Appliance Repair Wisdom for the Ages

Thursday, May 08, 2003

Awwite all you cool grasshoppers, go grab you a beer and the Samurai'll tell you a story.

Once upon a time, in a place that was once called the "land of the free," there was a big ol' company called Dupont. Now, Dupont made a thang that we old timers held near and dear to our hearts and that was R-12, a refrigerant used is just about every type of refrigerator ever made, including beer coolers. But Dupont had a problem: their patent on R-12 was about to expire and everyone else and their Momma was gonna start making it, too. Well, it don't take a rocket scientist, like yours truly, to figger out that once this happened, the price of R-12 was gonna take a nose dive.

Now, Dupont, being a company with lots of money to throw around, paid off a bunch of fancy-pants scientists and engineers at these high-dollar universities to show that R-12 was bad and needed to be banned. So these fancy-pants university types cooked up some numbers showing how all them nasty little molecules in R-12 was eatin' up the orzos in the atmosphere...er somethin' like that.

Anyway, Dupont goes and presents all these high falootin' studies to one of the fourth branches of the gubmint, the EPA. The EPA said, "Hmmm, we can't be eatin' up all them little orzos like that there. Gubmint has to do something about that!" So they came out with a big ol' riot act of new regamalations where they said everyone what works on beer coolers has to have a new-fangled recovery unit to catch all them bad molecules.

Well, I didn't know no better and besides, I didn't wanna hurt them little orzos 'cuz, heck, they ain't never done nothin' to me. So I lined up with all the other suckers, er, I mean, tradesmen and plunked down a bunch of money for a fancy new recovery unit.

Funny thang happened though. When the EPA got into the bidness of regamalating refrigerants, their prices all went sky high. So the cost to replace the compressor on your average beer fridge went from $150 to, oh, say $400, once you figger in the higher refrigerant cost and a refrigerant recovery charge. Well, at that price, people were just hauling their old fridges off to the landfill and buying new ones. Lots of good fridges piling up in landfills today. But, hey, the gubmint knows what's best 'cuz they're here to help!

Meanwhile, Dupont is back in bidness, happily raking in the big bucks selling it's new line of R-12 replacement refrigerants. Ain't gubmint great? I think everybody awwta own one!

And so the gubmint and the big shot corporations who benefit from their regamalations all lived happily ever after.

The End

I can tell you that my recovery unit makes a reeel spiffy footstool in my workshop 'cuz that's all I ever use it for. Never even used it once. Wanna buy one cheap?

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