Established brick homes between the lake and the airport, with laundries that have seen three or four machines pass through. Bread-and-butter repair work.
The assessment fee is $125, fixed. A technician diagnoses the fault and quotes the repair before any work starts.
Oak Flats is largely brick-and-tile from the sixties through the eighties, with a lot of original internal laundries and separate garages. The appliances are usually mid-life rather than new or ancient, which is the sweet spot for repair: the machine is worth fixing and the parts still exist.
The most common job down here is a washing machine that has stopped spinning, followed closely by a dryer that tumbles without heating.
There's a rough order to this that's worth knowing before you book.
If the machine fills, washes, and then sits there with water in it, that's drainage — the pump filter first, then the hose at the trap. If it drains fine but won't get up to spin speed, the story is usually the load being unbalanced (one heavy towel or a bath mat will do it) or the door lock not confirming.
If it makes a grinding or rumbling noise that changes as the drum turns, stop and open the door on an empty machine and turn the drum by hand. Grinding means bearings, and on a lot of front loaders that's a sealed tub assembly rather than a pair of bearings. On a machine past about eight years, that's usually where we tell you not to bother. Repair or replace sets out how we make that call.
A dryer drum turning while the clothes stay damp is nearly always heat, and the heat is nearly always missing because a thermal cut-out has tripped. The cut-out tripped because airflow was choked, and airflow was choked because of lint.
Two habits fix most of it: clean the filter every single load, and check the vent hose hasn't been squashed flat when the machine was pushed back against the wall. A dryer in a closed garage with no ventilation will keep tripping no matter how many parts you replace.
A drum that won't turn at all is a belt, a seized roller or the motor, and it's usually audible which.
Fan-forced wall ovens from the eighties and nineties are still going in a lot of Oak Flats kitchens, and they're worth keeping. The two faults we attend are a fan motor bearing that has started to whine (replace it before it seizes and takes the element with it) and a thermostat that has drifted so nothing cooks in the stated time.
Westinghouse, Electrolux and Omega dominate this suburb's kitchens, and parts for all three are readily available.
Oak Flats sits between Albion Park and Barrack Heights on our usual run, and it's a few minutes up Lake Entrance Road from Shellharbour.
The assessment fee is $125, fixed. You get the repair price before any work starts.