Your appliances are the lifeblood of various aspects of your life. Clean clothes, clean dishes, cooked food, they help to simplify so many aspects compared to years in the past.
The main problem with appliances is they can and will break down eventually. You have options, replacing them is the most expensive option, hiring a repairman is the second most expensive, the final option is conducting the repair yourself.
I have repaired the dryer since moving in and now the washer needs to be repaired. the problem was a noise that I initially thought was a slipping drive belt in the machine but it turned into a complete tear down and replacing the bearings on the drum. this repair may last another 5 years which is probably well past the life cycle of this model of washer. but it gives me a window of time to save enough money to buy another machine that meets the requirements for my small house.
To make this repair I started off at a website that specializes in repairing appliances, Repair clinic. You find the model number of the appliance and it gives you a list of symptoms and the most commonly fault components related to that symptom. from there I will cross reference the parts on amazon to see which is cheaper, this coupled with an amazon prime account will usually yield the best possible price and two day shipping on qualifying orders. after I find all of the potentially faulty parts I will tear down the appliance using you tube in conjunction with the model number to ensure I don't take anything extra off in the process. after the tear down I can inspect some of the components and replace what is needed
The next problem I encountered was they wanted me to buy the full rear drum section at $250. It was not happening in any way shape or form so I went with plan B: directly referencing the serial numbers on the bearings and seal. This cut the total price down to $40 enabling me to cheaply repair a critical appliance until I can replace it with a unit that meets my criteria. the total cost of the repair thus far is under $100
The downside of most home repairs is that you have to be confident enough to disassemble you broken appliance. I always say if its already broke you cant break it more, for the most part this is true. the second down side is you have to have at least basic hand tools. I am a mechanic by trade, so I have numerous and various tools at my disposal. If you want to tackle these sort of projects I would recommend buying a medium grade tool kit from craftsman or even harbor freight(anything marked pitsburg pro is usually decent), normally you can get a reasonable set of tools for around $100 bucks that will have 75% of what you need for most repairs, the rest you can piece together as you need it. the best part of owning your own tools is that you can tackle more and more repairs as your confidence grows and possibly make some money off your expertise by tackling repair jobs for friends or selling individual components from curb side appliances on ebay.
This concludes this post, As always if you have questions, comments or suggestions leave them in the comments section. please subscribe, share and +1 this post, I like knowing that people are reading my posts and hopefully enjoying the content I publish. I hope to get on track to continually publish high quality content chock full of helpful references, the science behind why things work, inexpensive ways to repair, rebuild and build a variety of things you would normally spend a bunch of money on for an inferior product.
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