I’ve already had the first domestic disaster of the year. On New Year’s Day, my tumble dryer stopped working, with a soggy load of towels inside and another load in the washing machine. It looked to be electrically dead – no lights on the front panel at all. I tried changing the fuse in the plug, in a forlorn hope that might fix it, but it made no difference. It would happen in the middle of a long Bank Holiday weekend, with no possibility of getting it repaired or replaced as quickly as I should like.
I phoned the local Domestic Appliance Repair people on Tuesday and asked them to send someone round to look at it and try to fix it. The earliest they could make was Thursday afternoon, as there was a long queue of people whose appliances had broken over the holidays. A very pleasant chap came round and diagnosed that the main control PCB had failed. The machine is only a few years old, but of course the particular model is already obsolete. It may or may not be possible to get a replacement board, but it could take ages and I was warned it could cost nearly £200. That’s ridiculous! For only very slightly more than that, I could have a brand new tumble dryer delivered, fitted, and the old one taken away.
I said I wanted a new tumble dryer asap, and what did they have in stock that they could deliver the next day? The chap phoned the store to check, and found that they were completely out – they had sold the last one in stock just minutes earlier. However, they were having a delivery Friday morning and did I want to reserve one of those? I checked that it wasn’t one of the brands that’s currently setting kitchens and houses on fire up and down the country, and it’s not. The price was reasonable, so I said yes, provided that it was delivered and fitted on Friday afternoon in time for me to spend the weekend catching up on the laundry.
They turned up as promised this afternoon to deliver the new tumble dryer, and told me that there was a massive run on them at the moment – mine was the sixth one that they had been called out to this week! The chap said it was almost as if the manufacturers had programmed them all to fail simultaneously! As they took the old one out from under the counter I noticed that it was rather dusty behind there – accumulated fluff from the tumble dryer no doubt. So I thought I’d take the offortunity to give it a quick once over with the vacuum cleaner, which was working fine on Sunday. It was dead as a dodo. It’s probably about ten years old, so I can’t complain too much, but it’s still very annoying and won’t be economical to repair. I’ll have to replace that too.
They say that things happen in threes, so I’m waiting with baited breath to see which of my appliances fails next. It really annoys me that there’s such a throw-away culture these days and that it’s rarely easy or economical to repair broken household goods. It’s a right scam having to replace everything anew every few years……
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We had our “third event” yesterday, and I had been waiting to see how bad it was – when I unpacked 3 boxes of china that our children has given us for Christmas, a plate was completely smashed in each box. Fortunately they were from John Lewis, and will be replaced immediately. So perhaps you will have a lucky third as well. Happy 2017.