Reduce the risk of a premature appliance failure with these simple tips.
The modern home is packed with appliances, each of which can represent a significant investment. Naturally you want to to protect this investment and get the best value for your money by extending the service life of your appliances as much as possible. And even if money is no object for you, making your appliances last longer is still a worthy pursuit from an environmental perspective, as you can reduce waste associated with prematurely failed appliances and carbon emissions associated with transport of new ones.
Here are some key appliance care tips that will help reduce the risk of problems with your appliances and prolong their service life.
Refrigerator Tips
- Keep coils clean. Dirty coils kill your fridge’s ability to generate cooled air efficiently. Keep them working their best by vacuuming the coils every few months.
- Change water filters. Failing to replace your refrigerator water filters every 6 months or as recommended by the manufacturer can cause more than just bad-tasting water and ice. It can lead to mineral buildup that can potentially clog water lines and cause a leak.
- Clean door gaskets. Use an all-purpose cleaner to keep the strip of rubber around fridge and freezer doors clean. This will help make a good seal to lock in cooled air and keep your unit working efficiently.
Oven & Range Tips
- Use autoclean sparingly. Besides using a lot of energy, running the autoclean cycle on your oven can actually increase the risk of premature failure of the appliance. Why? Because the intense temperatures required for autoclean can actually damage the electrical fuses and/or heating element.
- Keep drip pans shiny. If the drip pans beneath your stove’s burners become blackened with burnt-on food residue, they won’t reflect heat as efficiently and you might even think the whole stove needs to be replaced to solve the problem. In reality you can solve this issue by spending a few bucks on new drip pans or lining your dirty ones with clean aluminum foil.
Washer & Dryer Tips
- Never overload the washer. Putting too much laundry in the washer, or running the unit with an unbalanced load, can increase wear and tear on the machine and cause significant mechanical problems.
- Clean up dryer lint. Besides cleaning the lint trap after every use, you also need to make sure lint gets removed periodically from the dryer vent and from the inside of the dryer. If you haven’t been keeping up with these tasks, your dryer will become inefficient and may even be ruined by a fire.
The Single Most Important Tip for All Appliances
In addition to following the above care and maintenance tips, the single most important thing you need to do in order to get the best performance and the longest service life from your appliances is to get fast appliance repair at the first sign of a problem. By calling American Appliance Repair for help right away, you can solve small problems before they have the chance to cause increased wear and tear that could lead to the need for a more expensive repair or even ruin your appliance completely.
