Repair or replace: Our new used microwave

Brian and I are creatures of habit, especially where breakfast is concerned. My unvarying routine in the morning—at least on weekday mornings—is to pop a couple of slices of bread in the toaster oven, mix up some cocoa and sugar with boiling water in a mug, add milk, and put it in the microwave for one minute. Meanwhile, Brian is loading up his bowl with raisin bran, oats, flaxseeds, nuts, and raisins. (This part of the routine is now in danger, as we discovered on our last trip to Aldi that the price of raisin bran has gone up, leaving us with no packaged cereals that can meet our 10-cent-per-ounce cutoff. You may be hearing more about this in a future blog entry.)

Last week, however, this routine was rudely interrupted. When I put my cup of cocoa in the microwave, I heard a muffled "pop" that I couldn't identify. The microwave apparently continued to run—the light stayed on, the turntable turned, and the fan made noise—but when I pulled the cup out, it was still stone cold.

Not having time to tinker with the microwave at that moment, I simply heated up my cocoa in a pot. However, later that day I got an e-mail from Brian that began, "Been doing a little bit of research on the microwave problem." He found that, first of all, "the high voltage capacitor in a microwave makes it extremely hazardous for the amateur service person to tinker with"—which made it just as well that we hadn't attempted to open it up that morning. Second, the Kenmore website identified "multiple components whose failure might have caused the problem." He summed up the problem thus:

So, to service it ourselves, we'd need to
(1) Safely discharge the capacitor
(2) Identify the component or components that failed
(3) Order those items
(4) Wait for the them arrive (which might be a wait of two weeks or more for some parts)
(5) Make the repair and hope nothing is out of alignment and we're not getting microwave leakage.
The only one that I am confident of our being able to do well with our current resources and patience is #3.

He concluded with "I think this may be a problem that I'm willing throw money at."

I concurred and promptly set out to do some research of my own. First, I checked prices for microwave repairs at Home Advisor, which said it was "usually $70/hour plus the price of parts": a total of $100 to $150 on average. Then I checked ConsumerSearch to find out what a new microwave would cost and found that the best-rated "midsize" model, which was comparable to our old microwave, would cost about $150. The new microwave was readily available at Home Depot, while a shop capable of repairing the old one would take more work to track down—and, when (if) found, would almost certainly need to keep the microwave for several days. In other words, repairing would be a lot more inconvenient, and the savings would be $50 at most and possibly nothing at all. And even if we could fix the old microwave, it would still be a 6-year-old microwave, which presumably would have a shorter lifespan than a new one. In my return message to Brian, I concluded, "Much as it goes against my instincts, I think this is a case where replacing clearly makes more sense than repairing."

However, we couldn't just run out to the Home Depot and pick up the new microwave that evening, since we already had plans (our weekly D&D group). So we had to put it off one more day—and over the course of that day, I did a little more research and made a couple more discoveries. First, the microwave that ConsumerSearch recommended was discontinued by the manufacturer. Second, although it was still available online through Home Depot, there was no way easy to check to see whether any individual store had it in stock. Third, the reason it was discontinued appeared to be because it wasn't very reliable. Many of the recent user reviews complained about it breaking down within a few months—and since it was discontinued, presumably it would no longer be covered by a warranty. Even getting parts for it would be difficult.

I did a little more digging to see if I could find another midsize microwave that was similar to the recommended one, but I came up blank. The closest match I could find wasn't covered in ConsumerSearch and was roundly panned by Consumer Reports. And the ones Consumer Reports liked were mostly available in stainless finish only, which wouldn't go with our old-fashioned white-and-wood kitchen. And it was at that point I asked myself: If we can't find a new microwave that's really ideal for our purposes, why spend the money on a new one at all? Why not buy used?

So I searched Craigslist, and I managed to turn up one almost-new GE microwave, roughly the same size as our old one, for $50 in Bridgewater (about an hour away). It took a while to get through to the owner, but that evening we heard back and found it was still available, and we drove up to get it. It was a bit of a comedy of errors getting into the house; he'd attempted to text us and tell us to meet him round back in the garage, not realizing that the number I'd called him from was a landline, so he was down there and couldn't hear the doorbell when we rang. But eventually we managed to get in and complete the transaction.


Our "new" microwave is now settled in quite happily in the kitchen. We're still adjusting to a couple of things about it, like the lack of an interior light, which still makes me think "Uh oh, what's wrong?" every time I open it, and the slightly shorter interior compartment, which makes my usual bowl-and-inverted colander method of popping popcorn slightly more complicated. (I have to put the bowl in first and then the colander on top, rather than adding them both as a unit, and remove them the same way. But on the plus side, I no longer have to worry about the colander being knocked out of place by the popping kernels, because there's no room for it to move.)

But the bottom line is, we now have a microwave that's actually quite a bit newer and in better condition than our old one, and we only paid half of what it would have cost to repair it. And, since we bought secondhand, we were still saving a microwave from the landfill, even if we couldn't save ours. From an ecofrugal perspective, that's a win-win.

It didn't occur to me until this weekend that this is actually a case of history repeating itself. Five years ago, when our old blender suffered a cracked collar (the part the jar screws into) for the third time in a row, we decided to buy a secondhand one off Craigslist for $10. In that case, too, we ended up with a model that was newer and better than our old one for less than we were planning to spend on parts to fix it. (And, in fact, that same secondhand blender is still going strong five years later.)

So next time something around here breaks, unless it looks like something we can quickly and easily fix ourselves, I'm just going straight to Craigslist. It's probably cheaper than either a professional repair or a brand-new replacement, and it's definitely easier.