Still Worth Fixing — Should You Repair It or Replace It?

Still Worth Fixing works out what an appliance repair costs — and whether it is worth paying. Washing machines, dryers, refrigerators and freezers, dishwashers, gas and electric ranges, microwaves, disposals. Every price, error code and lifespan here comes from a named source — manufacturer documentation, a government or standards body, a published survey, or a named business — with anything derived by arithmetic labeled as such, and carries the month it was checked.

(Mowers, snowblowers and other outdoor power equipment are a different subject and a different site.)

Should you repair it, or replace it?

That decision is worth several hundred dollars and it usually gets made in about ten minutes, with a technician standing in the kitchen waiting for an answer. This site exists to make those ten minutes better informed.

Costs, specs and error codes on this site are dated on every page, with the month each was last verified and the month it is next due. The figures on this page are no exception: verified August 2026; next scheduled review November 2026.

Start where you actually are

Most appliance sites organize by appliance. That is the wrong axis — you already know what broke. What you don’t know is which question you’re asking.

Your situation	Start here
The machine is showing a code and I don’t know what it means	Error codes, by brand
I have a quote in my hand and I don’t know if it’s fair	What repairs actually cost
I know what it costs and I don’t know whether to pay it	Repair or replace
I’ve decided to replace it and I’m choosing	Buying and replacing
I want to know whether this brand does this a lot	Brands, reliability and repairability

Or use the repair-or-replace calculator

It prints a verdict, but the number directly under it is the one to act on — how many more years the repair has to buy before it beats a new machine, which is what the decision actually turns on and the one figure no quote ever gives you. Every input it uses is listed on its own page, with the source it came from — and, for two of them, with the fact that they are this site’s own choice rather than a published figure.

Open the repair-or-replace calculator →

The five sections

Section
Repair or replace The decision itself, appliance by appliance, plus the rules of thumb everyone repeats and where each one breaks. Includes the 50% rule stress-tested against real prices and where most of the lifespan charts a search returns actually come from — two documents that agree so closely you have mostly been reading one chart twice, and thinner underneath than you would expect.
What repairs cost Costs built up from manufacturer part prices and published labor rates, not scraped from other blogs. Owners report median repairs of $116–$214 while contractors quote $100–$500 — both are true, and the reason why changes what you should do with a quote.
Error codes Read from manufacturers’ own published code libraries, never from other blogs, which propagate each other’s mistakes. Bosch publishes 48 dishwasher codes that resolve to 22 faults. LG’s d90, Samsung’s C90 and Whirlpool’s AF are the same blocked vent.
Brands What each manufacturer will actually tell you, and for how long they promise to sell you parts. Sub-Zero commits to 15 years unconditionally, BSH to 15 only on units built since 2023; Whirlpool commits to seven in North America and ten in Europe.
Buying and replacing November is the cheapest month in the federal appliance price index — but the swing is only about 3%, and in four states the sales-tax holiday is worth more than the month you buy in.

Why this site, specifically

There is no shortage of appliance content. Almost all of it is written to sell you a service call, and a lot of it is copied from other pages that were copied from other pages.

This site is built on a narrower and more boring claim: someone read the primary sources and wrote down where each number came from.

Error codes come from manufacturer code libraries and service documentation. Never from other blogs. Appliance blogs propagate each other’s errors, and a wrong code costs you a wasted call.
Part numbers come from manufacturer documentation; part prices come from a named parts catalog — usually AppliancePartsPros, and GE’s own parts store where a page says so. Both are printed, so you can look up the same number and check the price yourself.
Costs are built up from parts plus labor where possible, rather than quoted as a band with no provenance.
Every page carrying a price, a specification, a warranty term or an error code shows the month it was verified, and figures that came from a source that later withdrew them are marked as withdrawn rather than quietly deleted. A page with none of those carries no verification date — the contact page has nothing on it for a date to be about — so the absence of one is information too. The editorial policy sets out the sourcing tiers and how often each is re-checked.
Arithmetic is labeled as arithmetic. Where a figure is derived rather than published, the page says so and shows the working.

What this site is not

It is not written by an appliance repair technician, and it does not pretend to be. The About page is explicit about that, because the alternative — inventing credentials — would make every other claim here worth less.

What that means practically: this site is good at telling you what something costs, what a code means, and whether a repair is worth paying for. It will not teach you to perform the repair, and on anything involving gas, burning smells, or a hot cabinet it will tell you to stop and call someone rather than talk you through it.

Independent, and intended to be reader-funded through advertising once it is running. No manufacturer, retailer, warranty company or repair service pays for coverage here, and nothing on this site is a paid placement. See the editorial policy and terms.