this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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For appliances at least, 95% of "the manual" today is useless CYA safety disclosures in 17 different languages. Manuals today rarely contain useful information.
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?
It's more likely than you'd think!
(Most new appliances come with warranties. And if the appliance breaks under warranty, the company will need to pay to send a technician to fix it. The technician may or may not be familiar with that exact appliance. Now, which would be more cost-effective for the company? A: Pay the technician's hourly rate while he spends time trying to look up the manual and the wiring diagram for this exact version and this exact revision of this exact appliance. B: Include a printed manual and wiring diagram inside the appliance's cover that the technician can quickly and efficiently locate. The company often decides Option B is more cost-effective, so they include a manual hidden inside for the warranty repair technician to find. Happily for us, that manual doesn't disappear when the warranty expires.)
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.
Discharging capacitors (and anything else that might hold a charge) isn't that hard and dangerous if you know how. I used to work on radar systems with 32KV on big capacitor banks.
1: Connect a thick, beefy wire to a solid and reliable ground connection.
2: Rig up a way to hold that wire in a well-insulated way, so that you have thick, non-conductive insulation between you and the wire, but you can still move it around freely and easily.
3: Firmly touch the tip of that wire to the contacts of any capacitors you can see, any bare metal contacts you can see, and anything else that might be at all dangerous. If in any doubt at all, touch the wire to it. Do it twice, just to be sure you didn't miss any. (There may possibly be sparks when you do this. That's okay -- it means it's working. Do make sure you're not close to anything that's very flammable, though.)
After doing that, everything will be discharged and completely safe to work on.
For something the size of a microwave, you could build a capacitor discharge tool very simply and easily by taking any three-pronged power cord, cutting it in the middle, disconnecting and isolating the two power connections (leaving only the ground connection), leaving a bit of bare wire from the ground wire exposed at the end, and then wrapping your handle area in some extra layers of electrical tape (just in case some of those capacitors have voltages above ~300V). (Or if you want to be ultra-safe, tape a plastic or wooden handle to the wire instead.) Plug that modified 3-prong cable into any standard 3-prong household outlet to connect it to a reliable ground.
If you want to be a bit more professional about it, a grounding wire from an ordinary welder setup should be able to safely discharge just about anything you'd ever encounter.
You obviously have the experience and tbh that might be the best guide I've seen on building a capacitor discharge tool (it might also be the only one, but it seems to make sense). For the sake of completeness I assume I plug in the plug and it's just using the house's earth?
Not sure how possible it is to reassemble it in an unsafe manner with the magnetron in the mix and I'm not sure how much peace of mind I'd have using it afterwards. But I certainly feel a lot happier about discharging big caps now.
Yes! Heh, I guess I forgot that part. I should add it in, just in case.
Haha, I thought I better check to be sure. It's such a fantastically straightforward sensible concept for a tool I'm honestly not sure why it's not everywhere vs people shorting caps with a screwdriver.
Crimping a push fit terminal of some sort on the end would make a handy static wrist strap hookup too I'd imagine.
Plus, you'd get to see the horrified looks on your friend's faces when they see you plugging your wrist strap into a wall outlet!
If it was a problem with the microwave function I donβt think Iβd have bothered. Iβm terrible at repairing things and break most things worse than they were before. But it was the lightbulb acting up (the underside one, weβve 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 Iβm terrible at soldering, but it worked out.
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......
...do is like, comment, subscribe, and hit that bell for notifications! (Insert 20 seconds of their janky-ass logo and AI-generated intro song.) Now, before I get to the fix, first I want to take a moment to talk about today's sponsor, Nord VPN...
(And then they'll add a bunch of filler and nonsense to make sure the video goes over 10 minutes so it can be monetized better.)
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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:
Well, good to know.
(Which you, of course, find in the manual of your robo-vacuum that runs automatically and has no way to know if the floors are wet or not.)
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.
And software doesn't even come with those kinds of manuals anymore.
Some does if you're lucky.
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.
Leno on the lost are of Owner's Manuals.