Ask Lemmy

I use drills everyday for work and have one at home that doesn't get used much because if I want to get handy I don't want to drive to work to get one.

The average person has fuck-all experience with power tools, they don't use them every day. They can pull the trigger and it goes brrrrrrr but they don't know what the options on the rotation piece are, they don't know about different types of chuck, they don't know which gear setting to put their drill in. They use it for the absolute minimum amount of time possible and then put it away. You're clearly a professional if you're using them every day, most people are not.

I don't know whether the 7 minute claim is true or not, but the idea that most drills barely get used and spend most of their time sitting about is not very difficult to believe. I'm quite a handy person, and even my drill spends most of it's time doing nothing because I'm not drilling every single day, just as and when DIY jobs come up.

In a world drowning in ewaste, and lithium being a precious resource, why are we collectively wasting so much on individual drills when, as JubilantJaguar said, we could own these things communally and not create so much waste.

The idea of a communal toolshed for your street, block, tenement, whatever, isn't the same as having tools sitting at work. Work for most people is a commute away. Communal toolsheds would be local. They ideally shouldn't be any more than 10 mins walk away. Can you really begrudge a 10 minute walk for the sake of your wallet, environment, and community?

This also helps the young get into DIY easier. Most of my mates growing up barely did any DIY or tinkering, not because they weren't interested, but because the cost of getting the necessary tools was prohibitive as a teenager. It's taken me years to accumulate the toolbox I have now, and many of the items in there are hand-me-downs or second-hand. A communally owned toolshed gives everyone instant access to tools regardless of personal wealth or resources. If a power tool dies, £150 spread between multiple households is nothing compared to £150 for an individual household.

Managing it, caring for the tools, ensuring they're returned, and in a good state, are obviously hurdles to be addressed, but if communal toolsheds were the cultural norm then they could easily be overcome. We manage to do it with books easily enough, why not anything else?

I'm guessing that 6-20 minutes is like the actual time spent driving screws or drilling holes. Each one takes maybe a few seconds. 6-20 minutes in that case translates to hundreds of screws driven, even on the low end. So not nearly as worthless as the time makes it sound.

Sure, it's a factoid. Maybe it's 20 minutes. But we all know it's very low. Seven minutes is an overestimate for my drill.

have one at home that doesn’t get used much because if I want to get handy I don’t want to drive to work to get one.

Yes, and it's a problem. The possibility of borrowing one from your neighbor is passed over entirely and the alternative is to drive to get another one already in your possession.

All of this is completely unsustainable behavior at the scale of the planet. I suppose you'll get in a huff and take this personally but I really am talking about all of us. As I said, I have a drill myself and bought it for exactly the reasons you cited. I just think we could all do better.

In fairness 7 minutes with an electric drill will get you a lot of holes!

The problem is that it's an incredibly inefficient use of resources. Most drills sit unplugged virtually the whole time. If we could only find a way to share them, we could have the same number of holes for a tiny fraction of the resources and the pollution. And as a bonus it might even strengthen local communities, which would be another obvious win. IMO the electric drill shows the dysfunction of consumer capitalism in microcosm.