Wednesday, January 28, 2015

This Is Why We CAN Have Nice Things

Last weekend, my wife took some clothes out of our dryer and put a new load in. She pushed the button to start it and .... nothing happened. About 30 seconds later, it beeped and showed an error code:



Uh-oh. A little Googling told me this particular code means the main controller board is bad and needs to be replaced. The part typically costs $250 and that doesn't include the labor to install it. The total cost ended up being $398.

Luckily, I have been preparing for this contingency. As I posted last May, my budget includes putting some money away in an Appliance Replacement Fund. Unfortunately, that fund doesn't have enough yet to completely replace the washer and dryer (I'd want to replace them both at the same time), but it does have enough to cover the repair cost of the dryer. So a potential monthly budget busting event has been averted thanks to planning. Yay for budgets!

The dryer is 8 years old and, as I feared, its time appears to be reaching an end. Hopefully, the repair will buy me enough time to save up enough to replace both the washer and dryer. I'll probably need take a new look at my budget and make some changes though. I was contributing $100 a month towards this fund, but given the failure, I may try to bump that up a bit so that I can hit my goal sooner.

In Tesla-related news, I came across this video of people experiencing the acceleration of a Model S for the first time. I can't wait to experience it myself!

2 comments:

  1. I am kind of surprised that your dryer had a problem with its solid state electronics and that it happened at 8 years. That said, like you I prefer to replace my washer and dryer together. The pair I bought in AZ over 20 years ago were still in good working order when I replaced them a few years ago with modern front loaders with steam.

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  2. Peg said she heard a popping sound when she turned it on, so I'm guessing a capacitor blew up. That's happened to some video cards of mine and seems common in AZ, where we have spiky power levels. I wasn't there when the board was replaced, so I didn't get to look at it.

    I think our next washer will be a top loader. The front loader we have now ties our clothes in knots.

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