Look at the back of a gadget you own. If a small sticker sits over a screw and says the warranty is void if the seal is broken, you are looking at a claim that often does not hold up.
A federal law passed in 1975 says a company generally cannot make its warranty depend on you using its own branded parts or its own repair service. The provision sits at 15 U.S.C. 2302(c). The Federal Trade Commission can grant a waiver, but its 2021 report to Congress on repair restrictions says only three waiver requests have ever been filed, and all three were denied.
That same report records a comment from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which said 45 of 50 warranties it reviewed appeared to violate the provision. Take that as a commenter’s finding rather than a federal count. The pattern is the point: the label implies one thing and the statute says another.
Keeping an object working is usually the lower-impact choice and usually the cheaper one. Usually, not always. One category of product can flip the arithmetic, and three categories are the wrong used purchase no matter how good the item looks.
Repair first, and the federal rule behind it
The 1975 statute is the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, and its tie-in provision is narrow but useful. It bars a warrantor from conditioning a written or implied warranty on your use of an article or service identified by brand name, unless that article or service comes free under the warranty itself. It does not promise that a repair you attempt is invisible to a future claim. It says the condition cannot be set in advance, as a warranty term, that only the brand’s parts and technicians may touch the product.
The FTC’s May 2021 report, Nixing the Fix, is the best single federal document on why repair got harder. It sorts manufacturer practices into eight groups. Reordered by what a person runs into, they amount to three kinds of wall.
The first is physical: proprietary screws, glued enclosures and soldered components turn opening a case into a destructive act. The second is informational: companies withhold service manuals, diagnostic software and the tools that read fault codes, so the knowledge gap is manufactured rather than natural. The third is digital: software locks, firmware restrictions and license terms barring modification can stop a repair that is mechanically finished from ever working.
The commission weighed the reasons companies gave, including intellectual property, safety and cybersecurity. Its conclusion is unusually direct for a federal document: the Federal Trade Commission wrote that “there is scant evidence to support manufacturers’ justifications for repair restrictions.”
Two commissioners attached footnotes disputing part of it, and the recommendations bind nobody. It is a report, not a rule.
Four state repair laws, and what they leave out
State legislatures moved where Congress did not. Four laws were checked directly for this article, in their statutory text or official legislative record.
Minnesota requires a manufacturer to supply documentation, parts and tools to any independent repair provider or to the owner on fair and reasonable terms, software updates included. The statute is Minnesota Statutes section 325E.72, enacted in 2023, and it reaches equipment sold on or after July 1, 2021, with materials due within 60 days of a product’s first sale in the state.
New York has the Digital Fair Repair Act at General Business Law section 399-nn, applying to equipment first manufactured and first sold or used in the state on or after July 1, 2023. Its definition of fair and reasonable terms is the interesting part: documentation is generally to be free, with a charge allowed only for a printed copy, and tools are to come without unnecessary authorization steps.
Colorado passed House Bill 24-1121, signed on May 28, 2024 as Chapter 258 and effective January 1, 2026. It expands laws the state already had for agricultural equipment and powered wheelchairs. Withholding the required resources counts as a deceptive trade practice.
Oregon enacted Senate Bill 1596 in 2024 as Chapter 69, and it does something the others mostly do not. For consumer electronics first made and first sold in Oregon on or after January 1, 2025, it forbids parts pairing that blocks a working replacement part, degrades performance, or throws up a warning the owner cannot dismiss. Colorado adopted a similar restriction for equipment first sold there after January 1, 2026.
Parts pairing is the quiet reason many modern repairs fail. The device checks a serial number on the new component against a list the manufacturer controls. The part is identical, the installation is correct, and the software refuses it anyway.
Then there is what gets left out, because every one of these laws carries a long list of exclusions. Motor vehicles are out in all four, as are medical devices. Minnesota, Colorado and Oregon exclude video game consoles. New York excludes home appliances with embedded digital electronics and electric bicycles. Oregon excludes heating and cooling equipment, solar generation systems and, in a detail that shows how these bills get written, electric toothbrushes.
Vehicles sit outside because they have their own track. Massachusetts General Laws chapter 93K makes vehicle manufacturers sell owners and independent shops the same diagnostic and repair information dealers get, and for model year 2022 onward requires an open, standardized telematics platform an owner can reach through an app.
Bills move every session, so treat any list, this one included, as a snapshot. Your state attorney general’s consumer division can confirm what applies where you live.
What is realistically fixable right now
Strip out the policy and the answer is narrower than the enthusiasm suggests.
Things that repair well: furniture, bicycles, hand tools, lamps, small engines, and major appliances with a mechanical failure such as a pump, a belt, a hinge or a heating element. Parts are often standard, fasteners are visible, and a model number plus a parts diagram gets you most of the way.
Things that resist repair: anything with a glued-in battery, anything where the failed component is soldered to a board, and anything where one part costs most of a working secondhand unit. Phone screens and batteries are the exceptions, because volume built an aftermarket.
There is also a point where a reasonable person stops. Gas connections, mains wiring and sealed refrigeration systems belong to licensed and certified trades. On the last of those the rule is specific: EPA regulation at 40 CFR 82.161 requires certification for anyone whose work could reasonably be expected to affect the integrity of an appliance’s refrigerant circuit, exempting only apprentices under close and continual supervision by a certified technician. A video tutorial is not an exemption.
The exception: products that use energy while you own them
Here the simple rule breaks. For a product that burns energy every day you keep it, the impact of making a new one competes against the impact of running the old one, and the comparison does not always favor keeping.
The honest version is less dramatic than either side of the argument suggests. ENERGY STAR, the government efficiency labeling program run by EPA, states that an old refrigerator uses about 20 percent more energy than a certified model, that a unit over 15 years old could cost roughly $95 a year more to run, and that recycling it and buying a certified replacement saves around $150 across the new product’s 12-year life.
Sit with those numbers. A hundred and fifty dollars over twelve years is not a reason to throw out a working refrigerator. The case strengthens sharply with age, which is why ENERGY STAR’s replacement calculator makes you pick a vintage band, with separate options for units built before 1980, in the 1980s, in 1990 to 1992, and so on. A 1985 second refrigerator humming in a garage is a different proposition from a 2008 model in the kitchen.
Three variables move the crossover, which is why no single answer exists.
Age. Federal efficiency standards tightened repeatedly, so the gap between what you own and what you can buy depends mostly on the year yours was built.
How hard you use it. ENERGY STAR reports that the average American family runs about 300 wash loads a year and that heating water accounts for roughly 90 percent of a washing machine’s energy use. A full-size certified washer uses about 14 gallons a load against about 20 for a standard machine. Multiply either by 300 and the intensity of use, not the machine, is doing most of the work.
What electricity costs where you live. Default rates in ENERGY STAR’s calculator run from about $0.09 per kilowatt-hour in Washington and West Virginia to $0.38 in Hawaii, so an identical swap pays back roughly four times faster at the high end.
You can run this yourself. The FTC’s Energy Labeling Rule at 16 CFR part 305 requires covered appliances to carry an EnergyGuide label showing estimated annual energy use in kilowatt-hours and an estimated annual operating cost, set against a comparability range for similar models. Section 305.9 makes manufacturers post those labels on a public website, so you can usually look up a model you already own.
One boundary. That is an energy comparison. Making an appliance also consumes materials and emits carbon, and published life-cycle studies draw the boundary around that step differently, which is a real disagreement rather than a detail. For most heavily used appliances the running phase dominates, but for a lightly used machine the answer can invert.
Buying used without inheriting a problem
The supply side of secondhand is larger than the visible market. A 2023 study in Waste Management and Research surveyed households in Porto, Portugal and estimated that about 80 percent of household stocks of small devices such as phones and laptops sat unused, directly reusable or easily repairable. One European city, so read it as an indication rather than a US figure, but the habit will be familiar to anyone with a drawer.
Before money changes hands there is one check that costs nothing and that almost nobody does. CPSC publishes a searchable recall database at cpsc.gov/Recalls, where you can filter by product category, hazard and date, search by keyword, and download the whole dataset as a CSV file. The agency says the data updates weekly.
The law behind it explains who is responsible. Under 15 U.S.C. 2068(a)(2), it is unlawful to sell, offer for sale or distribute in commerce a product subject to a voluntary corrective action taken with the Commission where CPSC has notified the public, or where the seller knew or should have known of it. A resale shop selling a recalled item is breaking federal law. A neighbor at a yard sale is usually just unaware, which is why the check falls to you.
One complication, reported rather than warned about. A 2016 study in Environment International analyzed Dutch waste streams for banned brominated flame retardants, found high concentrations in some plastics bound for recycling, and estimated that about 19 percent of those compounds in the automotive sector would end up in secondhand parts. Reuse keeps material in service, and some older material carries chemistry that later rules restricted. Both are true.
Three categories where used is the wrong call
The reader correction for this whole subject fits in one line. It still works is a test for a toaster. It is not a test for a car seat or a crib.
Car seats
The regulator here is not CPSC. Child restraints fall under the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and its used-seat guidance turns on five things you have to confirm.
Four you can check in your hands: the labels showing model number and manufacture date are still attached, the seat is under no open recall, every part is present, and the instruction book came with it. Missing parts and manuals are often fixable, since the manufacturer can supply both, and a recall may be too, since some remedies are repairs.
The fifth defeats the transaction. NHTSA says a seat must never have been in a moderate to severe crash, and it defines a minor crash restrictively. All five of these have to be true at once: the vehicle drove away, the door nearest the seat was undamaged, nobody in the car was hurt, no airbag deployed, and the seat shows no visible damage. A stranger selling online cannot prove any of it, and a seller who wants the sale has no reason to raise it.
NHTSA publishes no universal expiry date. It says the manufacture date on the label is how you judge whether a seat is too old, which leaves useful life in the manufacturer’s hands rather than yours.
Cribs
Federal crib rules are stricter than most people realize, and they reach resale directly. The standard at 16 CFR part 1219 applies by its own terms to new and used full-size baby cribs. Compliance has been required for manufacture, sale, resale, lease or other placement in commerce since June 28, 2011, and for child care facilities and places of public accommodation since December 28, 2012.
CPSC’s 2010 final rule explains the reasoning. Of 147 fatalities the agency linked to full-size and undetermined-size cribs, 35 involved structural problems, and the rule states that more than half of those, 18 of 35, were tied to drop-side failures. Eliminating the traditional drop-side design was a central effect.
The rule also carries a nuance missed in both directions. CPSC said plainly that nothing in the law requires a consumer to replace a crib already in their own home. The prohibition runs against selling and supplying, which is why a hand-me-down crib built before 2011 is a legal problem for the person passing it on and a safety question for the person receiving it.
For scale, a 2017 study in Pediatrics analyzed two decades of US emergency department data and estimated about 1.39 million injuries involving nursery products among children under three between 1991 and 2011. Cribs and mattresses accounted for 18.6 percent. Four in five injuries came from the child’s own fall, and nearly half involved the head or neck.
Helmets
A helmet’s job is to be destroyed once. CPSC’s safety standard at 16 CFR part 1203 requires every bicycle helmet to carry a durable label warning that an impact may damage it beyond the point of protecting the head. The required wording goes further: CPSC specifies that a helmet which has sustained an impact “should be returned to the manufacturer for inspection, or be destroyed and replaced.” A used helmet comes with an invisible history. The shell can look flawless while the foam underneath has already done its work.
A fourth case with a different shape: old painted furniture
This one turns on a date. CPSC’s ban at 16 CFR part 1303 covers lead-containing paint and furniture bearing it, for products manufactured after February 27, 1978. The limit was 0.06 percent lead, and Congress cut it to 0.009 percent effective August 14, 2009.
So the dividing line for a painted dresser, chair or bed frame sits around 1978. Older pieces get used all the time, but stripping or sanding them is the step that turns bound paint into dust a child can inhale or swallow. If a child has been around chipping or peeling paint on old furniture or woodwork, ask a pediatrician about a blood lead test rather than reasoning it out. A test is the only way to know.
Durability is a buying decision, not a disposal decision
Almost everything above gets easier if the choice was made earlier. The question to ask in a store is whether it can be opened and fixed in the middle. Five questions, in rough order of how much they predict:
- Are replacement parts sold to the public, and at what price relative to the whole product? A pump at 8 percent of the machine’s price is a different future from one at 60 percent.
- Is a service manual or an exploded parts diagram available without an authorized account?
- Can the battery be replaced with ordinary tools, or is it glued in?
- Does the product need an app, a cloud account or a subscription to keep working, and what happens when that service ends?
- Does the seller offer a repair route at all, or only a replacement route?
None of this appears on a package. All of it can be answered in a few minutes with a model number, a parts-supplier search, and a look at whether a manual exists.
The two checks to make first
One habit beats all the others here, and it is a lookup. Before any used purchase for a child, put the model number from the label into CPSC’s recall database. It takes under a minute and it is the highest-value check in the subject.
Before replacing an appliance that still works, find the EnergyGuide kilowatt-hour figure for a comparable new model, find your electricity rate on your bill, and multiply. The answer will usually say to keep what you have a while longer. Occasionally, for something old and hard-working, it will say the opposite, and that is the case the usual advice gets wrong.
Keep exploring: personal care product footprint, sustainable packaging, climate change and health and workplace heat standard.
Sources
- Federal Trade Commission. “Nixing the Fix: An FTC Report to Congress on Repair Restrictions (May 2021).” ftc.gov
- Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. “15 U.S.C. 2302: Rules governing contents of warranties.” law.cornell.edu
- Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. “15 U.S.C. 2068: Prohibited acts.” law.cornell.edu
- Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. “Minnesota Statutes 325E.72: Digital Fair Repair.” revisor.mn.gov
- New York State Senate. “New York General Business Law Section 399-nn (Digital Fair Repair Act).” nysenate.gov
- Colorado General Assembly. “HB24-1121: Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment.” leg.colorado.gov
- Oregon State Legislature. “Senate Bill 1596 (2024 Regular Session), Enrolled.” olis.oregonlegislature.gov
- Massachusetts General Court. “General Laws Chapter 93K, Section 2: Access by owners of motor vehicles and by independent repair facilities.” malegislature.gov
- U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. “Recalls.” cpsc.gov
- U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. “Safe Sleep and Cribs Safety Education Center.” cpsc.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. “16 CFR Part 1219: Safety Standard for Full-Size Baby Cribs.” ecfr.gov
- U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (Federal Register). “Safety Standards for Full-Size Baby Cribs and Non-Full-Size Baby Cribs; Final Rule, 75 FR 81786.” federalregister.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. “16 CFR Part 1203: Safety Standard for Bicycle Helmets.” ecfr.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. “16 CFR Part 1303: Ban of Lead-Containing Paint and Certain Consumer Products Bearing Lead-Containing Paint.” ecfr.gov
- National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Used Car Seat Safety Checklist.” nhtsa.gov
- National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Car Seat Use After a Crash.” nhtsa.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. “16 CFR Part 305: Energy Labeling Rule.” ecfr.gov
- Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. “40 CFR 82.161: Technician certification.” ecfr.gov
- ENERGY STAR (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency). “Refrigerators.” energystar.gov
- ENERGY STAR (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency). “Flip Your Fridge Calculator.” energystar.gov
- ENERGY STAR (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency). “Clothes Washers.” energystar.gov
- U.S. Department of Energy. “Appliance and Equipment Standards Program.” energy.gov
- PubMed. “Gaw CE, Chounthirath T, Smith GA. “Nursery Product-Related Injuries Treated in United States Emergency Departments.” Pediatrics, 2017. PubMed. DOI: 10.1542/peds.2016-2503.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Leslie HA, et al. “Propelling plastics into the circular economy: weeding out the toxics first.” Environment International, 2016. PubMed. DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2016.05.012.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Espino Penilla M, et al. “Drivers and barriers to achieve a circular economy of small-IT: Case study from the city of Porto.” Waste Management & Research, 2023. PubMed. DOI: 10.1177/0734242X21994917.” doi.org