The library that lends drills

Most people who own an electric drill use it for about fifteen minutes in its entire life. The rest of the time it sits in a cupboard, losing value and taking up space. The same is true of wallpaper steamers, carpet cleaners, tile cutters and sewing machines. They are expensive to buy, awkward to store, and needed perhaps twice a year.

A tool library works on the obvious answer to this. Members pay a small annual fee and may then borrow equipment in the same way they would borrow a book. A typical collection holds several hundred items, from hand tools worth very little to pressure washers worth several hundred pounds. Borrowing periods are short, usually three days to a week, because demand for the popular items is high and the whole point is that each tool should be in use rather than in storage.

The idea is older than it sounds. The first collections of this kind opened in the 1970s, usually attached to public libraries or community centres, and most of them closed again within a decade. Staffing was the problem: tools come back dirty, blunt or broken, and somebody has to check, clean and repair them. What has changed is not the idea but the cost of running it. Online booking removes most of the counter work, and volunteers who enjoy repairing things have proved much easier to recruit than paid staff were.

Members tend to join for the money and stay for something else. Surveys run by several of these libraries report that the saving is what brings people through the door, but that what they mention afterwards is advice: somebody at the desk who knows which blade to use, and who will show them how. A tool library, in other words, turns out to be a place where skills are lent along with the equipment, and that is harder for a shop to copy than low prices.