Help! My Thing is broken

It's always best to get in touch with us ASAP so we can troubleshoot before you return, as we can’t help with a problem we don’t know about!

What happens if a Thing breaks during my borrow?

Unfortunately our Things sometimes do misbehave - it's just part and parcel of being borrowed by lots of people. We try to offset this as much as possible by providing the best possible quality Things we can get our hands on, and having a Thing Technician for each location who cleans, maintains and fixes Things between borrows.

We'll do our very best to help you and we know that it's frustrating but ask for your patience and co-operation. The earlier you tell us about a problem, the more we can help you.

Our objective is fear-free borrowing. We know damages happen, and that 99% of the time these aren’t intentional. We simply ask that borrowers are honest about what’s happened.

If something breaks or stops working, follow these simple steps:

• Check the Borrower Guide for your Thing - these can be found on our website under the details for the Thing that you have borrowed, via the QR code on the Thing's label, or linked in your confirmation email:

• Contact us through our Live Chat

  Click on the question mark in the bottom right hand corner to send our Borrower Support team a message. We'll respond as soon as we can. Please remember to be kind and patient - we’re a small team and always doing the best that we can to help!

Handling compensation for a broken Thing

Once you've reported a Thing isn't working and ruled out any troubleshooting with our Borrower Support team, we'll create a maintenance order for our Thing Technicians to confirm the issue during their next shift.

As soon as a Thing Technician has confirmed that a Thing is broken, we'll be able to issue you a refund. If it turns out the Thing isn't broken but wasn't working due to user error, we're not obligated to refund the borrow, but we might credit your Library of Things account so you can re-book and try again.

If a Thing Technician isn't able to confirm the issue within seven days of the report, then we'll refund the borrow.

Got a question we haven't answered here?

• Check out these articles for more advice:
  • • • • • • Help! I'm having problems at the kiosk
            • How can I get in touch?
            • Do you run DIY workshops or repair classes?