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Appliance Parts Repair Rules

It is rare when car owners fail to heed the warning signs from their cars when noises start. So why is it that homeowners do not heed warning signs from their household appliances and replace parts when there are warning signs?

Appliance examples such as when your refrigerator door seal starts to come loose, when your oven lets out heat due to a cracked glass pane, or a washer-dryer set up starts to under-perform, leaving you with wet clothes.

Maybe appliance owners need some direction and some guidelines to get the job done. In the handbook of repairing your household appliances with appliance parts, there are key tips that our team can pass along to homeowners.

- Disconnect all electric power and gas supply connections to your appliances before attempting any repairs. It’s important to heed the rule of safety if you’re trying to fix some burnt out parts that aren’t working on major appliances, like washers-dryers, air conditioners and gas heaters. Make sure to disconnect first before you start any appliance diagnosis.

- Determine what you’re capable of fixing on your own with your tools. A good rule of thumb for checking if you can do the repairs yourself is to see if the parts of an appliance are held together with screws, bolts, plugs, and other take-apart fasteners. If they are, you can probably make the repairs yourself. If you see that the parts you need to meddle with are joined together with rivets or welds, then it’s best to punt this one over to a professional service operators for the appliance.

- Do the work yourself and save money. Generally, broken or worn appliance parts can be replaced more quickly than it would be going to a professional service firm. Seek out the model number and find an appliance parts dealer online for the right part, which is usually bought at a fraction of what the service firm might charge. Nine times out of ten, it’s okay to use a similar part for your appliance if fits into space from the previous part. Just remember to check manufacturer’s installation guidelines.

Other useful tips for attempting your own appliance parts repair includes:

- Check for blown fuses for your electrical grids on your major appliances, especially for 220-240-volt appliances like ranges and air conditioners.

- Double check to see that all existing parts that are supposed to work are working. By process of eliminating certain parts, you can see which part is in need of repair. To determine whether an outlet or power cord is working is working, use a voltage tester to test it.

- Always check the reset buttons on outlet switches before attempting any appliance repairs. Sometimes the problem is not the appliance, but a blown outlet switch. Push the reset buttons to restore power to appliances such as washers, dryers, and ranges.

When you are looking for appliance parts for refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, ranges, dishwashers, and ice machines, contact Appliance Parts Company. It’s one of the top online sources for appliance repair parts needs. Check the web page for an affordable part for your malfunctioning appliance.

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Basics of Non-Compete Agreements

In today’s economy, it is common for employees to leave their employers and start their own companies. Whether it is frustration with corporate America or a desire to chase their ultimate dreams, employees who become entrepreneurs can threaten an employer’s competitive advantage. This can be especially problematic when former employees compete against their employers, as a number of legal protections that restrict an employer’s ability to prevent former employees from competing against them.

Essentially, restrictive covenants, generally known as non-compete agreements, have historically been viewed as unfair restraints on trade. Our free market economy favors competition, and courts are more inclined to protect an individual’s right to earn a living. Nevertheless, unfair competition does in fact occur, and employers can take steps to protect themselves against unauthorized use of confidential information.

Employment Agreements and Non Competes

Employers can protect their competitive status if their non-compete (and non-solicitation) agreements are:

Reasonable in time and geographic scope – The restriction cannot be so long that an employee would be out of work for a significant amount of time (e.g. more than six months). While an employer may protect a certain region of established clients, (depending on the type of job), the covenant must not be one that forces an employee to move to another state simply to work for another employer.

Necessary to enforce a legitimate business interest – The non-compete can protect business interests such as confidential information, substantial relationships with existing clientele, and trade secrets. As such, it can prevent former employees from intentionally interfering with the company’s business relationships, and it can include restrictions on hiring current employees for a certain period of time after leaving the company.

No greater than necessary to protect the legitimate business interest. – The non-compete must not punish an employee simply for leaving to work for another employer. Bonuses and commissions earned before the employee’s departure cannot be withheld, and the employer cannot thwart a former employee’s move to another job.

Indeed, protecting confidential information is important. As such, employers may have each employee execute a proprietary information agreement, in which they agree that employees:
- May not use or disclose company confidential information or trade secrets while they work they for the company or after they leave;
- Must return all company property upon their separation;
- Assign all rights and interest in any intellectual property their create or develop to the company while employed by the company; and
- Can only use company resources (e.g., computers, Internet and other property) for the work they do for the company and not for any other purpose.

If you have questions about protecting proprietary information or establishing non-compete agreements, an experienced employment law attorney can advise you.

Article provided by Watkins Firm, A Professional Corporation
Visit us at www.watkinsfirm.com

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Make Your Global Market Solutions Fluent

The world’s market boundaries are blurring, many new and under-developed markets are becoming available to companies through the increasing sophistication of technology. How do you spread a consistent message across multiple markets, ensure that intended instructions and messages connect with your desired audience, and effectively release products in unfamiliar markets? Localization completes the implementation of a company’s top-line international market strategy. But localization is a highly collaborative process driven by different groups of experts from around the world. How do you integrate these experts with a company’s product development team?

Furthermore, up to 50% of translation errors are terminology-related. A huge part of terminology work is also ensuring the consistency of terms used in the source content. The issues causing inconsistency are the same – multiple people working on content about the same feature without proper communication; or different views on the terminology because of how their department uses it. How do you bring your different departments together to find a single, agreeable term?

Imagine you have a new mechanical product in development for an oil rig, one that you need to launch not only nationally but also overseas. You need engineering diagram, technical specifics, and a marketing platform compiled and then translated. The marketing team is based in New York; the engineers are in San Francisco; the technical writers are in Houston; and your local operators are spread across the globe. You could have a weekly phone conference to decide what terminology to use, but you are on a deadline, and how many weeks will it take for every term to be reviewed?

What if you create a centralized – online discussion for each term where each department could give its approval or concerns or even add a new term within a time window? When that time is done a decision is made to use a specific term and sent to local translators with technical expertise along with a definition, pictures, and even videos. Then translation is sent to be reviewed by your local operators and sales representatives ensuring a translation that is both understandable and retains your company’s original ideas. Finally, it all comes back to you for final approval without you having to chase down colleagues to ensure they know what tasks they should be doing because you have access to a self-running workflow tool.

Although there are a number of tools on the market for storing terms and translations, it’s crucial the content is accessible from anywhere via the web. One such tool is TermWiki Pro where you can store all terms – both source and target in 100+ languages – in a centralized, online location. A self-running workflow tool supports your terms from source review to second translation review. Once finalized, they can be searched for online, or be exported for use in different authoring and translation tools. TermWiki Pro is also special in keeping logs of all changes and comments, no matter how minor. This ensures you can keep up to date on the changes, avoid mistakes, and also have a paper trail for regulatory purposes.

In the fast paced, ever shifting economies companies need an efficient, flexible, and accessible terminology management resource. With TermWiki Pro you are able to manage your product’s source documentation; first, before it is translated creating a smooth integration from one market to the next while retaining the essential concept.

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