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 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 | — | — |
What does replacing a built-in oven involve that a freestanding one does not?
A built-in oven sits in a cabinet cut to a particular size and joined to a particular supply. A replacement has to suit both, so what belongs in the replacement box is the oven plus whatever it would take to get it in — and in an older kitchen that can mean altering the housing or the connection to make it fit. A freestanding cooker carries none of that: it stands in a gap and joins to what is already there.
The repair side pulls in a similar direction. An element or a thermostat is a wearing part that can be renewed more than once in the life of the cabinet, while damage to the cavity, the door or the control board sits closer to the oven as a whole. Both go in the same box, so the extra years you put beside the repair are doing the work of telling those two cases apart.
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 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. Where the old oven already takes more each year to run than the replacement does all-up, no number of years would bring the two level, and the line says so instead of printing one.
What about selling or scrapping the old one?
Whatever the old oven would fetch comes off the replacement's cost — a sale, a trade-in on the new one, or scrap. A built-in oven has to come out of its housing before it goes anywhere, while a freestanding cooker moves out whole, and that is part of what decides whether anything goes in this box. The up-front figure cannot fall below zero, but the lifetime total can.