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The Fix Bench

Repair or replace: the arithmetic

This does not estimate what your repair costs. It takes the quote you were actually given and works out whether it buys enough remaining life to beat replacing — using energy figures published by ENERGY STAR rather than made up.

On the rating plate, usually with the model and serial number.

Parts and labour together. We do not supply this number — we will not publish repair prices we cannot verify.

Include delivery, installation and removal of the old one, since those are real and are usually left out.

Fill the form above to see the working.

What this actually calculates

Three numbers, and none of them is a verdict on its own.

Cost per remaining year of the repair. Your quote divided by the years the appliance has left, using ENERGY STAR's 12-year planning lifetime. A $300 repair on a three-year-old machine is buying nine years. The same repair on an eleven-year-old machine is buying one.

Cost per year of replacing. The price you would actually pay, spread over 12 years, minus the energy the new one saves.

The energy saving. This is the only figure we supply, and it comes from ENERGY STAR. It is also, for most people, smaller than expected — which is the point of showing it rather than asserting it.

Why you have to enter the prices

Because we will not publish numbers we cannot verify. The repair cost ranges that dominate this subject come from quote aggregators using proprietary data, and they vary enough by region that a national average is an average of numbers rather than a number. Feeding you one and calling it a calculation would just be a guess with a form around it.

Your quote is a real number. The price of the machine you would actually buy is a real number. Those are the two that decide this, and you have both.

Where the energy figures come from

  • Refrigerator — about $12.50 a year. ENERGY STAR: about $150 saved over the 12-year lifetime of the product. EPA also publishes a much higher figure elsewhere — see the note below. Full working.
  • Washing machine — about $44.00 a year. ENERGY STAR: about $530 in energy costs over the lifetime of the product, spread across 12 years. Full working.
  • Dryer — about $17.50 a year. ENERGY STAR: approximately $210 in energy bills over the life of the product, spread across 12 years. Full working.
  • Dishwasher — about 115 kWh a year. Derived from ENERGY STAR criteria: the federal standard allows up to 355 kWh/year and current certification is 240 kWh/year or less — a gap of 115 kWh. Converted using the rate you enter. Full working.

Converting a lifetime total to a yearly figure is our arithmetic, not ENERGY STAR's claim. The 12-year lifetime is theirs — it is the planning assumption they use when calculating savings.

The refrigerator figure needs a caveat

EPA publishes two figures for refrigerators that do not agree. The current ENERGY STAR refrigerators page gives about $150 over a 12-year lifetime. ENERGY STAR's own "Flip Your Fridge" factsheet gives more than $300 over five years. That is roughly $12.50 a year against $60 a year, from the same programme.

This calculator uses the conservative one. If the case for replacing only works on the higher figure, it is resting on the more optimistic of two official numbers that contradict each other. Therefrigerator guide sets out both.

What it cannot tell you

Whether the next thing will fail. An appliance that has had two repairs in a year is telling you something this arithmetic cannot see, and it is usually worth listening to.

It also cannot diagnose. The single largest factor in this decision is which component failed, which is why there is a checkbox for it — a drain pump and a sealed system are not the same decision on the same appliance. If you do not know yet, find out before you spend anything: a surprising share of what gets quoted as a failure turns out to be installation or maintenance.