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 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 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. 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 fridge 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.