15 minutes ago, acfixerdude said:

I'd say that at least 75% of my repairs needing a board replacement are a failed capacitor, relay, blown trace or a cold solder joint. 

 

My own experience is less than 5% of total calls are candidates for board repairs of the type you describe. What percentage of your total call volume do these types of board repairs comprise?

15 minutes ago, acfixerdude said:

Technicians wanting to learn board repair should first build up their electrical troubleshooting skills as it will provide for faster diagnosis and a better bottom line.

Exactly right— much bigger and faster payoff learning the basic troubleshooting skills that all techs need.  I’m seeing guys neglecting learning basic electricity and circuits in favor of replacing the occasional bulging cap or stuck relay. That’s the shortsightedness and laziness that I’m addressing in my post. 

Thanks for your comments, Michael! 

Brother Quick, you're an old dawg like I am and we see the world pretty much the same way. One thing that means is we have sharp awareness of how little time we actually have in life.

Hmm.. Spend time stocking and storing tinky little relays and triacs for the once on a blue moon repair or, as you say, replace the board and move on.

Or not.

If the customer doesn't want to replace the board, it's most likely not a high value customer but one always looking for cheap cheap cheap. I don't have time for that bird song anymore. I'd rather save that time slot for another paying customer.

And again, we're talking about candidate board repairs that amount to less than 5% of total call volume-- something proponents won’t or don’t address. 

Quote

The impulse to improve their expertise is good, but this is the wrong application. As I've shown in other posts, board-level repair should be done rarely and only in very particular circumstances.

I think some people who have read this post are missing an important point. As trainers, every day we see techs with knowledge gaps that are a detriment to their success. They can't identify whether loads are in series or parallel, don't understand voltage drop, don't understand shorts and shunts, etc. Things that are critical for effective troubleshooting.

Everyone has limited time to learn, so setting priorities is crucial. Performing board-level repairs has enough uncertainty and liability risks that techs should put that skill way down the list of skills they need to acquire.

Totally spot on! Thanks for emphasizing that point about priorities, @Mrs. Samurai.  

If people would carefully reread what I wrote in the post and click the link to the other post where I show doing a field repair, you’ll see that I am not against doing certain types of board repairs.

However, I disapprove of guys who don’t know basic electricity, circuits, schematics, and troubleshooting, wasting time on board repairs when they don’t even know the basics of their trade.

If a tech has the basics down cold and they want to play with board repairs, more power to ‘em (pardon the pun).

But when I see guys going after board repairs as the new cash cow (which it is not) when they don’t even understand L1 and L2, for example, or the other basics that you mentioned, I  have a problem with that because it feeds the PCM mindset that is the scourge of our trade. 

10 hours ago, Lorainfurniture said:

the increased probability of failure,

Good point. 

10 hours ago, Lorainfurniture said:

honestly, it’s easier to charge $450 for a whole board than one 3 cent capacitor.  

There it is. 

Even if you wanted to give a price break for replacing the cap, you have different real costs to factor in: time spent locating and buying the 3 cent cap, if you already have a stock of caps, you have to remember where since the last time you used them, time to let your soldering iron warm up, time to desolder and solder in the replacement— this is all real time spent that you need to be paid for if you’re running a profitable business.

And this is assuming a field repair. If in shop, you have an extra trip to cover. 

So even if you wanted to give a price break, it couldn’t be much and remain a profitable job and now you have a perception problem with the customer: “What, you’re going to charge me $350 to replace that little thing?” 

And then suppose something else in the board fails unrelated (so you thought) to the repair you did. Suppose the board is in a refrigerator and that failure causes the compressor to stay offline, box warms up, and they have $500 of food loss or something much worse resulting in property or people damage. Since you modified a factory board, you are now in direct line of fire for liability and the manufacturer is off the hook. 

If it’s not something like a burnt solder joint, just replace the board and move on.

Even in the case of a simple burnt solder joint repair, I tell the customer no guarantees and I only charge my service call fee for this repair.  No profit in that job, but it’s so rare that I don’t worry about it, it’s a customer relations thing. 

I think part of why our comments about board repairs always seem to ruffle some feathers and make the topic appear to be controversial is that people don’t read what we are saying carefully, nor do they consider our unique perspective on the trade. 

We are not saying field board repairs are never a good thing to do and don't belong in a competent techs' repertoire. (We have several videos showing Samurai doing them.)

We are not saying that every person out there who talks about or does field board repairs is a PCM.

We are saying that we see a lot of people placing field board repairs too high on the hierarchy of skills that a profitable tech needs to have or spend time pursuing. Field board repairs come with a variety of downsides that need to be carefully considered, and the times where they are truly warranted and advantageous are relatively rare. (As you said, @rbmappltech, it's a judgement call. This means the tech needs to have enough experience and skill to have sound judgement.)

Yet we see techs who still don't know what we consider "fundamental" skills spending time gearing up for board repair rather than getting the basics - the electrical troubleshooting skills that will ensure that they are profitable in the long term - nailed down.

Our unique perspective comes from this: over 20 years of running online appliance repair communities, interacting with thousands of techs. In the past 5 years of Master Samurai Tech, we’ve worked with over 1500 students. We just simply have a lot of data about this topic that very few others do.

We've seen techs succeed and techs fail. Many struggling to get by and bitter after years of effort.

Those who failed were usually working very hard, but didn't know what to prioritize in their business. Often they didn't know how to charge properly and what mix of jobs they needed to have. But they also didn't know what skills they needed to gain to be profitable, or they were too short-sighted to invest in training.

We have a quiz at our site called The Master Appliance Repair Tech Quiz. A tech who cannot ace this quiz needs more training to get his/her skills up to speed. The average score on this quiz by already-working techs is about 40%. These are not guys who need to be thinking about field board repairs yet.

For a tech who wants to earn a good living and stay in business for the long term, prioritizing training time and types of service calls is a must, and we are simply encouraging them to make sure they are focusing on first things first.
 

Good stuff, Michael, and the pricing side of this is certainly open to reasonable discussion about ways and means. But that’s not the main objection to doing board repairs as part of an appliance repair service. It’s best spelled out in @Mrs. Samurai‘s latest post.

There are lots of guys out there who don’t know how to use a schematic or timing chart to troubleshoot any electrical problem in all appliances, past, present, and future. They would never be able to troubleshoot either of these simple dryer problems. They might guess and get it right but they would never know why. 

They can’t be bothered with learning basic electricity and circuits in order to even be able to read and use the schematic like a real technician.

But they get all giddy and bubbly about replacing parts on a board because there’s none of that icky troubleshooting stuff that I’m always talking about. Nope, just plug n’ chug while sipping a cold one, and easy money. Life is good.. until the next 27 calls they couldn’t figure out, had to guess on parts, make multiple trips, or just punt. Oh, but they’ll make it up on that next board repair! 

I’m talking about the idiocracy aspect of touting board repair as the cure for what ails cash strapped appliance service businesses. As Susan said, this does not apply to real techs who are troubleshooting sharpshooters. What we’re saying is this: learn how to be real technician first before you start going down the board repair rabbit hole. Real technicians can both troubleshoot and change parts. But the troubleshooting is the high skill component of that equation and the one that leads to higher lifetime income. 

Changing parts on a board does not make someone a technician if they don’t know how to troubleshoot electric circuits with a schematic and meter.   

13 hours ago, acfixerdude said:

And it is a worthwhile skill to learn and hone, provided you're good to go on the basics and advanced troubleshooting.

Yep!

13 hours ago, acfixerdude said:

In fact, you might one day consider making a course on it with the other courses being prerequisites.

What we'll probably do is beef up the discussion of board repairs within our existing courses, and/or do a webinar.

14 hours ago, acfixerdude said:

Bad power switch on a user interface? So easy to solder a new one in.

Yes, these repairs are easy - PCM repairs are by their very nature easy, and board repairs of the type we're talking about are PCM repairs. That doesn't mean you don't do them, but the judgement call on when they are wise to do takes the kind of experience you have, but unfortunately, a lot of techs don't. And, again, these types of repairs are not going to be a significant part of any business's bottom line, given the percentages involved and the fact that you are not making anything (significant) on the parts markup. A lot of techs don't understand the financial importance of making a profit on the parts and not just the labor.

Thanks for contributing to the discussion, Michael!

Thanks everyone for a great discussion! We always feel obligated to reply to good comments on a blog post and we enjoy doing it. But we’ve got courses and webinars to produce so we’re going to close off comments here for time considerations. But please feel free to start a new topic about this in the Dojo.