Fair enough, and a good point. I thought you were asking me specifically, sometimes I forget people may be asking questions for their own benefit, or for the benefit of others reading the forum.
To be honest I'm not sure how much time I've put into it. Could be as much as 8 hours by now. A lot of that was learning by doing, getting the tools I needed (or had to get cause I broke out that hammer when I shouldn't have). How long this will take will vary person to person based on their skills and what tools they have on hand.
And there's another part to the time thing. That's time it'll take the
next time you do it. If you are a DIY sort of person, chances are you'll do something like this again. For example, I plan on swapping the bearings on the pump that this pump is replacing. Then that pump will become a spare that will sit downstairs until I need it. I suspect that I will be able to change the bearings in that other pump in approximately two hours, give or take a little bit. And if I ever need to change bearings on a pool pump in the future, I've got the basics down.
This obviously doesn't cover the time required to swap the pump in and out, but of course you'd either have to do that yourself if you bought a whole new pump anyway, or you'd have to hire a service guy to do it (yet another tradeoff).
Perhaps. I think it's much more analogous to maintaining your daily driver though, as a classic car usually requires a lot of custom fabrication or extremely expensive spare parts. On your daily driver though parts are wildly and cheaply available. You can pay someone swap parts, or buy parts and do it yourself. Whether or not that's worth it is up to the individual person of course, but eventually you build up a set of tools, skills, and knowledge and the time required goes down. And a lot of this skills and knowledge helps you get a jump start on fixing other things. So there's an additive value to the value of doing stuff yourself that's really hard to calculate.
For example, I can probably swap the average pair of brake pads and rotors in a few hours. That's what, $300-$400 if you take it to a shop? But it's like $100-$150 in parts for decent parts. So call that $225 in savings for four hours of work. From a purely financial aspect, that's like I paid myself $56/hr. That's definitely more than I get paid at work, so it's completely worth it. But was the
first time worth it? Probably not. What about somebody who has no tools? Most likely no. Again though it's an additive process, you slowly build up tools that you later don't need to buy, you build up skills and knowledge that lets you do stuff faster in the future even if you've never done that particular thing before, and so forth.
Anyway, off to the Home Depot. Today's project is swapping out my outdoor spigot that's broke and won't turn off. I've been turning it off with the inside shutoff valve, but that get really annoying when I need to top up my spa every couple weeks. I get to learn how to solder copper pipe today.
