Nothing in life is ever straight forward. For an instance, take the simple task of how to buy major home appliances. If buying a home wasn’t stressful enough, now you need to get all the appliances. So you know what you need, you know your budget, but how do you select the best product for the least amount of money? How do you avoid potential pitfalls?
Essentially, you have to do some product research! If done correctly, it could save you significant amount of money and time down the road if the appliance had to be returned, serviced, whatever.
Basically, when it comes to buying major appliances such as the fridge, stove, dishwasher, washer and dryer here is what you need to know.
Name brands can be misleading. You may think because it’s a top of the line brand it will perform better when compared to other brands, but that’s not always the case. If you know what functionality you need, you can try to find a product with decent ratings that gives you what you need for less money. Don’t buy into the looks or brands.
Read the Reviews! Learn from other people’s experiences with the appliance. Did they report any problems? This will be the ultimate test, because chances are if it happened to them, it will probably happen to you. Avoid it. If you can.
Understand what essential features/functionalities you need from each appliance. If you can avoid having certain features, you could save money. It’s easy to get sold on features you may never use or need, so bring a friend along. Don’t buy on impulse, just shop and inform the sales person that you’re simply browsing and comparing prices.
Mind the appliances’s dimension and where you plan to put them. You don’t wanna order something that’s not going to be able to fit through the door by an inch or two.
Look for Energy Star rating as a good indicator of appliance’s energy efficiency. When it comes to washer, the front load is more efficient. Dishwashers can be set to run at night when energy costs less.
Buy manual over electronic where possible. The trend towards the nice looking, computerized digital dash brings some problems with it. Harder to fix if the sensitive controls damage. And a lot can damage them, heat, water, etc.
Find out about your warranty, you don’t normally need extended warranties as they usual are a waste of money. Also, if you need repairs who do you deal with? You want to be able to call up the service department and scheduled a service call in a reasonably quick time.
Start your search online. This will help you narrow down the list of potential appliances. Use the website’s catalog filters to narrow the results. Once you have a list of products you want to seriously explore, you can visit the actual stores, check it out in person, ask about delivery, installation options.
Buying home appliances is a big purchase and isn’t something you can quickly bring home or return back to the store. So spend some time researching now and avoid the potential problems in the future.
