Is It Worth Repairing? An Honest Answer, Appliance by Appliance

Owner-Operated  |  Repairing Appliances Since 2013  |  Set Prices, No Commission  |  Licensed, Bonded and Insured in Washington

Something has broken, and you are trying to work out whether to spend money on it or start shopping. This page is the framework used to answer that on the phone every day, written out so you can apply it yourself before you call anybody.

It is worth saying who is writing it. SD Appliance is a one-person company, Sergei Dergunov, and nobody here earns a commission on a repair. That matters on this particular page, because the business that answers this question is usually the business that profits from one of the answers.

The rule you will find everywhere, and what it misses

Search this question, and you will get the fifty percent rule: if the repair costs more than half the price of a new one, replace it. Some versions add a second condition: the appliance must also be past the halfway point of its life.

It is a reasonable starting point and not wrong. The problem is that it needs two numbers you do not have yet. You do not know what the repair costs until somebody has diagnosed it, and the price of a comparable new machine is not the price on the tag either, because a replacement also means delivery, fitting, and hauling the old one away.

So the rule tells you what to do once you know everything, which is the moment you no longer need a rule. What follows is what actually moves the answer.

Four things decide it

The asymmetry most people get backwards

Two appliances can have the same fault and the same repair price, and the right answer can be the opposite for each. The difference is the cost of replacing them.

A freestanding range, a countertop microwave, or a cheap chest freezer is replaced by buying one and plugging it in. The comparison is close to fair there, and the fifty percent rule holds up.

A built-in wall oven, a refrigerator column, an integrated dishwasher or an over-the-range microwave is different. Replacing one means paying for the appliance and hiring someone to fit it into an opening built for the old one, and sometimes discovering that the new unit is not the same size. On those, a repair stays worth doing well past the point where a rule of thumb would say stop.

The practical version: the more built-in it is, the more it is worth fixing. A dishwasher that slides out from under a counter sits somewhere in the middle, and a refrigerator column that the cabinetry was built around sits at the far end.

The argument for repairing that nobody in retail will make

Worth putting his own view on the record, because it is not what anybody selling a new appliance has a reason to tell you.

If it is a good appliance and the repair is worth doing, repair it, because the new one will not be built as well as the one you already own. That is not nostalgia; it is what he sees on the bench: a well-made machine that needs one part is frequently a better machine than its replacement would be.

There is a real counterweight, and it gets said too. Sometimes an older unit is genuinely finished, and sometimes an owner has simply decided they want a new one, which is a legitimate choice rather than a mistake. The job is to make sure that decision is made with the diagnosis in hand rather than instead of one.

Where the answer usually lands, appliance by appliance

These are the patterns from more than a decade of these calls. Each links to the page that goes into detail.

One honest note about brands

This is not a league table, and it is not about which brand is well made. It is about one thing only, which is whether the part will exist when you need it.

That is a repair-or-replace fact rather than a quality judgment, and it can flip the answer on a machine that would otherwise be worth fixing. There is more on how brand affects a repair on the appliance brands page.

Already have a quote and want it checked

A second opinion is a normal reason to call, and it happens often enough to be worth its own section. If a commission-based shop has quoted you a repair or told you the appliance is finished, having that checked by someone with no stake in either answer is reasonable.

The service call is $89 and includes an independent diagnosis, not a sales pitch. If the first quote was right, you will be told it was right.

There is one situation where he will say so before driving out, and it is worth knowing about. If you describe a washer making noise on the spin cycle, that is often bearings, and on an older machine that is not worth repairing. Rather than take a service call to confirm what he already knows, he will tell you on the phone. If you still want it confirmed in person, that is fine, and he will come.

What this decision does not turn on