Recently had an open neutral event that took out or hampered a handful of electronics in my home. Surge protectors largely did their job, and I learned quite a bit about protection and repair in the process. Luckily I was able to find a replacement power/fuse box for my on demand water heater pretty cheaply, but also fixing it would have been doable (including a temporary workaround).

I also recently (finally) refurbished a vintage fender amp (new plate resistors, new electrolytic capacitors, updated power wiring to be safer and have a standby switch, fixed a factory error with swapping a filter resistor position from the schematic (not sure how much of an impact this had as I haven’t done the full circuit analysis). It’s sounding great now, and I’m ecstatic! Being able to fix things is really gratifying.

I’ve long been interested in the premise of “lifetime reviews” like if I graphed satisfaction/happiness with a particular product vs the duration of ownership. Some things start out high, and rapidly fall off, others start middle and gradually glow as you learn to appreciate their choices or robustness. New fridge is great, but then the ice maker makes a puddle in the container and it goes rapidly down hill. So along with the other suggestions for ongoing updates, something like this where I could periodically track various (or a single) metric over the life of an object would be helpful. Aggregating by brand and years of purchase could help see the reliability trend for given appliances/similar.

Incorporating more repair details similar to ifixit seems helpful.

I’m not sure I see the business model, so maybe it’s open source or Patreon-sequence, or you’ve thought of something I haven’t. Best of luck!