I have some advice for folks who are in the category your trying to save a few hundred here and there on buying supplemental “warranties”…
If you really want to save money, it doesn’t hurt to learn a few small to medium maintenance things for your basic appliances.
Especially in the this modern day where information is posted free or new free on the internet, it really isn’t *that* difficult to do most of the repair/replacement work yourself out of warranty for most of the appliances.
Frig, stove, oven, dishwasher, garbage disposal, washers, dryers, plumbing fixtures…Most of this stuff isn’t rocket science and very little of how these appliances work have changed that much over time.
If you happen to run into electronic problems, most repairmen(women) don’t really do any true repair. They are parts swappers. They spend about 5-15 mins diagnosing which board/motor/etc needs to be replaced (which you could figure out yourself by following a bunch of online how-to-troubleshoot), and then they order parts from their supplier and charge you 30-40% more than they pay for the parts, and billing you out ridiculously for labor.
There are plenty of online parts stores that you can use to search by your model/serial number, and plenty o them even have schematics and exploded views of your appliance, along with instructions on troubleshooting and removing replacing parts.
If there’s any doubt on which specific thing is actually broken, just order them all, and replace them one by one until your problem is fixed, and return all the parts you didn’t use (minus any restocking fee). Also, if you use one online parts store, you usually end up being able to get the manufacturer’s part number. Then what you can do is google/froogle that part number to see if there’s any other appliance store that sells the same parts for a lot cheaper.
I can tell you if you call places like Sears for appliance repair, you are definitely bending over and getting reamed.
I’ve had my 15 year old frig fail on me twice (switch related), and repairman wanted a minimum of $200 just to diagnose each time (excluding parts/labor for the actual repair). Took me 1 hr of reading about how a frig works, looking at my specific model’s schematic, and a few mins to actually replace the part(s). Total cost for parts in both failures was like $50 (excluding my time).
