Keep Above
Repair or replace the fridge
When the fridge starts failing the choice has a clock on it, but the arithmetic is the same two-sider: what a repair would cost against what a replacement would. Each side is counted over its own expected span — the years are your estimates — and lands on a cost per year, the one figure both sides share. No winner is declared.
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 | — | — |
Does it matter which part of a fridge failed?
A fridge has two quite different kinds of fault. One is in the sealed refrigeration circuit — the compressor and the gas it moves — which is the part that cannot be opened and put back casually. The other is everything around it: a door seal, a thermostat, a fan, a control board. The page sees only the figure you put in the repair box, so which of those failed is what decides whether that figure sits at one end of the range or the other.
It matters again in the years field. A seal or a fan that has worn out is a wearing part being renewed. A repair to the sealed circuit of a cabinet that has already run for years is a different judgement about what would go next, and the page takes whatever number you give it and spreads the repair across exactly that many years. On this appliance the years estimate carries as much of the result as the quote does.
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 fridge?
The full quoted cost of having this fridge cooling again — call-out, parts such as a compressor or door seals, and labour. The cost per year spreads that whole amount over the extra years you think the repair would buy, so a partial figure would understate the repair side.
What goes into running costs a year here?
A fridge runs all day, so a real difference in power use between the old one and a replacement shows up every year on the bill — that difference is what the running-costs boxes are for. Where the two would draw much the same, leaving both at $0 keeps the comparison to the up-front figures.
What is the matching time?
The number of years the repair would have to carry the fridge for its cost per year to match the replacement's — a position in the arithmetic, nothing more. Where the old cabinet already takes more each year to run than the replacement does all-up, nothing the repair could buy would bring the two level, and the line says so rather than printing a number.
What about selling or scrapping the old one?
Whatever the old fridge would fetch comes off the replacement's cost — a private sale if it still cools, a retailer's trade-in, or scrap. A fridge replaced while it still works is a different case from one that has stopped, and only the first of those tends to put anything in this box. The up-front figure cannot fall below zero, but the lifetime total can.