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Comment by jackmott | Hacker News Reader

It is tough calculus to choose a repair even if you do it all yourself. Say a 400 appliance. Its old so worth say 200 now. You need a 75 dollar part. There is some large chance the part you buy isnt quite the right variant you need or you screw up then install and then you just lost another 75 dollars and still no working appliance!

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We recently had a dishwasher repairman fix our ~15 year old dishwasher. We chatted about buy vs repair and he noted our fixed-and-woking-again dishwasher could potentially still last longer than a new replacement, because of worse quality of the new ones.

That sounds about right.

My mother had a washing machine for 25 years and it had only had a couple of belts replaced.

Her new washer failed within a year, and has been replaced by a washer that has also failed within a couple of years.

Electronics failure in both. The control board is expensive. Not like a $25 belt.

I'm sure humanity is so advatanged that such board can be manucatured for 5 USD or so. Does it even have a CPU and a heat sink? It can hardly be more complex than a Raspberry PI.

True, but the replacement appliance will be even less reliable due to planned obsolescence and more recently supply chain problems.

Anything built in the last few years is simply going to be less reliable on average.

And that’s assuming your time is worth $0 too. Unless it’s a clear win, or just something I feel like taking apart and learning about, I’ll usually use it as an excuse for an upgrade.

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