Appliance Repair or Replace Planner

A fair comparison starts with two complete quotes

A repair price answers one question: what will this repair cost? It does not answer how long the appliance will work afterward, whether another part will fail, or what a replacement will cost to install. Keep those questions separate. This planner uses your quote for the known payment and your chosen remaining-life assumptions for the uncertain future.

Ask for a written diagnosis and an itemized repair quote. Record the proposed work, parts, labor, unpaid visit charge and tax. Ask whether the diagnostic fee is credited toward the repair. If you already paid a nonrefundable fee that applies regardless of your choice, leave it out of both future-cost totals. The same goes for the original purchase price and past repairs: those payments cannot be changed by today’s decision.

Confirm what the warranty actually pays

Check the written coverage, its end date, the claim process and whether labor or particular parts are excluded. Keep the purchase receipt and warranty together, and get verbal promises in writing. A separately purchased service contract may have different terms from the product warranty. The FTC’s warranty guide explains those distinctions.

In the planner, enter the full unpaid repair quote before coverage, then the dollar amount the provider has confirmed it will pay. For a $300 quote with $50 confirmed coverage, your repair outlay is $250. If a quote already shows only your copay, enter that amount as the quote and zero coverage so you do not subtract the benefit twice. Coverage that is still under review is not a confirmed saving; run a second scenario if you want to test it.

Price a replacement you can actually install

Use a specific model and a written, tax-inclusive purchase price. Add delivery, installation, required connection parts, modifications and old-unit removal. Put a bundled charge in one field only. Keep unconfirmed rebates out of the quote; if a discount is already applied, use the final price and note it. A later replacement in this planner uses the same full bundle, so temporary discounts can make that assumption optimistic.

Before relying on the number, confirm access and fit. Door swing, lid opening and ventilation clearance matter alongside the cabinet dimensions. The FTC’s appliance shopping guidance specifically calls out space to open the appliance and safe ventilation. Ask the retailer which installation work is included and what would trigger another charge.

The appliance type changes the questions

Refrigerators

Compare the replacement model’s capacity and configuration with what you need. Record its actual annual energy figure rather than using a brand average. If the current appliance will become a second refrigerator instead of being removed, this planner’s replacement path no longer describes your plan: it assumes the old appliance stops using electricity when the new one takes over. ENERGY STAR’s Flip Your Fridge has distinct replacement and extra-fridge-removal options; its estimates also carry usage and upkeep assumptions.

Clothes washers

Record the household workload you intend to compare, including annual loads and the water-heating assumption. Do not enter IMEF as annual kWh. ENERGY STAR describes IMEF as an efficiency measure that considers washer energy, water heating and drying-related energy; it is not the consumption input this calculator expects. The ENERGY STAR washer guide explains IMEF and the separate water-efficiency measure. This planner does not estimate water, sewer or downstream dryer savings.

Dishwashers

Check capacity and the cycle assumptions behind the energy numbers. Also ask whether the replacement quote includes the installation parts and any necessary changes to connections. ENERGY STAR’s dishwasher buying guide discusses capacity, cycle choices and EnergyGuide comparisons. For this worksheet, water consumption remains a separate question even when the electricity comparison is complete.

Electric dryers

This path excludes gas dryers. Use compatible annual electricity figures; do not substitute Combined Energy Factor, which is an efficiency metric. A vented electric dryer and a heat-pump model can have different installation needs. ENERGY STAR’s dryer guidance describes heat-pump condensate handling and venting differences. Ask the installer to price the requirements of the exact model.

A cost comparison is not an installation guide. For example, Whirlpool’s electric dryer manual includes model-specific electrical and venting requirements and calls for qualified installation. Use the manual supplied with your appliance, and leave electrical work and internal fault diagnosis to an appropriate professional.

Energy figures must describe the same thing

EnergyGuide’s estimated annual cost uses assumed usage and an energy price; it is not a prediction of your utility bill. Use the label’s annual kWh when appropriate and enter your own electricity rate. The FTC explains how those estimates work. Clothes dryers are not in the FTC’s list of appliances that carry the yellow label, so look for suitable manufacturer consumption data or compatible measurements instead.

For washers and dishwashers, read the water-heater wording. As a concrete example, Whirlpool’s WDTA80SAK EnergyGuide label shows different cost estimates for electric and natural-gas water heating. That label is evidence of the distinction, not a current electricity-price recommendation. A plug-level measurement excludes an external water heater, so comparing it directly with a figure that includes water heating gives mismatched boundaries.

Use the same annual workload and compatible energy scope for both entries. Do not apply an electric-water-heating estimate to a gas-water-heated household as though all the energy were electricity. If you cannot reconcile the sources, switch energy off. The planner will still compare quote payments and will say energy is excluded. It never fills a missing consumption figure with zero.

Record where each number came from and what it covers. An annualized measurement is an assumption about the coming year, not proof of future consumption. Enter dollars per kWh: 20 cents becomes 0.20. Use the usage charge relevant to the appliance, leaving out fixed charges that do not change with its use. If time-of-use prices matter, a single blended rate is another assumption to test.

The energy-only panel works independently of the repair quote. Once a full replacement price is entered, simple payback divides that price by annual energy savings. It does not deduct an avoided repair or stop savings when the repaired appliance fails. That makes it a separate illustration, not the repair-versus-replacement answer. With zero or negative savings, there is no energy-only payback date.

How the cash scenarios work

Each comparison begins today and runs for one, three or five years. Repair first means paying the quote less confirmed coverage now, then operating the repaired appliance until your assumed failure time. If that time falls before the endpoint, the model buys the replacement at the full quoted bundle and runs the new appliance for the remaining time. Replace now means buying that same bundle today and running the new appliance for the entire period.

The boundary is deliberate: a failure exactly at the endpoint does not require a replacement within that period. A failure at year 3 is excluded from the three-year comparison but included in the five-year comparison. At 2.99 years it is inside the three-year period. This explains the jump when an assumption crosses the endpoint; it is a cash event, not a sudden change in appliance quality.

Energy is prorated continuously across fractional years. If the repaired appliance lasts 1.5 years in a three-year scenario, it receives 1.5 years of the old annual energy cost and the replacement receives 1.5 years of the new cost. With zero remaining years, the model pays both the attempted repair and an immediate replacement, then uses only the new unit’s energy.

The earlier, baseline and later timings are your what-if cases. They are not statistical confidence limits, brand reliability ratings or estimates generated from age. Ask a technician what is known about the specific fault, then test a range you can explain. The age field is simply a record; changing it never changes the arithmetic.

All scenarios assume replacement units work for the rest of the selected period. They use constant quotes and electricity prices, with no inflation, discounting or resale value. They exclude unquoted future repairs, water and sewer, gas, finance charges, inconvenience and losses during downtime. The tool therefore reports modeled cash outlay, not total ownership cost or a guaranteed cheapest choice. Options can end the period with appliances of different ages and values.

A worked example you can check by hand

Suppose a repair quote is $300 with $50 confirmed coverage. A replacement is $1,000 including tax, plus $50 delivery, $100 installation and $50 disposal: $1,200 in total. Assume the repaired unit uses 800 kWh a year, the replacement uses 400, and electricity costs $0.20/kWh. These are illustrative numbers, not typical prices or appliance performance claims.

Annual electricity costs are $160 and $80. With three years of repaired life, the one-year totals are $410 for repair first and $1,280 for replace now. At three years they are $730 and $1,440: the failure sits exactly at the endpoint, so that period contains no replacement purchase in the repair-first path.

Over five years, repair first costs $250 + $1,200 + three years at $160 + two years at $80 = $2,090. Replace now costs $1,200 + five years at $80 = $1,600. That is $490 less modeled cash within five years, even though repair needed much less money today. Separately, energy-only payback is $1,200 ÷ $80 = 15 years under constant savings. It says nothing about whether either machine will last 15 years.

Turn the comparison into useful questions

If small changes in the remaining-life assumption reverse the result, focus your next conversation on the diagnosis and uncertainty. If installation costs dominate, get the site requirements priced before shopping further. If the energy saving looks surprisingly large, revisit the units, annual workload and water-heating boundary before treating it as real.

Print the blank worksheet for a service visit, or print your completed report with its assumptions and notes. Keep the quote and energy-label evidence with it. The lowest modeled number is one input to a decision that also involves cash available today, repair turnaround, fit, features and your tolerance for another interruption.