Okay, so this is not going to be 100% effective but if you are Deaf or hard of hearing and your car or dishwasher or other machine starts acting weird, use your phone to make a video of it.
Rocker-knock, which is one of the sounds I was describing, changes the behavior of your car only minimally so it is very hard to notice if, say, you are driving over rough roads or in stop-and-go traffic, and it typically isn’t obvious at speed either. What you can do to avoid that very specific issue is to set a regular schedule for yourself to check your oil - usually rocker knock is a symptom of low oil or other low fluids. Realistically, everyone should be doing this no less than once a month anyway, but if you can’t hear rocker knock it’s especially important to set up a maintenance schedule for checking fluids and testing the battery of your car, etc.
On some appliances, you will be able to feel a change that other people would notice as a sound first. You may want to make a point of getting to know what various appliances feel like (most things like your fridge compressor or various cycles of your dishwasher will have regular patterns and you may be able to feel it if the frequency changes).
But, you absolutely can take a video of an appliance or a car acting weird, upload it to youtube, and then go to a car/appliance forum or a hearing friend and ask “hey, I can’t tell - is this making a weird sound?” or give the video to a mechanic or repair technician.
This is actually something I tell to my computer customers too - a lot of customers have trouble describing the issues they’re having, so I ask them to take a photo or a video of their issues and the process they’re working on to help with diagnostics.
If your car is accelerating oddly or stopping oddly, take a recording. If it feels like there’s something whacking around in your dishwasher, take a recording.
You may have to do more trial and error to figure out what’s going wrong with an appliance if you can’t use sound to start troubleshooting, but you can try things like running an empty cycle on your dishwasher and opening it periodically to note if anything is unusual (do this with your major appliances before anything breaks down; run a wash cycle in your washer, run an empty dryer).
One thing that everyone can do is get an infrared thermometer gun (the hardware type, not the body temp type) and familiarize themselves with what normal temperatures are in their devices. You can make a chart for yourself and list the temps you expect for a normal dishwasher cycle, and then if there’s a problem with your dishwasher you can open it at various stages and compare; same with your washer, dryer, fridge, and engine.
You may also want to use a decibel-reading app or tool to take a baseline measurement of your car’s sound level while it’s operating normally, and then use the same decibel-reading device to check if there are changes if your car feels like it’s driving funny. If your comparison reading is substantially different, especially if it is substantially different with a pattern, or with big, significant changes from baseline, but you don’t otherwise notice things driving too badly, you may need to take a recording and ask someone to see if they can help identify the sound.
The primary thing I’m thinking of here is brakes - brakes get bad gradually so you may not notice a change in how your car is driving, and there’s not really a regular schedule for checking brake pads or drums because wear is so dependent on your driving patterns, so the way a lot of people first notice that their brakes are going bad is the sound the worn brakes make.
But yeah, a lot of troubleshooting is getting familiar with the device during normal operation and then comparing diversions from the norm.
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
