This page describes how content on Still Worth Fixing is researched, what is allowed to appear on it, how often it is re-checked, and what happens when it turns out to be wrong.
It is written to be specific enough to be held to. If you find a page that breaks one of these rules, that is a correction worth sending — see the bottom of this page.
Who writes this site
Woojoong Kim. There is one author, and there is no anonymous byline anywhere on the site. See About for who that is and, more importantly, what they are not: this site is not written by an appliance repair technician and does not claim trade experience.
The authority claim this site makes is narrow and, I think, defensible: the information here was compiled from primary sources, the sources are named, and the date it was checked is on the page. Where that claim would not hold, the page says so instead of covering the gap with confident phrasing.
What counts as a source
Sources are ranked. Higher tiers override lower ones on any conflict.
Tier 1 — manufacturer documentation. Support pages, service documentation, owner’s manuals, warranty sheets, and parts catalogs published by the manufacturer of the appliance in question. This is the only acceptable source for error codes, part numbers, warranty terms, and specifications.
Tier 2 — government, regulatory, and standards bodies. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Energy and its federal test procedures, ENERGY STAR, the eCFR, state consumer-protection statutes, and equivalent bodies in Canada and the UK.
Tier 3 — surveys and datasets with a published methodology. Consumer Reports member surveys, industry studies that state their sample and method. These are cited with their method attached, because the method is usually the reason two sources disagree.
Tier 4 — commercial cost aggregators and named businesses. Thumbtack, HomeGuide, Homewyse, and the published price lists of individual repair shops. Useful, and often the only thing available, but they measure what a contractor quotes rather than what a household paid. Always attributed by name.
Not a source at all: other appliance blogs. Nothing on this site is sourced from a competing content site, an AI summary, a forum post, or an unattributed figure found in a search result.
That last rule exists for a specific reason. Appliance blogs copy each other’s error codes, and the errors propagate. A wrong code republished fifty times looks like a consensus and is still wrong. Every code on this site was read from the manufacturer’s own documentation, and the page names which document and when it was read.
Rules the content is held to
These are absolute. A claim that cannot satisfy them is cut, not softened.
- No fabricated figures. No invented statistic, price, survey result, test finding, or specification. If a claim needs a number and no source has it, the claim is removed rather than estimated. Where a number is arithmetic performed on published figures rather than a figure someone published, the page labels it as such.
- No claimed first-hand experience. Nothing on this site says “in my testing,” “I’ve found,” or “after six months of use.” No appliance discussed here has been tested by the author. Where the site knows something, it knows it because it was looked up.
- Uncertainty is attributed, not asserted. “Reported repair costs range from…” rather than “repairs cost…”. Where two credible sources disagree, both are shown and the disagreement is explained instead of averaged away.
- Gaps are stated. Where a figure could not be found, the page says it could not be found. Several pages on this site have empty cells in their tables for this reason, and in more than one case the empty cells turned out to be the most useful thing on the page.
- Sources are linked at the point of claim, not gathered in a bibliography at the bottom where they cannot be checked against anything in particular.
- Conclusions follow the evidence, including when it is inconvenient. Where a fact cuts against the point a page is making, it belongs inside that argument — in the paragraph where you would otherwise have finished believing the wrong thing — and not in a confessional section at the end. A caveat quarantined in a closing box is easy to skip and easy to write. One that interrupts the claim it qualifies is neither.
What this site does not publish
Pages here describe what a repair involves and what it costs. They do not teach you to perform it. Specifically, this site does not publish step-by-step procedures for:
- Opening a sealed refrigeration system — recovering, charging or brazing the refrigerant circuit on a refrigerator or freezer. What that work consists of is set out in detail, read off Whirlpool’s own service job aid, for exactly one reason: so you can judge the quote you are given for it. Venting refrigerant is separately prohibited under EPA Section 608, and what that means at disposal is covered here.
- Gas connections on a gas range or gas dryer — supply lines, regulators, and the orifice changes an LP conversion involves.
- Any work that requires the appliance to be energized while it is open, including control-board diagnosis on a live machine.
- Repairs to an appliance under an active safety recall. Three actions get a section of their own here: the LG range knob action, the LG top-load washer action, and the Samsung top-load washer action. On the two washer pages that section answers the unbalanced-load code — the one symptom there where being on the recall list changes what you should do about it. A fourth, Samsung’s 2024 range recall, is dated and counted in the brand comparison. The answer in every case is the manufacturer’s recall remedy, not a repair and not a part swap. The remedy is free; a repair is not, and doing your own can forfeit the other.
For each of these the page names what the job consists of and what it costs, so a quote can be judged, and points at a qualified technician.
This is a scope decision about what gets written, not a disclaimer bolted to the bottom of a page. A safety notice under bad instructions does not fix the instructions. The hazard list itself — mains electricity, gas, water under pressure, heavy moving parts, and the faults that mean stop using the appliance now — is in the Terms of Use, §2.
If you think a page here has crossed that line, say so. Email hello@stillworthfixing.com. Those messages are read ahead of everything else, including corrections — that is a rule about the inbox, so it holds whichever route you use.
Re-verification
Prices move, manufacturers reorganize their support sites, and model generations change what a code means. Content that was accurate in August 2026 will not stay accurate.
- Every page carrying prices, specifications, warranty terms or error codes displays the month it was last verified.
- Each page carrying dated figures also states an internal next-review date — the thirty articles, the five cluster hubs, the homepage and the calculator page, thirty-seven pages in all. There are three intervals, not two, and the split is uneven: twenty-two of the thirty articles are on a three-month clock, seven on five months, and one on six. Six months is the longest interval on this site, and exactly one page uses it. The rule below sets the short clock; it does not by itself separate the five- and six-month pages, which are assigned page by page. A hub inherits the earliest review date in the cluster it summarizes, because a summary goes stale as soon as the first figure under it does; all five currently inherit November.
- What sets the interval is not the topic but the kind of citation the page rests on, and the distinction is narrower than it sounds. A dated cost guide is superseded visibly — last year’s edition is still there, still labeled, so a stale quotation of it is at worst out of date. A live retailer or catalog listing has no editions at all: the page simply shows a different number, or stops existing. Any page carrying two or more of the second kind goes on the short clock, with one standing exception: where the rest of a page is tied to an annual cycle, the page is reviewed on that cycle and its retailer listings are re-checked separately rather than dragging the whole page forward. One page is in that position today — the appliance disposal guide, whose nine utility rebates roll over on a program year a February review tracks and a November one would miss, and whose two retailer haul-away prices are spot-checked on their own between reviews. Pages sitting just under that line are noted internally as the first to spot-check rather than quietly rounded up.
- That distribution is not the one this site started with, and the reason is worth stating. The original convention was six to twelve months, on the assumption that survey data is superseded in dated editions rather than quietly changed. In August 2026 that assumption turned out to be wrong: Consumer Reports rewrote two of its five repair-or-replace articles in place — same URLs, no edition markers, nothing on the page to indicate a change — replacing the survey underneath every figure this site had quoted from them. The clothes-dryer article alone took fourteen figures across six pages stale inside four days, all of them correct on the day they were written. The other three articles were untouched and every figure taken from them still verified — so there was no way to tell the rewritten from the unchanged without re-opening all five. Pages resting on that class of source moved to the shorter clock and have stayed there.
- A claim that carries its own end date is reviewed by that date, not on the page’s periodic clock. Promotions, bonus rates and program windows expire on a schedule nobody here sets, and a three- or six-month interval will step straight over one. Two articles carry such a claim today: the appliance disposal guide, where one utility’s rate is written only for pickups inside calendar 2026, and the Samsung and LG comparison, where a promotional second year of coverage ends September 30, 2026. Each says so in the row or the sentence that makes the claim, and each is flagged in the page’s own front matter so the date is checked mechanically rather than remembered. A third dated claim — a utility bonus rate that closed at the end of August 2026 — has already lapsed, and the disposal guide now states it in the past tense rather than carrying it as an offer.
- At review, cited sources are re-opened and the figures re-read. Links that have rotted are replaced or the claim is cut.
- Where a page cites a document through a third-party mirror because the publisher no longer hosts it, the page says so, because a mirror can disappear without notice.
Pages are researched and drafted well before they appear. This site opened with its library already written rather than publishing into an empty archive, and those pages are released on a schedule rather than in one batch, so a publication date here says nothing about when the work was done or how long any one page took. The verification date printed on each page is the one that does.
Corrections
Corrections are welcome and are the fastest way this site improves. Email is the shortest route; the address is also on the contact page. Please say which page and which figure you are writing about — that single detail is what makes a correction fast to act on, because it points straight at the source that needs re-reading.
What happens when you send one:
- A factual error — a wrong price, a mis-transcribed code, a broken source link, a claim the cited source does not support — is checked against the source and, if confirmed, fixed. The page is updated and its verification date reset.
- A material correction — one that changes the advice a page gives rather than a detail within it — is noted on the page itself, so the change is visible rather than silent.
- A disagreement about interpretation is a fair thing to raise and will get a considered reply, but will not necessarily change the page. If the sources say something different from what experience suggests, the page will generally keep reporting what the sources say and note the tension.
If a correction turns out to be right and the original error came from a source this site trusted, the source’s tier gets reconsidered too.
Advertising, and its relationship to content
This site is intended to be supported by display advertising. It is not running yet; what it will mean in practice, and what the advertising partners will collect, is set out in advance in the Privacy Policy.
What it does not mean: no advertiser, ad network, manufacturer or retailer has any input into what is published here. No page on this site is sponsored, and none has been paid for, reviewed, or approved by a company it discusses. Several pages are directly unflattering to major manufacturers, and that is the test of whether this paragraph is true.
Where the site links to a retailer or manufacturer, it is because that is where the information came from.
AI use, stated plainly
Because it is a fair question to ask of any site publishing at this volume: AI tools are used in producing this content — for drafting, structuring, and working through published material.
They are not used as a source. That is the distinction that matters, and it is worth being precise about rather than reassuring. A language model is a fluent writer and an unreliable rememberer; anything it produces from memory is a plausible-sounding guess. So nothing on this site is written from memory. Every factual claim traces to a specific published document — a manufacturer’s service manual or warranty PDF, a dated cost guide, a retailer’s live parts listing — and that document is linked at the point the claim is made.
It would be easy to write here that the checking is all done by hand, and it would not be true. The source-fetching and cross-checking passes are tooled too: citations are re-resolved in bulk to catch links that have died, and figures that appear on more than one page are compared against each other to catch the drift that creeps into content published at volume. That tooling has caught real defects on this site — a dead manufacturer URL, and a figure attributed to a page that did not carry it — and each was fixed and recorded rather than quietly patched.
What is not automated is accountability. A named person decides what goes up and answers for it, and the sourcing rules above are written down so that you can check the work rather than take it on trust. Every number here is linked to where it came from, and the honest test of this policy is whether those links hold up when you click them.
Last updated August 2026.