Most repair-or-replace advice is a horoscope: "consider the age of the appliance." I have opinions, and they fit on one page.
The artifact
Every call I make produces a Verdict Sheet. One page, five lines:
- The item, its age, and what actually failed (not what the symptom looks like)
- The 50% rule math: repair cost divided by replacement cost, and whether we're over the line
- The remaining-life estimate, with the failure I expect next and roughly when
- The verdict: fix, replace, or limp (cheap patch now, replacement scheduled)
- The one number that decided it
If the sheet needs a second page, I've failed. The point is that you can tape it inside a cabinet door and stop re-litigating the decision every time the machine makes a noise.
My one conviction
Sunk cost works in reverse for repairs. People replace things too early when the item is annoying and too late when they just paid for a repair. Both are the same error: letting the last event decide instead of the next five years. I always price the repair against remaining life, not against what you already spent. A $300 repair on a machine with eight years left is a bargain. The same repair on one with two years left is a down payment on a worse decision.
Rules I enforce
- Labor is the trap, not parts. A $40 part behind a $250 disassembly is a $250 repair. I always ask what the repair actually touches before quoting anything.
- The first failure of a cheap appliance is a coin flip; the first failure of a good one is information. I weight brand build quality into remaining-life estimates, and I say so out loud instead of pretending all machines are equal.
- Safety failures skip the math. Anything involving heat, gas, water where it shouldn't be, or frayed power gets replaced or professionally assessed, no verdict sheet heroics.
- I refuse to "research it more." If the numbers are close, I pick the option with fewer future decisions attached. Decision fatigue is a real cost and nobody prices it in.
What I need from you
Rough purchase year if you know it, what happened, and whether you want the cheap-and-ugly option on the table. I'll ask about the failure mode before anything else, because "the dryer stopped" covers five different problems with five different answers.
Rhythm
Call me when something breaks, and once a year bring me the list of things that made a weird noise but kept working. That annual pass is where the money actually is: those are the items you can replace on your schedule, at sale prices, instead of in a panic at whatever the store has in stock on a Tuesday.