The homeowner is obviously very exasperated, her refrigerator is leaking, and she is worried about warping the oak floor under the refrigerator. She’s right about that, she’s already started doing it. The water also runs under the wall behind her refrigerator into the garage and onto the floor there.

To top it off, you’re putting your house on the market and getting it ready to sell, so the last thing you need right now is any kind of appliance, maintenance, or water issue. Nothing drives away a potential buyer faster than a house with a lot of problems. So even though it’s just a very small water leak, it’s having a big impact on your mood and plans for the future.

The only problem from my perspective is that while it’s obvious the drive has been leaking, it’s not leaking when I show up and there’s nothing I can do. Here’s the hard truth that so many appliance repairmen are afraid to say, we can’t fix what we can’t see or observe.

In order for me to solve a problem with your appliance, I have to be able to see the problem in action. I have to be able to see where the leak is coming from. I have to be able to hear the part that makes the noise that’s driving you crazy. I have to see your machine actively involved in the problem behavior that made you pick up the phone and call me.

There are repair companies out there that will pull out a crystal ball when faced with a situation like this, make educated guesses as to what could be causing the problem and charge you a lot to correct theoretical issues and I’ve heard a few horror stories from homeowners that pleased these charlatans in their guesses. In reality, it is easy for these companies to make these types of sales because the owners want to believe that this type of diagnosis is possible. However, in my opinion it is not.

In order to do a repair that you can guarantee and support, you have to go through a process, to make things easier for homeowners, I’ll explain. A repairman has to be there when your appliance has a problem. After seeing the problem in action, you need to decide on the possible causes of the problem, and often there can be many.

After deciding on the possible causes of a problem, you should check each of these possible causes until you discover which one, or combination of them, is actually causing the problem. Only then can they really make a repair. This is the smart repair method. There is another method, the guesswork method, which involves replacing parts until you finally replace the correct one. On many of the calls I attend, the owner has already tried this approach and still has the problem.

So if possible, make sure that the appliance you want to repair is actually broken. Because if you call a repairman, you have to charge them for the time, gas, and expenses of coming to your house, which is usually known as a service charge. And even though I’m in business to make money, I don’t like doing it that way, I don’t like the look on my customers’ faces when I have to charge them to examine a machine that isn’t doing anything wrong. .