Keep Above
Repair or replace the dryer
The dryer's stopped drying, and the two ways forward are a repair or a replacement. Put in what the fix would cost with the extra years you'd expect from it, and what another dryer would cost with the years it would last; the page spreads each over its own life to a cost per year. It declares no winner — the estimates and the call are yours.
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 | — | — |
Why does how often you use a dryer change the answer more than the dryer does?
A dryer's yearly running cost is mostly a count of loads. Each cycle draws power for as long as it takes to move the water out of the clothes, so a household drying several loads a week and one drying a few a month land in very different places with the same machine standing in the corner. The running-costs boxes ask for a yearly figure, and on a dryer that figure moves with how the machine is used more than with which machine it is.
That is also why those boxes carry more of the result here than on an appliance that runs briefly and rarely. Where a machine is used now and then, a difference between the old one and a replacement barely registers against the up-front figures. Where long cycles run often, the same difference repeats every week of the year and is counted again for each of the years the page spreads the two sides across.
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 dryer?
Whatever the fix would come to in full — call-out, the part that failed, and the labour to fit it. The cost per year divides that whole amount by the extra years you expect from the repair, so the figure that belongs in the box is the complete one.
What goes into running costs a year here?
Where the old dryer and a replacement would use noticeably different amounts of power per year, that difference belongs in the running-costs boxes. Where they'd be much the same, both boxes can stay at $0 and the comparison rests on the up-front figures alone.
What is the matching time?
The number of years the repair would have to carry the dryer for its cost per year to match the replacement's — a position in the arithmetic, nothing more. Where the old dryer already takes more each year to run than the replacement does all-up, no number of years would close the gap, and the line says so rather than printing a figure.
What about selling or scrapping the old one?
Whatever the old dryer would fetch comes off the replacement's cost — a sale, a trade-in, or scrap. A dryer replaced while it still runs is the case where this box does something; where the machine has stopped drying altogether there is generally nothing to enter, and at $0 it drops out of the arithmetic. The up-front figure cannot fall below zero, but the lifetime total can.