Wait... Don't Throw That Out!

When we moved into this house, it came with the appliances. It wasn’t until after a few loads of laundry that we realized why the seller had no qualms giving up her appliances. The washer shimmers like Britney Spears in her hey day and squeals like a cat on a chalkboard. I’m serious, it sounds that bad.


Of course, I’d like a new machine but money is tight and in my new green conscious thinking, it doesn’t make sense to toss out an entire machine when surely we could find a part to fix it. (Something my husband has been meaning to do for a year now). Sure we could hire a repairman but that’s not exactly in the budget these days, either.

So when I received an email from PartSelect, an online retailer of appliance parts, it couldn’t have come at a more convenient time. Especially when I learned that they have installation videos (already available on 105 of their parts with more being shot each week) that shows a repair technician, Steve, installing each part step by step.

Part Select has also recently added a Virtual Repairman – a free tool that helps you figure out exactly what’s wrong with your appliance. They’ve spent years doing the research and collecting data on symptoms for each individual model and put that information together to diagnose exactly which part is causing the problems and how to fix it.

Sounds great, right? Well, I was a little skeptical.  After all my machine was at least 8 years old and there are so many different kinds out there what are the odds they'd have information on mine.  I was wrong. I plugged in the part number and immediately shown a list of symptoms. I clicked on “noisy” and up comes a list of parts that might fix the problem. Of course, I’m not sure if this is the right part for the problem so I scroll for more information and see a ton of customer comments where they describe in more detail what their symptoms were and it was easy to see that I had a match. PartSelect customers are able to rate on how understandable the instructions are, give their own tips on how they repaired their machine and what tools they used.

Amazing. I’ve lived with this problem for a whole year to find out that it’s a $60.00 part and easily fixable by my husband. It even lists what tools are required, which are all ones that we have kicking around the house. Not some specialty tool that someone had told my husband we needed.

My understanding that no other online part site has the ability to help their customers at every stage of the repair: diagnosing the problem, figuring out the part needed, getting the part, and then installing the part.

PartSelect is a BBB Accredited Business, offers same day shipping, 30 day returns and one-year warranty. It has a Canadian dedicated site as well as a U.S. site. (.com or .ca)  So while this may be a different sort of recommendation post than I normally do, in this day and age of saving money and reducing what we toss into our landfill, it behooves all of us to find a way to give new life to these old machines of ours.



***Disclosure: I was compensated for this post by Part Select; however, I blog with integrity and the experience I have written about herein is a true and accurate re-accounting of what occurred with our washing machine. ****