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In order to maintain professional standards and maintain the quality of our repairs in the highly technical IT sector we regretfully have had to increase our labour rates.
This applies to computers, laptops, and all other IT equipment.
We charge a minimum fee followed by ten minute blocks of labour.
The hourly rate that we charge is still competitive compared to the industry average.
Ecotech Services approached Piko Wholefoods in 2013 to test the market for the recycling of small batteries. Over the past twelve years a large quantity of batteries were recycled through Pikos but the demand for the services has now dropped off due to subsidised schemes offering free battery recycling for small quantities from households.
In the intervening years Ecotech Services has become a major player in the New Zealand battery recycling market with a huge tonnage accepted from individuals and businesses.
We have also set up the first supermarket-based battery recycling scheme.
We picked up a second hand Sunkko 737G+ battery spot welder to do some in-house battery repacking work. I decided that instead of having a fixed mains power cord a chassis mounting IEC C14 socket would be a good idea. It makes it easier to store and to move around. And we have plenty of the matching mains cables with the C13 plug.
After fitting the C14 socket I did an electrical safety test. It failed on earth continuity because there was 2-3 ohms resistance. It did not take long to figure out the problem. The chassis earth goes to a screw holding one of the feet and there is no bare metal for the crimp connector to make contact with the chassis! Also, the crimp connector has been crimped incorrectly.
A separate screw, washers, and nuts on some bare metal fixed the problem.
This case is prime example of cheap, poor quality equipment purchased by individuals and shipped to New Zealand directly from overseas suppliers. If this item was sold by a New Zealand company and if a vigilant individual or organisation became aware of the issue it would be subject to a recall.
I don’t recommend buying any mains powered equipment from overseas unless it has been declared to be compliant with New Zealand regulations.
We are pleased to supply some props at no charge for the Elmwood Players stage play version of Popcorn, based on Ben Elton’s 1996 novel of the same name.
We were fortunate in being able to supply an older television and video camera that will be sure to “set the scene”.
Today is the end of National Volunteer Week 2025.
Ecotech Services would like to thank all of our past and present volunteers for the work that they have done. Our volunteers mainly carry out dismantling of ewaste which cannot be done by paid staff.
The work done by the volunteers allows the company to recycle a larger quantity of ewaste than what would otherwise not be able to be done. This means the impact of ewaste on the environment is reduced.
This is today’s egregious failure of cheap and poor quality goods, in the case a Digitor A9734 mini stereo system.
It came in for recycling. When tested on the bench it drew a few watts but there was no power indication. I took it apart and look what I found!
The loose wire must have been only just hanging on underneath the blob of solder where it should have been. I soldered it back on and soldered it properly. It then burst into life on a radio station. The volume control was scratchy and one speaker was giving intermittent output. I spent a LOOONG time trying to fix it by inspection and by soldering but as the hours (ok tens of minutes) ticked by the fault got progressively worse. It was awful to fault trace. I eventually gave up and went home.
The next morning I thought I would give the tape and CD player a test. The tape player chewed up a good tape and the CD player wouldn’t spin up the CD.
So I grabbed the thing by its cables and frustratingly threw it into our dismantling department!
We are proud suppliers of New Zealand based services. We are locally owned and support local businesses as much as we can.
Buying New Zealand goods and services is good for the environment and good for our economy.
We get a huge amount of spam emails even though we have spam filters and often add entries into an extensive blacklist. Recently we have been getting spam from .click addresses.
Given that they are all promotional spam we have decided to block the complete .click gTLD. They are sold for as low as $1.80 making them attractive to spammers.
The .click gTLD was launched in 2014 but they only began to appear in our email inboxes from this year.
We order parts from all over New Zealand and overseas to do our repairs and refurbishments. Some of the companies that we deal with just send the stuff and assume that we will get it. And I am more than happy with that. Other companies send us a whole stack of automated emails telling us the progress of the shipment.
We ordered some electrical switches from Mitre 10. (Interestingly they are cheaper to buy from Mitre 10 than from our electrical wholesaler. But that is a story for another day.) We got SIX emails about the parcel from three different sources!
We don’t need ANY emails about the parcel delivery! We will just assume it will turn up and if it doesn’t we will then look up the tracking information. It is bad enough that our email inboxes are flooded with spam and scam messages!
