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 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 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. 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 dryer 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.