When to Repair Appliances.
Your refrigerator breaks. Your oven won't heat. Your dishwasher doesn't clean. Is it time to buy a new appliance? Or is it worth it to get your old one fixed?
Paul Willman has been repairing appliances for nearly 30 years. He often gets desperate calls from homeowners.
"They can't hear that we'll be there in two or three days. They want it fixed that day or the very next morning," he explained.
But it turns out finding a good repair person isn't always easy.
"We surveyed 13-thousand of our subscribers, covering more than 20,000 broken products,
and plenty of them had complaints about the repairs," said Celia Kupszmid-Lehrman of Consumer Reports.
The biggest problems were with electric cook-tops and wall ovens.
"The parts were very difficult to find and the repairs often took two weeks or more to get done," warned Kupszmid-Lehrman. When it comes to dryers, washers, and other larger appliances,
The survey showed people have much better luck using an independent shop once the warranty is up rather than a factory-authorized service center.
Willman says it's great when he can fix something right away -like the oven that went out on Thanksgiving Day.
"Not even an hour later I had that stove lit," he remembered. "Cheers coming from the other room because people were already arriving for the dinner. And it was pretty cool."
But Consumer Reports says sometimes an appliance just isn't worth fixing.
"You should replace it if the repair is going to cost more than half the price of a new model," explained Kupszmid-Lehrman.
With a report by CTV British Columbia's Chris Olsen.
