The brands we see most in the Illawarra, and what usually goes on each
People ask me which brand to buy about as often as they ask me what is wrong with the one they have. I have never given a straight answer, and I am not going to start now, because the honest one is that there is no bad brand at the moment and there has not been for a while. There are brands that fail in ways you can fix and brands that fail in ways you cannot, and that distinction is worth more than any star rating.
What I can tell you is what comes up in the diary. I have been doing this locally since the nineties, and after enough years you stop diagnosing from first principles and start diagnosing from the badge on the door. You walk into a laundry, see a particular model, hear the noise, and you already know what is in your hand before you have taken the panel off. That is not skill so much as repetition.
So, in rough order of how often we see them.
Bosch
The most common badge in Illawarra kitchens, by a distance, mostly dishwashers. They are well built and they are extremely serviceable, which are two different virtues and both worth having.
The failures are boringly predictable. E15 is the anti-flood float in the base tray, which means water has got somewhere it should not and the machine has locked itself down. E18 is a drain fault, and it is the filter or the pump nine times out of ten. On the washing machines, F21 is a drum rotation fault, usually carbon brushes on the older motors.
Two things I like about Bosch as a repairer. The error codes actually mean something, unlike some brands where every fault throws the same generic code. And parts are widely available and not outrageous. If you have a Bosch dishwasher throwing a code, the specifics are on our Bosch page.
Where they let people down is the door seal on the dishwashers and the way the drain hose sags under the sink after the plumber has stuffed it into the cupboard. That last one is not Bosch's fault, but it is where their smells and their drainage complaints come from, and it is covered properly in why your dishwasher smells.
Fisher & Paykel
The New Zealand ones. There is a lot of loyalty to this brand around here and it is mostly earned.
The direct-drive washers are the mechanically simplest washing machines in the country. No belt, no gearbox, the motor drives the drum directly. Fewer things to break, and the things that do break come off in one piece. I have brought back plenty of these that anyone else would have written off.
The DishDrawer is the divisive one. People either love them or have never got on with them. As a repairer I will say that a well-maintained DishDrawer is fine and a neglected one is a nuisance, because the lid seal and the drawer seal do a lot of work and they are the first thing to give. If you have one, keep the seals clean and do not slam the drawer.
Their fridges use multiple fans and sensors to hold separate zones, which is why an F&P fridge fault often shows up as one compartment drifting warm while everything else stays right. That is a sensor or a fan, not the refrigeration. Details on the Fisher & Paykel page.
Westinghouse and Electrolux
Same family, and between them they account for most of the older ovens still working in this region, some of them thirty years old and still going.
The failure is almost always the element or the thermostat, and both are cheap and both are quick. I would happily put a new element in a twenty-year-old Westinghouse wall oven and expect it to see out another five. They were built when ovens were simple, and the simple ones keep going.
The newer stuff has boards in it like everything else, and boards are where the maths gets harder. A control board on a six-year-old oven can be a good chunk of the price of a new oven, and that is a conversation I would rather have honestly than talk someone into. We set out how we weigh it in repair or replace. The Westinghouse page has the model-specific side of it.
Samsung and LG
The Korean pair. Both make genuinely good appliances now, whatever anyone tells you about ten years ago, and both fail in their own particular ways.
The fridges are where I see them most. The refrigeration itself is usually sound; what goes is everything bolted onto it. Ice makers, in-door water lines, filters, and the fans and sensors that manage the zones. If your Samsung or LG fridge is not cooling right, the odds favour a fan or a defrost fault over the compressor, which is the good news, because it is the difference between a repair and a replacement. Some of that overlaps with the noises we go through in why your fridge is making noise.
The washing machines are solid. LG's direct drive motors in particular have been very good to their owners, and the Samsung page has the fault codes we get asked about most. What I would flag on both brands is that they update models fast, and a part for a seven-year-old model can take longer to source than the same part for an older European machine. Not unavailable, just slower, and worth knowing if you need the machine back this week.
Smeg and the European end
Smeg, Asko, and the built-in Italian and Scandinavian gear that goes into the nicer kitchens up and down the coast.
The build quality is real. The doors are heavier, the hinges are better, the enamel holds up. What you pay for it, apart from the sticker price, is parts. A specific part for a Smeg freestanding cooker can be a two or three week wait, occasionally longer if it has to come in from overseas, and there is nothing I can do to speed that up. It is worth factoring in when you buy, especially if it is the only oven in the house at Christmas. What we handle on the Italian side is set out on the Smeg page.
Heavy doors are also what makes the hinges the recurring job on this end of the market. A big freestanding oven door puts real load on its hinges, and when they go the door drops and stops sealing, which changes how the whole thing cooks. That whole story is in oven doors, seals and thermostats.
The budget end
Euromaid, Omega, Haier, Hisense and the rest. I am not going to be rude about them, because they do a job and not everybody has $2,000 for an oven.
The honest position is this. The mechanical parts in a budget appliance are usually fine, and if a pump or an element goes we can fix it for a sensible number. What kills them is the control board, and on a $500 machine a $350 board is the end of the line. That is not a criticism of the brand so much as arithmetic.
If you are buying at this end, my advice is to buy the simplest model in the range. Fewer functions means fewer electronics means fewer of the failures that write the machine off. The one with the dial beats the one with the touchscreen, every time, for exactly this reason.
What actually matters more than the badge
Three things, and none of them are printed on the box.
How the appliance is installed. A dishwasher with a sagging drain hose, a dryer with a crushed duct, a fridge shoved so tight against the wall that the condenser cannot breathe: I would rather have a cheap appliance installed properly than an expensive one installed badly, and I see the second one far more often.
Whether anyone cleans the filters. This is the whole ballgame on dryers and dishwashers, and it is free.
And salt air. Every brand corrodes at the coast, and the ones out at Port Kembla and along the northern beaches show it first. External condenser coils, cabinet screws, dryer element terminals. There is no brand that is immune and there is no coating that beats a rinse and a look once a year.
Two things worth doing regardless of what you own. Keep the receipt, because consumer guarantees run past the manufacturer's warranty and a premium appliance is held to a higher expectation of how long it should last, not a lower one. And if something fails in a way that seems dangerous rather than merely annoying, put the model number into the product recalls register before you ring anybody, because it happens more than people think and a recall is repaired at the manufacturer's cost.
We repair every brand named here, and a good many that are not, from Helensburgh through Wollongong and down past Kiama to Nowra. The technician diagnoses the fault and quotes it before starting, and you are free to say no at that point. The assessment fee is $125 across the Illawarra and $145 further out. Book a repair or call 02 4229 3777.
Have the model number ready when you call. Not the brand, the model number, off the sticker inside the door or behind the drawer. It is the single thing that decides whether I turn up with the part in the van or turn up twice.
