Why do appliance repairs (dishwasher, laundry, fridge, etc.) seemingly cost as much as the appliances themselves?
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The parts are usually pretty cheap. If you do it yourself it’s not all that bad. What you are paying for is a technician’s time, and there’s more of it than you think.
For example, right now my fridge is making a weird noise. I’m 90% certain the worst it needs is a condenser fan replacement. That requires about $70 and a screwdriver.
However, the fridge also weighs an awful lot and I do not have a great back or a dolly. So if I try to wrestle it away from my wall I can see myself tipping the stupid thing over and hurting myself. The kind of dolly I need costs about $200, and I’m still worried I’d manage to misuse it and I’m also not 100% sure the condenser fan is the only problem.
It’s going to cost me a minimum of $75 to get a technician to come to my house. Part of that is because he has to drive here from his last job, which could take 20-30 minutes of time alone. He already has the $200 dolly and presumably the $70 fan, so I don’t have to wait on shipping or pay for tools I don’t need. He’s going to probably spend 10-20 minutes moving the fridge, 10-20 minutes disassembling parts, 20-30 minutes investigating the problem and replacing a part, then another 20-30 minutes putting everything back right again and making sure the problem seems solved. The quote for everything is about $175 with some error bars around it.
So even if we decide there is nothing to replace he’s going to have to spend at least an hour and a half working with me if I count the driving. $75 for that is about $50/hour, which sounds steep. But it’s his back at risk, and his equipment he brings that I need.
I’d have to pay $200 to get the dolly or probably $30 to rent it in addition to driving to and from a rental place. I’d have to pay $70 for the fan myself. So to DIY it, I’d have to spend anything from $100 to $300.
So honestly, paying 20% of the cost of the fridge to get him to fix it makes sense because I’d have to pay more than that to fix it myself.
(My worst-case would be if the compressor is failing, those are more like $400 and much more labor to replace. If that happens we may consider getting a new fridge anyway. But that’s not likely, and part of why those parts cost so much is they’re made to be not very prone to failure even if they’re a little abused.)
**edit** I think it’s worth saying the fancier the appliance the less likely this gets. I should’ve included that.
Less fancy appliances tend to be “electromechanical”. That means they use fairly simple components like switches and relays and motors that can be tested to figure out what’s busted and sourced for fairly cheap. Part of why they’re cheap is often a lot of models use the same or similar parts so they just get produced in large quantities.
More fancy appliances tend to have small computers inside of them, and often those small computers consist of one single logic board with no replaceable components. Even if they were replaceable, it’d take a lot of special equipment to figure out which parts were broken. So these pieces tend to be expensive and can only be “repaired” by replacing them. These logic boards tend to be custom-produced per unit, almost like the manufacturers intend to make money selling replacements.
If you hear people talking about “right to repair” laws, it concerns that practice. Those people want laws that require manufacturers to use more replaceable parts and build devices in such a way that people are more likely to be able to make DIY repairs for affordable costs.
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