The maintenance that actually prevents appliance repairs

Refrigerator: keep the condenser coils clean, the safe way

The condenser coils are the black grid under or behind your refrigerator. The compressor pushes hot refrigerant through them and a small fan pulls room air across them to dump the heat. When they are coated in dust and pet hair, that heat has nowhere to go. The compressor runs longer, runs hotter, and eventually the fridge stops holding temperature.

It is one of the most common things behind "my fridge is not cooling," and nearly every owner's manual lists coil cleaning as required maintenance. That cuts both ways: skipping it is a standard reason warranty claims get denied, and going further than the manual allows is another.

What to do, and where to stop:

• Unplug the refrigerator first.
• Remove the front kick plate only. Do not remove any other panel.
• Use a vacuum with a soft brush attachment. Nothing else: no wire brush, no compressed air, no scraping. The fins bend easily and a bent grid cools worse than a dusty one.
• If you cannot reach the coils without removing a panel, stop there.
• Twice a year is enough for most homes. With pets, every three months.

Have us do it instead if: the unit is built-in, counter-depth or sealed at the back; the coils are behind a panel; or the refrigerator is under a manufacturer or extended warranty and you would rather not touch it. It is a short visit, and on a warranty unit it keeps the maintenance record clean.

Refrigerator: change the water filter and check the supply line

The filter light comes on at six months. Most people change the filter when the light has been on for a year. Past a certain point the filter restricts flow, the ice maker fills slowly or not at all, and mineral scale starts building at the inlet. On well water it happens faster.

While you are back there, look at the water supply line. The thin plastic lines that came with a lot of fridges get brittle and split. When one goes, it floods the kitchen floor and usually the control board on the bottom of the fridge with it. A braided stainless line costs a few dollars.

What to do: change the filter on the schedule the light tells you. Replace a plastic supply line with a braided one. If the ice maker has ice built up around it, that is a door seal, valve or defrost issue, not the ice maker, so call before you replace the assembly.

Dishwasher: clean the filter monthly and scrape the plates

Every dishwasher made in the last fifteen years has a removable filter in the bottom of the tub. It twists out. Almost nobody knows it is there. When it clogs, the machine cannot drain, the pump strains, water sits in the sump between cycles, and biological growth starts. The smell is the first sign. The next sign is a dishwasher that will not drain and a service call.

Scraping plates matters more than rinsing them. Rinsing is optional. Bones, seeds, labels and toothpicks are not optional. They go through the filter into the drain hose, where they collect as sludge until the machine stops draining.

What to do: once a month, pull the lower rack, twist out the filter, rinse it under the tap with a brush. Wipe the door gasket. Run an empty hot cycle with a dishwasher cleaner every few months. Keep tall pans and utensils from blocking the spray arms; a broken arm is a cheap part, but a machine run with one broken is a wash-quality complaint that turns into a pump complaint.

Front-load washer: leave the door open and wipe the gasket

The big rubber gasket on a front-load washer has a fold at the bottom that traps water, lint and detergent. Closed door, warm laundry room, and in a few months you have black mold in the fold and a smell in every load. Once it is deep in the rubber, the gasket gets replaced, and no manufacturer covers that.

What to do: after the last load of the day, wipe the inside fold of the gasket with a towel and leave the door cracked open. Use high-efficiency detergent in the amount on the cap, not more. Run the tub-clean cycle monthly. If you already have a torn or leaking gasket, stop running the machine; a small leak under a washer becomes a subfloor repair.

Dryer: the lint screen is not the whole story

Cleaning the lint screen every load is the minimum. The lint that gets past the screen collects inside the cabinet around the heating element and in the duct to the outside. When the airflow drops, the high-limit thermostat trips, the dryer runs cool, loads take two cycles, and eventually the thermostat or the element fails from cycling. Lint packed around a heating element is also how dryer fires start.

What to do: every load, clean the screen. Every six months, pull the dryer out and clean the duct behind it and the exterior vent hood. If the hood flap will not open when the dryer runs, the duct is clogged. Every year or two, have the cabinet interior cleaned; that is a service call, but a cheap one. Replace foil or plastic flex duct with rigid or semi-rigid metal.

Gas range: keep the ignitors dry and the burner caps seated

A surface burner that clicks and will not light is usually a wet or dirty ignitor, or a burner cap that got put back crooked after cleaning. Boil-overs are the main cause. Let the burner dry fully before you assume it is broken. If one ignitor clicks constantly even with the knob off, there is moisture in the switch and it needs to dry out or be replaced, but it is not an emergency.

What to do: wipe up boil-overs when the stove is cool. Seat the burner caps flat. Do not run the oven's self-clean cycle right before a holiday; the extreme heat is the most common trigger for a failed oven ignitor or a blown thermal fuse, and you do not want that the day before you need the oven.

When maintenance is not the answer

None of this fixes a compressor that has lost refrigerant, a control board that took a power surge, a bearing that howls, or a defrost heater that quit. Those are repairs. The point of the list is to keep the avoidable calls off your bill so the money goes to the real ones.

If you are past the maintenance stage and something is not working, tell us what it is doing. We diagnose first and quote the repair before we do it, and if the appliance is not worth fixing we say so.