How Long Do Home Appliances Last? When to Repair and When to Replace

Something in your house will break this year. That is not pessimism, it is arithmetic: a typical home contains fifteen or so things with a working life and if they last a decade each then roughly one and a half of them reach the end of it every year.

What makes that expensive is not the failure. It is being surprised by it and then making a decision about a few hundred pounds while standing in a kitchen full of water.

So it is worth knowing roughly how long things last, what tends to go first and how to make the repair or replace decision before you are making it under pressure.

How long things typically last

These are typical ranges rather than guarantees. Usage matters enormously: a washing machine running two loads a day in a household of five will not see the far end of this table; one running twice a week may beat it comfortably.

The useful thing about this table is not any individual row. It is noticing how many of your things were installed at the same time, because a house fitted out in one go tends to need replacing in one go.

Repair or replace: how to decide

There is a rule of thumb that holds up well: if the repair costs more than half of replacing the item, replace it.

It is not the whole answer, though. Three other things swing the decision.

Where the item is in its life. A four hundred pound repair to a three year old boiler is usually sensible. The same repair to a fourteen year old boiler is buying a few months at a poor rate.

What it costs to run. An old fridge freezer or tumble dryer can cost noticeably more in electricity than a current one, so a marginal repair on an inefficient appliance is worse value than the quote suggests.

What failed. Some failures are wear items and some are the beginning of the end. A door seal or an element is a repair. Bearings on a washing machine or a heat exchanger on a boiler are usually the machine telling you something.

One practical point: get the diagnosis before you decide. A call out fee to find out what is actually wrong is money well spent, because "it needs a new pump" and "it needs a new pump and the drum is going" are different decisions.

What that means in practice

The time limits above are the window for bringing a claim, not a promise that everything lasts that long. What counts as a reasonable life depends on the item and what you paid for it and after the first six months it is on you to show the fault was there from the start rather than caused by wear or use.

In practice that means an expensive appliance failing at three or four years is often worth pursuing, especially if the fault is a known one. A budget appliance failing at five probably is not.

What makes the difference is evidence. You will need proof of purchase, the model and serial number and ideally an engineer's report saying what failed and why. This is the unglamorous reason to keep receipts: not for the warranty, which is short, but for the years afterwards when the burden of proof is yours and a receipt is the cheapest evidence you will ever hold.

If a retailer will not engage, the manufacturer sometimes will as a goodwill gesture; for a purchase over one hundred pounds paid by credit card there may be a further route through the card provider. Neither is guaranteed, but both are worth asking about before writing the item off.

What actually makes things last longer

Very little of this is surprising and almost none of it gets done.

• Clean the filters. Dishwashers, tumble dryers, extractor hoods and washing machines all have one; a blocked filter makes the motor work harder for years before anything fails.
• Service the boiler annually. It is usually a warranty condition and it catches the cheap failures before they become the expensive one.
• Do not overload the washing machine. Bearings are the thing that kills washing machines and load is what kills bearings.
• Run a hot maintenance wash occasionally. It clears the detergent residue that eventually reaches the pump.
• Descale in a hard water area. Kettles, dishwashers, washing machines and boilers all suffer and much of England is hard water.
• Leave a gap behind the fridge. A compressor that cannot vent heat runs longer and dies sooner.

The general principle is that most appliances do not die of old age. They die of something small that was left.

Knowing what you own

Almost nobody can list the appliances in their own home with dates. That is not carelessness, it is that the information arrives one item at a time over a decade and never gets collected anywhere.

The cost of not having it shows up in small ways repeatedly: ordering the wrong part, paying for a repair that was still covered, replacing something that had two good years left, or losing a claim because the receipt went in a drawer that was cleared out.

It shows up in one large way too. When you sell, the age and condition of the boiler, the windows and the kitchen are exactly what a buyer and a surveyor want to know about; being able to say precisely is worth more than being able to say roughly. That is the same case as the one for a digital property logbook and the same case as keeping a maintenance record.