You must log in or register to comment.
For appliances at least, 95% of “the manual” today is useless CYA safety disclosures in 17 different languages. Manuals today rarely contain useful information.
There’s sometimes a few Ikea style pictures showing how to put it on a table and plug it in. Which is possibly useful to some.
Until you do like step one of taking an appliance apart, and realize that the real manual is marked “for technician use only”, and it’s hidden inside of the appliance.
My washer and dryer both have good manuals complete with circuit diagrams under the top once i take a few screws out. My chest freezer has one taped up under the hatch where the compresser sits. My refrigerator has one hidden in the door hinge.
Yeah, my parents were about to throw out an oven that would keep shutting off. I pull it away from the wall and boom, wiring diagram. Take out the ohm meter, figure out that the resistance across the temperature probe went to near zero when steam intruded through a gap in the crimp. 5 dollar part and it was good to go for years to come (the new part was crimped in a simpler, more robust way).
Dishwasher had the service manual taped to the kick plate. It gave me codes to troubleshoot, finding the heating element died.
Ah, yeah, forgot that was another one I’ve done. It seems like I’ve taken apart most of my household appliances at this point.
Yup, just got done wiring up an old washer to turn it into a feather plucker using the technician only manual!
You mean actual paper manuals ester-egged inside the appliances themselves? In 2025?
deleted by creator
The troubleshooting section of the manual is almost always useless because it only ever covers user error.
My washer threw a drainage error and the manual suggested I blocked the outlet or had done something daft. I looked up the error code online and 90% of the time it was a failed water pump.
I had to replace the water pump. It was an easy job that required less documentation than a lego set for a 5 year old. You just had to know which screws to loosen to get to the pump. Was it documented? Of course not.
The actual manual is usually hidden somewhere on it for repair techs to find. For my oven it was taped on the back.
Yep. I needed the circuit diagram for my microwave to fix an issue with the light (kept blowing out bulbs rapidly). Turned out you have to pull it out of the top inner frame, after unscrewing the button board and top panel. Thankfully, was an easy soldering fix, thyristor blew.
Generally microwaves are amongst the devices I tag as “do not self repair” I lack the confidence in my repair skills to fuck with the machine with giant caps and built in death ray.
If it was a problem with the microwave function I don’t think I’d have bothered. I’m terrible at repairing things and break most things worse than they were before. But it was the lightbulb acting up (the underside one, we’ve got an over-range mounted unit).
In this case I had the circuit diagram and multiple YouTube videos to lean on. Thankfully the thyristor is big, because I’m terrible at soldering, but it worked out.
Honestly I have to disagree. All my recently purchased appliances: microwave, washing machine, dishwasher and induction cooktop, had detailed instruction manuals that were genuinely useful, especially where the finer details aren’t obvious from the device itself.
Heck, even my wireless earbuds had a little bit of useful info, like how to force them into pairing mode.
Of course, all those manuals contained those nonsense safety warnings too (and I read every word of course! :P) but that’s neither here nor there.
All those safety warnings are useless nonsense, until:
This vacuum is not water resistant and no part of it shall come into contact with water. Do not operate this vacuum on wet floors.
Wash the infuser with water or coffee machine cleaning powder only. Do not wash with soap. Every 6 months, relubricate the seals with food and water safe silicone grease certified with NSF/ANSI/CAN 61 and NSF/ANSI 51.
Well, good to know.
And software doesn’t even come with those kinds of manuals anymore.
Some does if you’re lucky.
Appliance repair in the 20’s? WTFY (Watch the fucking Youtube)
query:samsung Ice maker stoped working
Hi, I’m jimmy from shadyApplianceParts.com Did your samsung ice box stop making ice? That’s a common problem. What you need to…
I read the manuals for everything now. I think it’s because when I was a kid videogames used to come with great manuals and half the fun was just reading through those. One of my favourites was for the original Heavy Gear on PC. that thing was like a hybrid manual and lore bible. Or old Flight Sim games with manuals that were as thick as text books.
Now you don’t get shit.
Arcanum manual, my beloved https://archive.org/details/Arcanum_-_Manual
I had the same experience. It could even be a long time before you were allowed to play, so reading the manual just increased the anticipation and made your mind wander wildly with all the possibilities.
Yeah sure, unless the manual reads like a white paper from the 80s… Ya know like every man page ever
I read the manual before i buy a product, I watch the product reviews, and if I can I watch the repair videos as well.
Big part of my enjoyment from buying things is the work I do upfront. I tend to do the same with any tech project.
Part of it is cultural and habit and that is something you can just decide to change. It helps if someone brings it up, like this post, or you might not even think of it.
I bought a $10 power strip / surge protector last week. It was the first time this occurred to me. I pulled out the manual to throw it away, and it was only my experience in writing technical documentation that made me stop and consider actually reading/skimming it.
Maybe I’ll change this habit. Maybe I’ll start reading these things.
Of course some of them aren’t meant to be read. But you can usually tell pretty quickly,
The issues come up when I read the manuals and they do not explain anything to a person who doesn’t already know most things.
Linux fails in too many places at having instructions written by people who care even slightly whether humans will ever be able to comprehend them.
Its the damn truth. Either rtfm which is the easy way since your predecesors made it for you or tinker with shit by trial and error untill you figure it out all on your own. Otherwise you are just lazy.
Lol. That’s exactly what I did in the early 90s. ls /usr/bin, then man at, or whatever it was that came first, and work onwards from there.
Moreso when I installed my own Unix machine (briefly Minix, quickly replaced by Linux) and had to actually learn how to manage it.But then I came from a mix of 8 bit, PC and semi big iron (Tandem) culture where any machine you used would matter of factly come with a litteral wall of binders containing documentation for pretty much anything (which led to the fun regular “documentation day” where you had to manually “patch” the documentation by replacing pages in all the binders with updated ones).
Anyway knowing what the fuck you were doing was pretty much expected. So everyone spent a lot of time perusing documentation.Of course nowadays, to read documentation, you first have to find it, which can be quite a challenge in itself. But at least the manpages are still there.
I used to be a Crew Chief of F-15’s in the U.S. AirForce. We had manual patches too. Luckily, that was Supports job duty.
It’s interesting. There’s a lot of talk about how chatgpt makes people lazy, but honestly I think Google killed the “read the manual” ethos.
Back in the day when you couldn’t just search for everything, you needed enough understanding of the manual to find anything in the index.
So a key part of figuring anything out was reading at least the start of the manual.
Now, fuck it, you just type into Google and try to guess enough context to understand what’s going on.
Agreed, finding a manual should always be the first step to solving a problem imo. Even when searching online, I prefer if I can find the official docs/wiki for a piece of software, then search within that.
I think LBD is the other half of it. If you have the confidence to try and fix or build something you Learn By Doing it. That eventually compounds and you could pretty much do anything. Maybe takes a bit longer than a professional would do it. A great shortcut would be to RTFM
I’ll read the manual after it stops working. There are 10 pages of “warning: don’t microwave your cat” and 10 pages of what obvious buttons do and if I’m lucky 3 pages of fault codes that in the worst case scenario I’ll see one of them the next 10 years.
Sometimes customers pay me to troubleshoot what other vendors sold them, I find the manual for their model number and basically flick through it until I find something.
I still have manuals for appliances I no longer have.
My folks bought a new EV recently and my dad was unable to figure anything out for days. I hopped in and was doing everything he wanted in minutes.
“How the hell did you do all that‽”
“I RTFM Dad”
Wow, didn’t think I’d see an interrobang in the wild!
“Reading! Kids, nowadays (sigh).”
After a while it’s basically muscle memory so you don’t have to go digging as much. OpenBSD’s are my favorite. So well-written.
Yea I run OpenBsd on my VPS. So much nicer than having to wonder where this particular Linux distro decided to keep this particular config file.
Blew the technicians mind away because I read the bad manual
Blew the technician
It must be nice to be able to read and recall.
