It is always a good practise to buy extended warranty for high prices home appliances such as electric cooking oven range, washing machine, clothes drying machine, fridge, dishwasher, furnace, hot water tank. People would say you won't really be using the warranty anyways, because these home appliances are manufactured according to high standards and has a very slim chance of breaking down. But based on my own experience, I was always glad I had bought the extended warranty on all of my home appliances I ever bought.
Recently I bought a new Frigidaire cooking oven range and also included the extended 4 years warranty on top of the 1 year manufacturer warranty. I knew that up front, the cost you pay for extended warranty might seem quite high about 25% of the actual price of the home appliances. In fact, if you look at the repair cost you could incurred on your own, if you never had the extended warranty, buying extended warranty will start to make sense after all.
During the first year of use, I found that my heating element coil was frequently turning off by itself when it gets hot and it wouldn't turn on for sometime. Then after few minutes it would turn back on. This cycle of turning on and off made me really impatient as it was taking me more than an hour just to cook two meals. I used to be able to be down withing half an hour with my very old cooking range oven.
So I called the Frigidaire company and since it was still under the 1 year manufacturer warranty, they send someone to check out the problem. It turned out that this was the new feature of most new cooking oven range heating element top. The feature was introduced to prevent any people unintentionally leaving the cooking element turned on for a very long time. I hated this new feature as it was delaying my cooking time with this automatic on and off feature.
The repairman unfortunately said he couldn't do anything about this problem. Then i had to stick with this frustrating feature for quite some time. On my second year of using the same cooking range oven, the top cooking element actually caught on a small fire and that burned out the wires and the heating element. Even the bottom portion of the round element underneath was burnt quite black.
So now, I couldn't call the Frigidaire company for warranty because it was past the one year period for the manufacturer warranty. Luckily I had bought the 4 years extended warranty and now I could use this warranty. Home depot had some contract with another appliances repair company and they send out a repairman to my place.
The repairman did a great job in fixing the problem and he helped me install a new heating element on the top of the cooking oven range. This new heating element was so much better than the original one and it doesn't turn on and off all the time. He didn't charge a penny after the repair service since my appliance was under extended warranty. Just for my knowledge sake, I asked him how much would the bill have come up to approximately. He told me that it was a bill for about $400 for his service rendered.
Doing repairs on home appliances is a costly thing and the repairman usually charges upward of $200 for each visit and successfully repairing your machine. This is not including the cost of the parts that he will have to get to repair your home appliances. $200 is usually just the labour cost of them visiting your home and doing the repairs. So, paying $300 or even $400 for extended warranty is totally worth every penny.
5 years is a very long time for a home appliances not to break down at all. Somehow or the other something will break down in the parts of your appliances during the long course of 5 years. I had my Samsung washer stopped draining and showing some strange error message, and luckily I had the extended warranty I bought on it which I used to call for repairs. My 1 year warranty with the manufacturer was just over and in the past, I also used the manufacturer warranty once when I could hear a very loud drum rolling noise with my washing machine.
My uncle once boasted that he didn't need any extended warranty on his samsung washer machine. Then one day his washer machine started acting weird and malfunctioning, but he was lucky that Samsung did a recall on his model of clothes washer machine, and Samsung actually replaced his machine with a brand new one. I would say he was taking a chance too big to play with, in case if really his washer machine breaks down, he would need to hire a repairman which will cost him more than the cost he would have paid for the extended warranty.
