We need your engagement in the RepairMonitor!

Have you ever wondered which products and brands are most often brought into the Repair Café? Is there a product which particularly often shows defects? Does this differ per country… or can similar failures be seen in products worldwide? To answer these questions, we created the RepairMonitor.

What is the RepairMonitor?

The RepairMonitor is an international tool to collect data about repairs that are carried out in your Repair Café. This allows you to get an overview of products and brands brought in by the the visitors and which defects need to be repaired. Want to learn more about the RepairMonitor? Click here.

Analysis of repairs in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US

In this short article, we will go through the repair data added to the RepairMonitor by repairers from English-speaking countries. The monitor has participants from the UK, Australia, Canada and the US. We will look for differences and commonalities in the data for each of these four countries.

When it comes to registered repairs, the UK scores particularly well in the RepairMonitor with 3642 entries in total. Repairers from Canada registered 880 repairs, while the Repair Cafés in Australia entered data on 328 repairs. From the US only 51 repairs were added until now.

Top 5 products

The product that has been registered the most in the RepairMonitor from the UK and Canada are… pants! Would you have guessed that? The diagrams display the top 5 products registered by participants from the UK and Canada, as these two countries have the most representative numbers.

 

 

 

 

 

However, there is another item, which made it into the top 5 in all four cases … the lamp. In the US and Australia, this is even the most registered item in the RepairMonitor. The rest of the products, however, are very different.

Sony – most brought in brand in all 4 countries

When it comes to brands, there is a particular one which is represented in the top 5 of brands in all four countries: the Japanese brand Sony. While in Canada and the US, Sony is the most registered brand, in Australia and the UK, however, it only made the fifth place. In the UK, for example, products by the British brand Dyson were brought in the most, followed by products from Apple and Bosch. It has to be stated that, in all countries, for most products the brand name was registered as “Unknown/n.a”. This shows the need for more entries in the RepairMonitor, in order to draw more meaningful conclusions about popular brands.

 

Breville – popular brand in Australia

As can be seen in Figure 2, the Australian brand Breville is the most registered brand in the Australian RepairMonitor. The brand is known for household appliances such as coffee machines and blenders. In the Australian RepairMonitor the toaster by Breville was the most registered product. In almost 70% of the entries (6 in total), there was a problem with the pop-up button of the toaster, which would no longer stay down. In half of all entries, the cleaning of e.g. crumbs was a suggested solution.

 

 

Successful repairs

On a positive note, the percentage of successful repairs was higher than 60% in all four countries. In the US, the success rate was 76%. However, as the number of registered repairs in the US is still very low (51 repairs), this doesn’t mean very much. That is why we need more engagement from Repair Cafés in the RepairMonitor! When more repairers start sharing information, we will get more meaningful information about the reparability of products in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US in the future.

 Join in!

You can register your Repair Café in the RepairMonitor now! This will take less than 10 Minutes!

You are already registered? If you have any questions, we offer a tutorial and various video with instructions that show you the way in the monitor. If you have additional questions, you can also send us an e-mail to: info@repairmonitor.org