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Saturday, January 24, 2009

Do you think we are stupid?

A little background - we have been having problems with our dryer lately. The sensor dry stopped working about a year ago...and it has been taking longer and longer to dry. What used to take 40 minutes to dry a full load of clothes today takes 70 minutes. Jen gave Dustin an ultimatum....get it fixed or she's buying a new one....so what does Dustin do? Sets up an appointment with Sears repair (we bought the washer and dryer at Sears 8 years ago) - today is the day the "repairman" showed up.

We were given an 8am-noon window. At 8am a man calls asking what our problem was - Jen explain it....he hums and haws...and says he is in Salt Lake and will be there in a bit. Hang up the phone and roll my eyes. I had a feeling how this was going to go. The man shows up - we re-explain the issue and he immediately says "oh it is probably your thermistor". Then runs the sensor dry and sure enough it shut off after 5 minutes as previously explained. He then says he needs to "call in" to find out if it is the thermistor or the control board.....he sits on hold for about 10 minutes...then just decides to open up the unit to look at the control board. Sure enough you can physically see a couple fried resistors on the control board.

At this point he has no clue that we are both engineers - Jen sneaks away and googles the price of a new control board ($150). He proceeds to give us a price quote for a new control board of $270 plus an additional $160 for labor. Yes - this Sears repair man wanted to charge us $430 to get our sensor dry to start working and cut down the time it takes to dry a full load of clothes. We can buy the part ourselves online for $150 and unplug the old board and plug in the new one for no cost! :) And that is why this post is entitled "Do you think we are stupid?".

1 comment:

~AnnaMarie~ said...

LOL, gotta love Sears repair. They were at my house this week too, for our dishwasher that is still under warranty. It was leaking on my hardwood. Not good. Long story short, the answer I got was "Hmmm...I can see the water marks here where it was leaking, but I can't find why it was leaking. Everything seems like it should be working correctly. Call us again if it keeps leaking." Wow. That took some expertise.