Recently we had to change our fridge freezer – and whilst our initial reaction was “but it’s not that old!” we quickly realised that actually our fridge freezer had been looking after our milk and leftovers for at least 12 years; probably longer (it was so old we’d forgotten when exactly we bought it).
When we realised that, we cast our eyes around our ‘new’ kitchen – and realised that actually, our ‘new’ kitchen was now eight years old. How could that possibly be the case? But that means that our ‘new’ range cooker and ‘new’ dishwasher and ‘new’ bamboo work surface have all been seeing daily service in a busy household for three meals a day for eight years. That’s over 8,500 meals – not including baking sessions and random snackage. It still feels new to me (but then it replaced a kitchen of at least 20 years heritage, so it’s got a way to go yet. It might explain the well-used feel of the cooker, though). Like all things, kitchen appliances wear out – they become less productive and more inefficient over time. And it’s clearly easy to forget how long they’ve been sitting there, humming away as a background theme tune to your kitchen. I was amazed when I read the details of our new fridge freezer just how much more energy efficient the new one was; despite being much bigger, it costs us far less to run than the one it replaced. It did make me wonder just how much continuing to run an old appliance costs.
Unbeknown to me, someone somewhere has obviously declared it the season of Appliance Doom; we’ve had an engineer out to fix our dishwasher three times in the last year, and just this week he’s condemned it to the Great Dishwasher Park In The Sky. Yes, this is my fed up face.
So whilst the children are all enjoying* the novelty of washing and drying by hand, we’re now on the hunt for a new dishwasher. We’ve scoured the obvious places, but in the same way we didn’t realise until this year that Carpetright do beds, I had no idea until we started the #FixItFriday series that Homebase do kitchen appliances!
No, really, they do!
And having a quick squizz, I can get this full-size integrated Bush dishwasher for under £200. It’s got an A++ rating, and is 14 place settings – so bigger than my current dishwasher. Mostly, I think, because of that handy cutlery tray at the wasted space at the top which frees up that annoying basket space on the bottom drawer.
I’m sold.
So what appliance in your kitchen do you just know is running on a wing and a prayer right now?
*they don’t really enjoy it so much as know they’ll suffer the consequences if they don’t assist in a timely and willing manner…
