Since I've out of work for about six months which has given me time to really look at the condition of our home appliances. Not just the cleaning but how they are operating. So now I've retrieved the owner's manuals to get a handle on what to expect to breakdown...ah too late. The washer, an air conditioner, and now one of the heating elements on the electric range. Oh and the light inside the oven. Jeez, when it rains it pours. Do you take the initiative to check out your home appliances? What experiences have you incurred by delaying them?
You know I didn't for a long time and always seemed to have that same, when it rains it pours kind of experience. Now that I check on them periodically and clean them even more thoroughly, I find that it's not a problem as much.
We are thrifty when it comes to appliances. We regularly clean even the water dispenser. But when an appliance breaks, we never bother to have it repaired. We just buy a new one when we have the money for it. When our big tv was needing repair, the charge was almost half of a brand new tv. So what do we do? It is more practical to buy a new one than suffer the costly repairs.
You know, I never think of maintaining any of my electronic appliances beyond giving them a thorough clean. We too use ours until they break down, at which point we just replace them. I just wouldn't want to mess around with them.
I have replaced the seal on my washing machine and the ight bulb inside my fridge using YouTube videos but I wouldn't feel comfortable carrying out anything more advanced. Most of the time, it is indeed more cost-effective to purchase a new appliance though.
When the washing machine broke down my daughter watched a video on youtube to get an idea on how to repair it. She was very successful in repairing the washing machine. The garbage disposal broke, we did get a person to fix that. Now we need to repair the dishwasher. It is a good idea to have a schedule to check your appliances but I know we will not do anything until it breaks. Like with your car.
The only appliance we check regularly is the aircon. We have a regular maintenance man that cleans and checks if it is still working fine and what needs to be replaced in it. We did replace the aircon already though as the first one keeps on breaking. The newer one works fine and we just maintain it with the help of our maintenance man.
I bought my washer, dryer, and refrigerator when I moved in here 6 years ago. Obviously, the fridge gets constant use. I hooked up the ice maker myself, via YouTube and the instruction manual, but don't do anything to maintain it. I've been fortunate that the others have held up, but I also don't use them that much. I might do 2 loads of laundry a week, which is probably pretty light, compared to many households. The stove is the thing that gives me the most problems, and the landlady will not fix anything around here. The seal on the oven door is broken, and the metal frame on the door has come off. I haven't been using it much lately, since it's Summer, but I know it will really aggravate me once Fall arrives. If I owned the place, obviously I would replace it, but I don't own the house, and don't have money to replace it. I don't even think it's original to this house, I think it's original to some house before this one existed, because it's pretty old, and not in a good way.
It is essential that you keep your appliances in good condition, because if you don't it might mean that they are likely to break more quickly, and this could lead to you having to replace them when you're not really ready to do so. It can seem annoying when you have to go through the steps to maintain your items, however when you think about the amount of money that you would be able to save in the long term, it is definitely something that you should be thinking about doing.
Living in apartments for many years, I always dreaded the inevitable day when I would be moving out of them and have to clean out the oven completely. I absolutely hate cleaning out ovens, and I've gotten in to the bad habit of cooking greasy things in it, like buffalo wings and ribs uncovered, which ends up splattering grease everywhere. It usually takes me several hours and several bottles of oven cleaner, not to mention that stuff stinks really bad and my hands are usually burning after scrubbing the stove repeatedly. I had a similar problem with a toaster oven and a rotisserie oven I had purchased, and I ended up just tossing them out, because I could not get them cleaned. For the cost of several cans of oven cleaner and other things such as metal scrubbing pads, I could just replace those appliances instead.
