The letters were written with the help of a trade group called the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM). All three letters are similar but include slightly different wording and examples in parts. The letters ask lawmakers to “withdraw” a bill that would protect and expand the ability for consumers and independent repair professionals to repair everything from iPhones to robot vacuums, electric shavers, toasters, and tractors. Here are links to the Wahl , Dyson , and LG letters .

The manufacturers of your appliances do not want you to be able to fix them yourself. Last week, at least three major appliance manufacturers—Dyson, LG, and Wahl—sent letters to Illinois lawmakers opposing “fair repair” legislation in that state.

Companies such as Apple and John Deere have fought vehemently against such legislation in several states, but the letters, sent to bill sponsor David Harris and six other lawmakers and obtained by Motherboard, show that other companies are fighting against right to repair as well.

The bill ( HB 4747 ) would require electronics manufacturers to sell replacement parts and tools, to allow independent repair professionals and consumers to bypass software locks that are strictly put in place to prevent “unauthorized” repair, and would require manufacturers to make available the same repair diagnostic tools and diagrams to the general public that it makes available to authorized repair professionals. Similar legislation has been proposed in 17 other states , though Illinois has advanced it the furthest so far.

“If manufacturers make products that require a graduate engineer to repair, I’ll suggest they have a huge safety problem,” she said. “Either the product is safe to repair by their own techs, or its unsafe—in which case their own people will get hurt. Amazing lack of logic.”

Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director for Repair.org, a coalition of independent repair companies that is pushing for this legislation, said that the only things holding back repair are artificial software locks and lack of access to parts, not technical know-how. Many independent repair people are highly skilled, and many consumers are able to perform repairs if they have guides available to them.

Dyson declined to comment on the record and Wahl did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

The Dyson and LG letters suggest that opening their products up to third-party repair could put consumers in imminent danger from independent repair people who they posit could enter your home to fix an appliance and instead harm and hack you

“It’s not like the old days where you can go in and change a pulley or belt in a washing machine,” John Taylor, senior vice president of government relations at LG, who wrote the company’s version of the letter, told me on the phone. “These are highly technical machines—you practically need an engineering degree to be able to service it, with the circuit boards and circuitry and software updates. That may be an overstatement, but a lot of them are technicians who have been trained through our program or vocational schools.”

Just as smartphones, tractors, and laptops have become more difficult to repair thanks to software locks, proprietary tools and parts, and encrypted firmware available only to “authorized” repair professionals, so too have vacuums, refrigerators, toasters, and coffee makers, many of which have digital rights management (DRM) software that prevents the average consumer from performing basic repairs. LG sells a wide range of products including smartphones, refrigerators, and TVs; Dyson is best-known for selling vacuum cleaners; and Wahl sells hair clippers and electric shavers.

The truth is, it’s iPhones, it’s e-waste, it’s tractors—the issues at play cut across all electronics, big and small. Right to repair legislation is being pushed not by an iPhone repair company but by Gordon-Byrne’s organization, which represents hundreds of independent repair companies across sectors. The legislation is also supported by lobbying groups like the American Farm Bureau and hospital interests in several states and nonprofit groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the US Public Interest Research Group.

“The purpose and objective of the bill is a company wants to fix more iPhones,” he said. “It has nothing to do with any of the things you’ve been saying … in California they tried to couch it as e-waste issue. In Nebraska, it was tractors. In Illinois, it’s iPhones. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Over the past several years, Motherboard has reported extensively on the right to repair debate. The articles and documentaries we publish on the topic are generally popular, and I regularly get emails and tweets from people who say they see the slow creep of DRM from music, movies, and computer programs to smartphones, tractors, home appliances, and medical equipment to be a fundamental shift in the concept of ownership . I laid out this narrative to Kevin Messner, a top lobbyist for AHAM, who said that the argument may make sense for iPhones, but that “for home appliances, it’s not sympathetic at all.”

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, which teaches people how to fix their own things and is a proponent of right to repair legislation, told me that “LG’s claim that their products are too sophisticated for consumers to repair is condescending and misinformed. Hundreds of thousands of LG’s customers use iFixit to repair their products every year with positive results.”

Gordon-Byrne said that companies “happily claim” that only their authorized employees are safe to let into your home.

Wahl—which sells hair clippers and shavers—suggests that a botched repair could burn your house down: “When product repairs are not performed correctly, they can cause property damage by fires, as you have seen from laptops and hover boards in the news.”

Taylor told me that “if someone slips through and doesn’t have a background check, it becomes a big issue. I don’t think everyone has a handyman [they trust] next door.”

“The nature of appliance repairs requires repair technicians to enter the homes of consumers,” the Dyson letter says under a heading called Consumer Safety. “Manufacturers who certify technicians may require extensive background checks as well as drug screening, as well as previously mentioned technical and safety training. If manufacturers are required to make their technical information public knowledge, they no longer have the ability to address whether the technicians who are entering the homes of consumers have completed the necessary technical, safety, and security checks.”

The letters rely in part on some flimsy arguments: The Dyson and LG letters, for instance, suggest that opening their products up to third-party repair could put consumers in imminent danger from independent repair people who they posit could enter your home to fix an appliance and instead harm and hack you.

“Despite you having decided whom to invite and had the opportunity to vet their qualifications through recommendations, ratings websites, and the [Better Business Bureau],” she added. “By their logic, appliance repair techs are roaming the streets knocking on doors like driveway sealing companies.”

I told AHAM’s Messner that I did not think the manufacturers’ concerns were credible. It seems farfetched that making appliance diagnostic information available to the general public would somehow lead to an increase in sham repair people robbing houses and harming people.

“There are true safety issues—who knows who’s coming into someone’s home,” Messner said. “Not all repairmen are disreputable by any means but there are examples and true stories where you might have a mom with her kid at home and she goes on the internet to find a washing machine repairman and they take a few hundred dollars cash and they don’t leave the lid locked on during the spin cycle,” which can be dangerous, he added.

"I'd hardly say it's a monopoly ... for those who want to get into the service business, we’d encourage them to participate with the major brands and become part of the process."

AHAM then sent me two articles—one in which a woman called the wrong number for an actual repair company and was swindled out of $420 by random people, and another from 2013 published on a site called Ezine Articles in which a competent repair person fixed a washing machine repaired by someone who messed something up without incident. It’s worth emphasizing that a small number of isolated and misrepresented incidents are being used to kill legislation that has the potential to make repair safer for everyone—fixing an appliance with a repair guide and diagnostic information is inherently safer than poking and prodding around devices blind: “This legislation will improve consumer safety by providing owners with the same safe procedures for repairing products that authorized service technicians are using,” Wiens said.