Keep Above
Repair or replace the oven
An oven that won't hold temperature — or won't heat at all — comes down to the usual pair: repair this one or replace it. Each side takes its cost, its years and any running costs, and is counted over its own life to a cost per year, the only figure the two share. No winner is declared; the estimates 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 an oven?
The complete cost of the fix — call-out, the element, thermostat or board that failed, and labour. The arithmetic divides that full amount by the extra years you think the repair would buy, so a partial figure would flatter the repair side.
What goes into running costs a year here?
Running costs only matter here where the two sides would genuinely differ across a year — and an oven's yearly power cost often lands close on both sides. Where it would, leaving both boxes at $0 keeps the comparison to the up-front figures; where the two would differ, the difference is the figure to enter.
What is the matching time?
The number of years the repair would have to carry the oven 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 oven 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.