Send six fields and nothing more: product type, brand, estimated age, what happened during ordinary use, what has been tried since, and the assessment you want. Those are the fields the Open Repair Alliance asks community repair groups to record, and the dataset built from them held 441,068 repair attempts from 31,436 events run by 1,482 groups in 32 countries at its October 2025 release. The condition that changes the note is who you are asking: Repair Café's own FAQ says the foundation cannot judge whether a given item can be mended and sends that question to the local organisers.

The six fields a repair dataset is built from

The Open Repair Data Standard splits a record into three groups. Session data is the group's name and the event date. Product data is the type of product, the brand and the estimated age or year of manufacture. Repair data is the problem in as much detail as possible, the repair status, and the barrier if the repair was not completed. The three repair statuses are the useful part for an enquiry: repaired, repairable but not fixed on the day, or end of life.

Nothing in that list requires opening anything. Age can be estimated. The brand is on the plate or the base. The problem field asks what the product did, not which component failed, and the standard keeps the diagnosis in a separate field from the observation for exactly that reason.

Say what happened, not what failed

A repairer can work with "it stopped mid-cycle on Tuesday and has not been switched on since". A repairer cannot do much with "the motor has gone", because that sentence has already closed off the checks that come before the motor. If a professional has given a diagnosis, name who gave it and when, and keep it in its own line rather than folding it into the description.

Leave the fault where it is. Reproducing a fault to describe it better risks turning an intermittent problem into a permanent one, and taking a cover off changes what a repairer sees when the item arrives. A photograph of the outside is usually enough; leave serial numbers, screens showing personal information and paperwork out of it, and ask through the service's own contact channel what else they need.

Example: a seven-year-old coffee maker

An example, filled in against the real dataset. Coffee makers are among the most-logged products at community repair events, with 18,116 records at the October 2025 release, and the Open Repair Alliance's 2024 report puts their average age at seven years, alongside laptops and printers. So the note reads: product type, coffee maker; brand, as printed on the base; age, about seven years; problem, it stopped part-way through a normal brew and has not been switched on since; repair history, none known; what is wanted, an assessment before any part is ordered.

Give each person a field. The owner supplies the age, the history and what happened, because nobody else knows those. The companion reads the plate, writes the note and checks that no sentence in it is a guess wearing a fact's clothes.

What the barriers data says to ask about next

The same report explains why a well-written note still ends in a wait. Across the dataset, 53% of attempts ended in a repair and 25% ended with the product judged end of life. Of the repairs that were not completed, the Open Repair Alliance found the spare part unavailable in 25% of cases, too expensive in 18%, the product impossible to open in 16%, and the repair information missing in 12%. The 2025 release puts the overall repair rate for electrical and electronic items at 54%, against 83% for non-electrical items such as textiles and bicycles.

So the enquiry carries two more questions. Is the part available, and at what price? And is there an assessment fee separate from the repair price? Repair Café's FAQ notes that its cafés stock only small items such as switches, plugs, wire, thread and darning wool, and that a repair needing anything else usually means advice on what to buy and a return visit, which is worth knowing before a Saturday is set aside for it.

Read the reply together and separate three things: a possibility, a confirmed diagnosis and a price. "They can look at it on Thursday" is not "they will repair it for that price". A written summary of the reply is what makes the same description reusable with a second service, and it feeds straight into a first visit to a repair café with someone new. If the answer comes back as end of life, the next question is not automatically a new model, because keeping a device longer is not one simple number, and the wording on the replacement's box is worth reading carefully, since repairable, reusable and recyclable are different promises.

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