Repair it, or replace it?
You have a quote and a decision to make. This compares what each option actually costs per year — including how long each buys you and what each costs to run — rather than just whether the quote sounds like a lot.
It is genuinely close — either choice is defensible
- Costed over the same 10 years, repairing works out at about £88 a year against £84 a year for replacing — including what each costs to run.
- The quote is 63% of what a replacement costs. The usual trade guidance is to think hard above 50%.
- At 6 years there should be around 4 years of life left, which is long enough for a repair to pay for itself.
- The two options are close enough that the numbers do not decide it. If the appliance has been reliable and you like it, repair. If it has needed work before, put the money towards a replacement instead.
The working
| Over 10 years | Repair it | Replace it |
|---|---|---|
| Up front | £120 | £190 |
| Running cost a year | £65 | £65 |
| Expected life bought | 4 yrs | 10 yrs |
| Total over the period | £882 | £838 |
| Cost per year | £88 | £84 |
The repair column assumes that when the current dishwasher does reach the end of its life you replace it then, so both columns cover the same 10 years. That is what makes the per-year figures comparable.
What next
Before you commit, it is worth checking what the fault actually is — a good number of quotes are for things like a blocked filter that cost nothing to fix yourself.
How this is worked out
Most repair-or-replace advice reduces to a single rule: if the repair costs more than half a replacement, replace it. That rule is a reasonable starting point and it is one of the inputs here, but on its own it ignores the two things that usually decide it.
The first is how much life each option buys. A £150 repair on a three-year-old machine and the same repair on a fourteen-year-old one are not the same purchase. The second is what each costs to run. An ageing fridge freezer runs continuously and can cost £40 to £50 a year more in electricity than a modern one — which over a decade dwarfs the repair bill. An oven used a few hours a week barely differs between generations, so the same logic does not apply.
So both options are costed over the same number of years. Repairing buys the appliance's remaining life, after which you replace it anyway; replacing resets the clock now. Dividing each total by the same period gives a cost per year you can actually compare.
What we assume
- Electricity at 27p per kWh, roughly the Ofgem cap unit rate for a standard variable tariff.
- Average service lives drawn from published UK trade and consumer-body figures — for example 11 years for a washing machine and 13 for a fridge freezer. Yours may well outlast that.
- A repaired appliance does not reset to nominal life. It has already shown one failure, so the model credits it only with its remaining years.
- Energy use is estimated for typical household use and scaled by age, not measured from your actual appliance.
These are averages, so treat the output as a steer rather than a verdict. Where the two options come out close the tool says so, because at that point the numbers genuinely do not decide it.