CDA washing machine PCB

[CDAhelp]

Good evening

not sure if this is the right place for this, but I would really appreciate some help.

The house we moved into had an integrated CDA washing machine that stopped working after a fuse shorted. After being stood up by a couple of local engineers, we decided to go with British Gas and an engineer came round and told us the issue was the PCB. That was over 3 weeks ago and since then they've cancelled two appointments at the last minute and not turned up to a third after my partner had taken the day off work to meet them.

Their excuse is that they've ordered the part but it isn't in stock. We've looked the part up on espares etc and it says its been discontinued by the supplier. At this point are we better off cancelling the repair and replacing the washing machine or is there a chance of finding it somewhere?

If it can be found, should we leave replacing it to the professionals or is it something that we could do ourselves? British Gas have been really unreliable - I understand if they've not got the part, but the lack of communication has been exasperating.

Thanks in advance!

[Whitegoodshelp (Andy)]

Hi, yes if it was me, I'd be tempted to abort and replace unless you know it's only a few years old. Sadly washing machine repairs have become unrecognisable from the industry I started in many years ago. Back in the 70s and 80s it was actually a very profitable business to be in, but since then it has slowly declined to a point where it is very difficult to make money from carrying out repairs on appliances that cost so little in real terms. So many of the local independent repair businesses have gone bust, or people have retired and the business has never been replaced. It seems that appliance repairs is now dominated by very large national companies, many of who just hoover up business from Google and pass on to 3rd parties. It is very difficult for these national repair companies to provide a fast and efficient, quality service. They deal in numbers. They need their engineers to repair as many appliances as possible at each day and thrive on the really simple faults that their engineers can fix straightaway. Any fault that requires parts ordering with one of these company tends to end up taking weeks and then if the part is out of stock, or the wrong part has been ordered it can drag on for many weeks more.

Why are appliance repairs such a pain these days?