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Oregon’s governor signs right-to-repair law that bans “parts pairing” (www.theverge.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 127 points 7 months ago (68 children)

Some products — like devices powered by combustion engines, medical equipment, farming equipment, HVAC equipment, video game consoles, and energy storage systems — are excluded from Oregon’s rules entirely.

It's interesting to me that Game Consoles get an exception... Not sure whats up there, other than straight up ~~bribery~~ lobbying.

HVAC makes sense when you consider environmental concerns (some refrigerants are really terrible pollutants).

Medical equipment, particularly equipment in public health care should be held to high standards. Authorized, properly trained repair; peoples lives depend on it.

Energy storage when attached to public infrastructure (you back-feeding the grid) can be a saftey concern for workers and the supply/load needs to be balanced to prevent damaging that infrastructure and other private equipment attached to it. Not sure preventing repair is the right move here; you can still buy and install new without oversight. Perhaps it's again a saftey concern (for the person performing repair).

Vehicles, farming or otherwise, I'm on the fence about; there's an argument to be made for public saftey/roadworthness, but I'm not sure that's enough of an argument to prevent home-repair. Again seems more to do with lobbying than anything else.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

HVAC makes no sense to me considering the only real hazard in there is the actual refrigerant gas.

unless they manage to pair the gas, im sure they would if they could

[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (2 children)

You joke but we're almost there. Refrigerants are getting more and more proprietary. I work in the industry and with the push to go to lower global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants manufacturers have developed their own formulas here. It varies from manufacturer to manufacturer even amongst almost identical equipment. Getting the right refrigerant will only become more and more expensive the more boutique it is. The equipment can already tell what kind of refrigerant is in there based on the system pressures and temperatures.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I've been watching Hyperspace Pirate on Youtube and he talks about how hard it is to get commercial access to some basic refrigerants (like ethylene) as someone who isn't a Pro HVAC tech, and he uses it as an excuse to to create them himself for part of his content.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I'll have to check out the channel. Sounds interesting!

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