Are you a hoarder?

[RoGeorge]

About saving EE scrap, stocking jellybean parts, books, equipment, tools and such.
Do you ever think about yourself that maybe you went overboard with your lab? 

[nctnico]

You missed one option: recovering hoarder

[themadhippy]

im in treatment.

[RoGeorge]

Added poll option

[schmitt trigger]

I was until a close friend of mine who hoarded old paraphernalia died suddenly from a stroke. His grieving widow was burdened, among a dozen other priorities, of disposing of a basement full of stuff. Neither his grown up children nor his closest friends knew what to do with 90% of what had been hoarded, and a state sale didn’t help much either. Most ended on the trash.

As neither of my children likes electronics, I have started disposing of stuff that I won’t ever use again, like a boxful of TTL chips. And no longer salivate over surplus sales.

[Brumby]

For those who are drawn to this thread .... take a look at the *TEA Glossary (scroll down a bit).   

.... then tell us how well you identified with what you saw there.   



*TEA - Test Equipment Anonymous

[Brumby]

PS   I'm saying nothing. 

[coppice]

Can you get through your front door, and work your way to the toilet and your bed? If yes, you aren't a very good hoarder.

[RoGeorge]

Well, added a "something else" category to the poll 

[globoy]

I'm with schmitt trigger.  I had to deal with my father's estate and I know my partner and children won't know what to do with my lab so I now have a yearly purge with the goal that every year more goes out than comes in.  I have to say it always feels good after the purge!

[madires]

A few years ago an old friend passed away, much too early. I helped to clean out his hobby related stuff and we gave several boxes full of useful parts and devices to a local repair café. They happily took everything. The junk went to e-waste and more valuable devices were sold. Of course, I also took some things.

[T3sl4co1l]

No.

I have a fair number of things laying around (about 2000 unique items actively cataloged, though to varying degree of accuracy, mainly in terms of being lazy updating the quantity when I fetch some parts..), but no mass quantities of anything, and just a few bits of junk/salvage that I've mostly picked over already.

I can see where an ordinary person might consider that a lot, but the nature of electronics is to need a lot of little things.  I have like three reels of anything, and those are just incidental; most are singles to hundreds, cut tape or the like, and things I use regularly in breadboarding and prototyping.  Most components fit into a couple of drawers, boxes and organizers, and the rarely used stuff sits in a couple of boxes in the basement.  Pretty sure everything I have would fit in a standard storage locker, and most of that will be furniture.

Tim

[Zeyneb]

I've a lot of unfinished DIY projects. Not really EE, but more car repairs and stuff to do in the house. Some are in the way before I can complete the next. All the stuff will be used in the end. I would like to do a very good job of each project, so that is overwhelming and also lead to procrastination.

[artag]

You missed one option: recovering hoarder

There's a reason why that option isn't needed.

[coppice]

You missed one option: recovering hoarder

Recovering from hoarding, or recovering stuff to hoard? The latter is an interesting class of hoarder, stripping everything down to a collection of components they will one day reuse for exciting new projects. The snag is they are always too busy stripping stuff down to ever start those new projects.

[Smokey]

Funny thing is most people you would accuse of hoarding have boxes of old newspapers, or thrift store clothes, or little elephant figurines.  The sum total actual market value of all that stuff is about $0.00. 

If I consider my test equipment stash a "hoard", then someone that had to deal with that if I died suddenly would make out well if they had an eBay account.  I think that sufficiently offsets the box of old motherboards and other random circuit boards and components under the bench.  :⁠-⁠)

PS.  As the son of an actual hoarder of the newspaper and magazine variety, my advice to anyone looking at having to deal with that at some point is.....  Just because someone else applied value to all that stuff does not mean that inherited value must be transferred to you.  Try to accept that before you have to deal with it.  Trying to process that in the moment when you are waist deep in boxes is harder to do.

[coppice]

Funny thing is most people you would accuse of hoarding have boxes of old newspapers, or thrift store clothes, or little elephant figurines.  The sum total actual market value of all that stuff is about $0.00.

Wifey's uncle was a hoarder. When we had to taken action, and cleared out his apartment, there was about $20k in a bundle amongst those old newspapers and other junk. We had no idea it was there, and it almost got thrown out.

[Postal2]

I threw away the vacuum tubes. I wanted to give them away, but they offered to send them by mail. I left a couple of sets for a device that I don't know what to call (in the photo). I had a lot of vacuum tubes.

I used this device to very precisely tune the recording channel of video recorders.