair services costs £150 as a fixed price, and if they can't repair it, they offer a small discount on a replacement appliance (not as much as the cost of the repair service). That's a better repair service than I expected, honestly, but it's a lot of money at a time when we've got a lot going out.
What's the alternative? I'm not a huge fan of YouTube, but in this case, it absolutely came to our rescue. Mr. Washy Washy's repair guide explained the problem, showed how to disassemble the machine and showed what was required for the repair. Basically, two solder points where a relay was attached the mainboard had cracked and needed re-soldering. Taking the machine apart was pretty easy (just required a torx bit, which I already had). Taking the mainboard out was a bit more fiddly - lots of stubborn plugs to remove and some slightly fiddly cable routing. Still, with a few reference photos, some tools (pliers and a couple of bits from an iFixit toolkit) and a lot of persistence, it came out OK. But then... the soldering.
Soldering seems like it shouldn't be too hard, and videos always make it look so easy, but in practice it's not straightforward. We clearly need to practice, as we were having trouble getting the joint hot enough to resolder, getting the fresh solder to flow properly etc. Still, we managed to get at least a bit of a route across the cracks, so we re-assembled everything and lo & behold, it worked! We now have a working tumble drier for the grand total of £20 (the cost of a new soldering iron after our cheapo USB one died).
So - success! It's very much made me want to learn to solder properly. Being able to repair things, rather than replacing them, would be fantastic. Repairing saves money, and saves waste - what could be better?
Luckily, there's a book about soldering in the current Humble Bundle: Humble Books Bundle: Electronics for the curious. Time to learn!