Rhonda Bracey: At Random

We got a new washing machine yesterday. Not because the old one had died, but because the touch panel on it was getting less and less responsive every time we used it. The old washing machine was a Fisher and Paykel (F&P) Smart Drive (model GW701; user manual [PDF, 2.25 MB]), and we bought it in April 1993 for the then princely sum of $1020 + $20 delivery fee (yes, I still had the receipt with the instruction manual!).

I called the 24/7 F&P customer care line a month or so ago and the lovely chap with the NZ accent (F&P is a NZ company) said that a replacement panel and electronic bits inside the machine would be about $400 plus another $150 or so for installation. I’d already checked out the prices of a new machine and they were about $500 to $700 for the sort of machine we wanted. So I could either pay ~$550 to fix a 20-year-old machine (and still have a 20-year-old machine) or I could spend  a similar amount and have a brand new machine, which, with luck, will have 20 years in it too.

The lovely chap at F&P offered me a loyalty discount too, and I received the rebate form in my Inbox a few days later — if I bought a F&P product within three months, and it was more than $500, F&P would send me $50. Nice!

So we bought a new F&P washing machine. Not because of the loyalty rebate, nice though it is, but because we are REALLY happy with F&P products. We have two F&P upside down fridge/freezers (only because one wouldn’t fit in a new house, so we had to get another to fit; we kept the old one for drinks etc.), a F&P chest freezer, and the 20-year-old F&P washing machine, which had only required one bit of maintenance/repair in its lifetime (I still had the receipt for that too — it was in 2006 and cost $165 at the time).

It was a no-brainer to replace our F&P washing machine with a new F&P washing machine. We are really happy with the brand and the reliability of their products.

And the price was exceptional too. The recommended retail price was $749, but Harvey Norman’s had it on stocktake sale (new model, not floor/demo model) for $548. Delivery, set-up, and removal/disposal of the old machine and the packaging was another $63, but with the $50 rebate from F&P we will eventually pay a total of $561 for this machine, almost half the amount we paid for the original F&P washing machine two decades ago! When you consider how much almost everything else (except electronics) has gone up since 1993, I reckon we got a great deal.

With luck, our new F&P washing machine should last us another 20 years. (It even has a 10-year warranty on the ‘SmartDrive’ mechanism, so they expect the machine to last at least that long too.)

Would I buy and F&P product again? Absolutely.