Although I try to live a frugal life there are always areas that I don’t quite get right, I’ve been working on improving those areas.

I used to be the kind of person that if an appliance broke or wasn’t working how I wanted it to I would replace it, usually using a credit card (slaps hand) but not anymore! My new motto is repair, repair, repair, and ONLY replace as a last resort.

I’ve had my Dyson vacuum cleaner for around four years and last year I noticed it wasn’t picking up as well as it used to, on top of that the extendable cleaning hose got a tear in it which I patched up with masking tape, every time I got the hoover out I would grumble about how rubbish it was, it got to the point where I would dread hovering and I even started looking at buying a new one and trying to justify adding it to the already over-stretched credit card.

After months of griping about it, I had a light bulb moment, instead of moaning I knew I should do something more proactive and set about searching online for a solution, I feel like an absolute idiot for not doing this sooner. I found a tutorial on YouTube which explained that the first thing I should do with the loss of suction was to check for blockages and remove the filters and clean them, I’m ashamed to admit this but I didn’t even know my Dyson had filters!

                                       Image courtesy of Smarnad at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

After doing what the tutorial suggested my vacuum is now back to picking up brilliantly and I’ve learned a very valuable lesson about being more clued up about the items I own and how to maintain them.

The next part of my light bulb moment was finding out if the hose was replaceable as by this point it had that much masking tape on it was in danger of not fitting back onto the main body of the vacuum anymore, after a quick search and comparing the best price I found the right part and paid £16 which is far better than the hundreds I would have paid to replace the whole thing.

I feel very proud of myself for taking a step back, thinking logically instead of impulsively and being pro-active instead of reactive.

There are of course times when repairing isn’t possible or the most cost-effective thing to do, our oven recently broke and after doing some research we discovered that it would cost only £10 less to replace the part than to buy another oven, sometimes situations like this can’t be avoided but you can give yourself peace of mind by exhausting every avenue first.

Have you been in this situation yourself? How much have you saved by repairing? leave me a comment below I would love to hear from you.