‘Restart’ parties: prolong the life of your electrical goods and pick up some useful skills in the process

On Saturday I dropped into a ‘Restart’ party near to where I live in Tooting. If you don’t know what a Restart party is – they’re a group of techies who raise funds to be able to hold events in various locations where the public can turn up with broken electrical goods and be trained how to fix them. A completely fantastic idea, in other words – people can learn skills, save money, extend the life of electrical goods and reduce waste going to landfill.

So I went along on Saturday afternoon, just to be nosy, without anything to fix. The event was at Mushkil Aasaan (a community centre for Asian families in crisis) on Upper Tooting Road. It was organised in conjunction with our local Transition group, so there were a couple of people there I recognised. I could see people in deep discussion, bent over laptops, radios, mobile phones and a vacuum cleaner.

Read more here.

Restarter Profile: Meet Faraz

Tell us a little about yourself.

I studied Materials Science in Oxford University and I’m still finding my way, career-wise. What I’d like to do is design and invent interesting products, so I spend lots of time in hackspaces working on prototypes.

When did you start repairing electronics and electricals?

My secondary school science teacher had given me a soldering iron when I did an after school electronics class. I still have it today and bring it to every Restart Party. It helped me replace a capacitor in an LCD monitor being discarded at uni. If there was a broken electronics item in the house it was a good exercise to break it open and deduce how it works. This sort of curiosity helps with fault finding skills.

Why do you attend Restart Parties?

I love helping people, I love learning and I love solving a puzzle. At Restart Parties I can do all three at the same time. I have made some great friends amongst the regular Restarters and it’s awesome to meet up and see how they’re getting on.

What is your favourite kind of repair?

I like hacks. They may not be pretty, and it’s a bit of a grey area for repair, but it’s cool to use the tools at your disposal and some creative ingenuity to improve something. Those fixes leave me with a good feeling.

What do you do when you are not Restarting?

I spend a few evenings in an open workspace/hackspace in my area. Use the few hours to develop something I’m working on that might use an arduino. I have a wild imagination with many ideas I’d like to explore, I hope one day I can use some of them to earn money.

Read more: http://therestartproject.org/restart-project/restarter-profile-meet-faraz/