How to properly maintain your household appliances

Appliances are some of the hardest working components of your home. Constant moving parts, hundreds of RPMs, the occasional high temperatures and thousands of gallons of water pumped over the course of a year. We run our appliances like workhorses and still expect them to work at the flip of a switch. But that wear and tear builds up over time. Never fear. With a little regular maintenance, you can fend off that dreaded “clunk” of a failed appliance and add years to its life.

› KEEP APPLIANCES WORKING LONGER: Keeping appliances clean and attending to routine maintenance can add years to their lifespan.

› Regularly clean your appliances — in particular, keep the condenser coils in your refrigerator free of debris. A condenser coil brush, available at any hardware store, works well for this purpose.

› Regularly check the seal on your refrigerator door. If you can slide a piece of paper between the seal and the door when the door is closed, hire a professional to inspect the unit and replace the seal. Otherwise, your refrigerator will work much harder to keep food cold.

› Regularly scrub your oven and never let food debris remain on burners. Experts advise avoiding the self-cleaning feature on ovens. Instead, just keep it clean as you go along. If a pie spills over, using a quick dab of oven cleaner right away is better than waiting for debris to build up.

› Scrape off as much food as possible into the trash before putting plates in the dishwasher. Food debris can clog up the pumps.

› Keep an eye on your dishwasher’s filter, and remove debris and hardwater deposits. Check the sprayers, screens and gaskets for particle buildup.

› MAINTAIN A WASHER AND DRYER: Heavy loads, lots of water, thousands of revolutions at high speed — it’s hard to imagine a harder pair of workers than your washer and dryer.

› Don’t overload your washer — that wear and tear builds up over time. Make sure you empty your pockets before running a load; those pennies, lint and paper clog up the drain lines. Take seriously your dryer manual’s admonition to clean the lint filter every load. Otherwise, it will have to work harder each time. And if your dryer still dries slowly, consider cleaning out the dryer vent.

› REPAIR OR REPLACE? As a general rule, if the repair is more than half the cost of a new appliance, and your unit is more than six years old, go ahead and upgrade to a new model.