The Polaris detached from the pool wall last week. The Polaris is a pool cleaning “robot” which is not really a robot, but a changing water pressure system that stirs up detritus from the bottom of the pool and sometimes catches larger things in an attached mesh bag. Some years, I spend a lot of time on reattaching the Polaris–sometimes, the water pressure causes one of the nuts holding the line (hose) to the housing or its various joints. This time, though, it was not a matter of simple detachment at the quick-release attachment which had been a bit of a recurring problem until I re-trimmed the hose and tightened its nut with a pliers instead of finger-tight. A nut had actually cracked and was no longer usable.
Well, that’s a trip to the pool store unless I have one in the pool parts bin in the garage. I’ve collected a number of bits out there because I cannot throw anything away. I have a bit of hose that’s petrified now. The old skimmer basket which is cracked, kept because I can envision a time when we’re skint and the cracked, replaced skimmer basket is our only option. And, to my delight, an extra hose nut in official Polaris packaging which probably means it cost $20 on a trip to the pool store in a past summer. Good thinking, me. Just in case I would need one, and I did.
Though, to be honest, that’s not much of a gamble. I might have mentioned that Nogglestead is overdue on a number of major maintenance due to its owner’s poor fiscal decisions (mostly, overphilanthropy when flush). But, strangely, we’ve taken care of the pool. A couple of new liners at a couple thousand per. A couple new pump motors and secondary Polaris pump motors. We even got a solar cover to keep the pool water warmer earlier and later which we used only the year we bought it because it’s a lot of work to deploy it, and in the first couple of years (and a decade), we didn’t use the pool that much (and, now, we open it early and keep it open later and I get into it for a cold water dunk / cryotherapy). We’ve been told that the newer models of the Polaris are not as good as the old ones, so we’re likely to keep cobbling this one together as long as we can. So buying a couple commodity spare parts for it makes sense.
But other times, I’ve gotten burned buying spares for appliances we have replaced.
Ah, gentle reader, I have mentioned many times how often I had to fix my dryer(s). We had commodity Maytag/Whirlpool washers, mostly under the hood the same units, and I was forever replacing wheels whose ball bearings seized up, slipping belts, or bad fuses/thermometers on them. They were not even electronic dryers, dammit, but the lubricant on the wheels or the bearings were trash. I ended up having a kit on hand so I wouldn’t have to wait for an order to be able to keep the multi-load daily laundry running. And when we got the postless Samsung washing machine, which sat on shocks and if one of the shocks went bad, the washing machine was useless. After replacing them once, I ordered an extra set on hand for the next time since the Internet informed me it happened pretty often. But as it happened, a seal at the bottom failed and the repairman sent to me by a lead generation service proposed a fix that cost more than a new washing machine. As a result, we have a matched set (bought at two different times when each unit failed me for the last time), and we have parts for machines we will never own again.
I’ve also mentioned that I have had to replace the heating element on the forty-year-old wall-mounted oven a couple of times (jeez, just this January?) and have had trouble with them arriving bent or broken. I want to say earlier this year I also ordered a spare, and it arrived bent, so I sent it back and did not order another spare. I mean, we can’t replace the oven without renovating the whole kitchen because it’s a small oven built into the wall, and they don’t make ovens that size any more). So we’ll have to ride it until we absolutely cannot any more. But, eesh, I’ve not been happy with the heating elements I have ordered from Amazon.
So buying spares really does seem like a bad idea in these cases. Parts I don’t have on hand fail, and I end up replacing the unit.
The one exception I have is for our family room television. It’s a rear projector kind which uses a giant, expensive lamp. The lamp on our twenty-one-year-old television has failed twice, and the last time it did, I ordered a second lamp because I figured that in a decade from then when it failed again, the part might not be available. So it’s gathering dust in a cabinet in the storeroom. Hopefully, if I need it, someday, it will work. But history has proven that’s not often the case–something else will fail, and we’ll end up with a modern telescreen of some sort.
Meanwhile, my garage collects these spare parts, and I’m not sure what to do with them. They’re new, so I hate to pitch them. They have fallen out of the return window by many years. Perhaps if I get into listing things on Ebay again, I’ll give them a try there. Or, more likely, leave them for my estate sale.
