Keep Above
Repair or replace the washing machine
The washing machine has quit, and there are two ways to be washing again. This page counts the repair — what the fix would cost and how much longer it would keep the machine going — against a replacement and how long that would last. Each side is spread over its own span into a cost per year, the only figure the two share. No winner is declared; the estimates are yours and so is the call.
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 | — | — |
Is a washing machine bearing fault different from a pump fault?
In how it reaches a quote, yes. A pump, an inlet valve, a door lock or a heating element sits where it can be got at without taking the machine apart. A drum bearing sits inside the tub assembly, so renewing it means stripping the machine down and building it back up, and on some designs the assembly does not come apart at all. There is one box for the repair, so the fault behind the figure is what puts it at one end of the range or the other.
A washing machine is also joined to a water supply and a drain, so a failure can put water on the floor rather than simply stopping the wash. There is no field for what that costs and it enters neither column, so the two cost-per-year figures on this page describe the machine and nothing around it.
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 washing machine?
The whole of what the fix would take: the call-out, the diagnosis where it's charged, parts and labour. If a repairer has quoted a range, the figure that fits the arithmetic is what you'd actually expect to pay, since the cost per year spreads that full amount over the extra years you think the fix would buy.
What goes into running costs a year here?
Anything beyond the purchase or repair that it would take to keep each machine washing for a year. Where the old machine and a replacement would use noticeably different amounts of power or water, that difference is a real yearly figure; where they'd be much the same, leaving both boxes at $0 keeps the comparison to the up-front costs alone.
What is the matching time?
The number of years the repair would have to carry the machine for its cost per year to match the replacement's — a position in the arithmetic, nothing more. Where running the old machine already takes more each year than the replacement does all-up, no length of service would bring the two level, and the line says so rather than showing a figure.
What about selling or scrapping the old one?
Whatever the old machine would fetch comes off the replacement's cost — a sale if it still washes, a trade-in on the new one, or scrap. A machine replaced because it stopped working is a different case from one replaced while it still runs, and only the second of those tends to put anything in this box. The up-front figure cannot fall below zero, but the lifetime total can.