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 accounts, 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 | — | — |
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.
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. When running the old one already costs more each year than the whole replacement does all-up, no length of time would match, and the page says so.
What about selling or scrapping the old one?
Whatever the old dishwasher would fetch — a sale, scrap, or a retailer's trade-in on the new one — comes off the replacement's cost. The up-front figure can't go below zero, but the lifetime total can: an old unit worth more than the replacement genuinely pulls it down.