How to Fix What You Can and Get the Rest Fixed Free: United Kingdom Repair (Skavinger)

The quote to fix it was more than the thing is worth. Was it?

You already suspect the machine is fixable. You just do not know whether you are allowed to touch it, where to get the part, or at what point you are being quietly ripped off. So the quote decides it, and the quote was never neutral.

So you replace it. Most households do. And a good proportion of them have just paid for something they had a legal right to have repaired for nothing.

Here is the part that should annoy you. Under the Consumer Rights Act, where a trader has to repair faulty goods, the trader bears the cost. Not you. Not the postage, not the call-out, not the parts. Retailers know this. They are not going to mention it.

And there is a second one. UK regulations force manufacturers to keep specific spare parts available for 7 years after the last unit of a model was sold, and to deliver them within 15 working days. "We can't get parts for that" is often not a fact. It is a sentence somebody says when nobody quotes the rule back.

Don't panic. Nothing here needs a workshop

How to Fix What You Can and Get the Rest Fixed Free is a calm field manual for an ordinary British house. Every claim of law traces to a named primary UK source, printed with the date it was checked, and there is a register at the back so you can check the book rather than trust it.

The chapters are ordered by what it costs you to get it wrong. Dripping taps at the front. Gas at the back, where the book stops and tells you to call somebody, because the difference between a safe repair and a lethal one is invisible once the cover is back on.

Inside, you will discover

• The four-question test that settles fix-or-replace in about a minute, with no emotion in it
• Which spare parts they must sell you directly, and which they must sell your repairer, and for exactly how long
• The sentence that ends the repair loop when a shop keeps taking a machine away and sending it back broken
• Why a full refund is a full refund inside a certain window, and reduced after it
• The 5-minute fix for a door that has caught for a year, which is almost never what people think it is
• Where the line sits on electrics, and the warning signs that mean today rather than the weekend
• Why "my mate does boilers" is not a category that exists in British law
• 14 worked repairs, from the washing machine that stopped mid-cycle to the damp patch somebody has quoted four figures to inject

Two things you are almost certainly getting wrong

You are talking to the manufacturer. Your contract is with whoever took your money. A retailer pointing you at a helpline is offering you a service, not discharging its own duty.

You are going outside to look at the damp patch last, not first. Overwhelmingly the cause of a wet internal wall is a gutter or a downpipe, visible from the garden in the rain. That is a ladder and an afternoon, against a five-figure quote for the wrong problem.

What to do now

Find the model and serial plates on your boiler, your washing machine and your fridge, and photograph them. Then read chapter 3 before you spend another pound replacing anything.