Repair or replace? How we actually make the call

Everyone wants a rule. "Don't repair anything over ten years old", or "never spend more than half the replacement price". Both are wrong often enough to cost people money.

The honest version is that it depends on which part failed, and a bit on which brand it is. Here's how we think about it on the doorstep.

The two questions that matter

What has actually failed, and is it a wear part or a structural one?

Wear parts — pumps, elements, thermostats, seals, belts, fan motors, door locks — are what appliances are designed to have replaced. They're usually cheap, usually available, and replacing one on a sound machine buys years.

Structural failures are different. Sealed tub bearings, a corroded cabinet, a cracked drum, a failed sealed refrigeration system. These are the parts the machine was built around, and getting to them means dismantling most of it.

How much life is left in everything else?

A pump on a four-year-old machine is a no-brainer. The same pump on a fifteen-year-old machine that's also getting noisy and has a perished seal is money spent on something that will be back.

Where we say don't bother

There's a short list, and we'd rather say it before you've paid for an assessment than after:

• Sealed-tub bearing failure on a front loader past about eight years. On a lot of modern machines the outer tub is a sealed plastic assembly, so the repair is a whole tub rather than two bearings. It routinely lands within coo-ee of a new machine.
• A failed main control board on a budget machine. Boards are expensive relative to what the machine cost, and on the cheaper brands the board is often the most expensive part in it.
• A sealed-system refrigeration fault on a fridge over about eight years. Gas leaks and dying compressors are proper work, and the economics rarely stack up.
• Anything where the cabinet or drum has corroded through. We see this in unventilated laundries near the water. Once the structure has gone, nothing bolted to it is worth saving.

Where the repair almost always wins

• Ovens. Thermostats, sensors, elements, fan motors and door seals are all cheap and available, and oven cavities last decades. A twenty-year-old wall oven with a dead element is worth fixing.
• Dishwashers with drainage or heating faults. Pumps, elements and door catches are modest parts.
• Dryers that won't heat. Almost always a thermal cut-out and an airflow problem behind it.
• Anything still under manufacturer warranty. Call the manufacturer first, not us.

Brand changes the maths

Not because some brands are better, but because their failure modes and parts pricing differ.

Asko uses stainless tubs, so a bearing job stays viable much later in life than on a plastic-tub machine. Bosch bearings and motors tend to outlast the electronics, so the board is the part to worry about. Westinghouse and Electrolux share a parts platform, which keeps common repairs cheap. On the budget end, a board failure is often the end of the story.

The energy argument, honestly

You'll read that a new appliance pays for itself in running costs. Sometimes that's true — an old vented dryer replaced with a heat pump model is a real saving if you use it a lot. For a fridge or a washing machine, the difference between a well-maintained ten-year-old unit and a new one is usually smaller than the marketing suggests, and it takes a long time to repay a purchase.

Manufacturing a new appliance also has a cost that doesn't appear on your power bill. A repair that buys five more years is usually the better outcome on both counts.

What we do about it

The assessment fee is $125, fixed. A technician attends, diagnoses the fault properly and gives you the repair price before anything is touched.

If the answer is that it's not worth repairing, you get told that, with the reason. We'd rather lose the job than take money for a repair we don't believe in — we're going to be back in this suburb next week either way.

Booking is a phone call or the form, and we cover Shellharbour, Shell Cove, Oak Flats, Albion Park and the lake suburbs.