Keep Above
Repair or replace the dishwasher
A dishwasher that won't run leaves the same two options as any broken appliance: fix this one or buy another. Enter what the repair would cost and the extra years you think it would buy, then what a replacement would cost and how long it would last — each side lands on a cost per year over its own life. The page declares no winner; it only does the arithmetic on your estimates.
Your estimate, not the page's
Not counted while this is $0
Your estimate, not the page's
Not counted while this is $0
Comes off the replacement
Put in what the fix would cost and what a replacement would cost. Nothing here is read from your budgets, and nothing is saved.
| Repairing | Replacing | |
|---|---|---|
| Up front | — | — |
| Running costs over its life | — | — |
| Total over its life | — | — |
| How long that covers | — | — |
| Cost a year | — | — |
| Cost a month | — | — |
What does replacing a built-in dishwasher involve that the price does not show?
An integrated machine is built into the run of cabinets, joined to a supply and a drain, and often carrying a door panel matched to the kitchen. Taking one out and fitting another is a joinery job as well as a plumbing one: the aperture has to suit, the panel has to transfer or be remade, and the connections behind it have to be picked up. A freestanding machine standing beside the bench carries none of that, so the same replacement price can stand for two quite different amounts of work.
Being enclosed changes the fault side too. A slow leak from a hose or a seal sits behind a cabinet door, where it is not seen the way a puddle in the middle of a floor is, and what it reaches is the cabinetry around the machine rather than the machine itself. The page has no field for that, so both columns describe the dishwasher and nothing else in the kitchen.
This is one of the tools built into Keep Above
Keep Above is a budgeting app where you enter your bills and income and it works out the balance you need to keep — so you can see what's safe to spend. No bank connection, no ads on your data.
A replacement arrives as one bill on one day, which is the kind of expense a sinking fund exists for — how budgeting apps handle money set aside for later bills.
About this calculator
What counts as the repair cost for a dishwasher?
Call-out, parts and labour together — the full amount it would take to have this dishwasher running again. Where a quote spans a range, the arithmetic wants the figure you'd actually expect to pay; the cost per year spreads it over the extra years you think the fix would buy.
What goes into running costs a year here?
Anything beyond the purchase or repair that it would take to keep each dishwasher going for a year. Where the old machine and a replacement would use noticeably different amounts of power or water, that difference is a real yearly figure; where they'd be much the same, both boxes can stay at $0 and the comparison rests on the up-front costs.
What is the matching time?
The number of years the repair would have to carry the dishwasher for its cost per year to match the replacement's — a position in the arithmetic, nothing more. Where the old machine already takes more each year to run than the replacement does all-up, there is no length of time that would bring them level, and the line says as much.
What about selling or scrapping the old one?
Whatever the old dishwasher would fetch comes off the replacement's cost — a sale, a trade-in on the new one, or scrap. On an integrated machine the door panel belongs to the kitchen rather than to the appliance, so what is being sold is the machine on its own. The up-front figure cannot fall below zero, but the lifetime total can.