Plant & Facilities Engineering

Good suggestion. When I visited my brother in U.S 20 years back, he had discarded "Sears Model 2000" land line phone only because its ring tone volume control was not working. He asked me to take to India and get it repaired and use it. I did that and I found this phone is still working where as other phones have given away.

One way to look at it is whether the cost of repair is worth it compared to the cost of replacement. My first video tape player was expensive for the time (about $350) so when it had a bad chip, the $75 repair cost made sense. But now that a new DVD player can be had for $99, would a $75 repair with a three week downtime make sense? And that's if you could find anyone to repair it.

On the other hand, many pieces of equipment would have longer lifetimes if regular service and maintenace was scheduled. Often enough, management plans to throw equipment away after a certain time period, so it is bought cheaply, worked until it fails and then is replaced even though it would still be quite serviceable if repaired. It depends on the time period a cost analysis is applied to.....do you look 5 years out only, or do you look 10 or 15 years out?

So, one way to save money might be to invest in more robust equipment that initially costs more, but with proper service will last much longer.

This depends on whether it costs too much to repair an object or not, My cousin is an electrician, and he repairs all the electrical goods in the house if they break down, of cource we are not all capable of doing this, but if anything mechanical breaks down in our house I fix it myself, as I am a trained engineer (both mechanical and marine), but how many people can do this, not so many if you take into account the population of our planet, and not all are good at DIY.

Spencer.