Just how long should your household appliance last?

Monday, 29 December 2025

Six years after a robot vacuum cleaner was bought for $389, the casing supporting one of its wheels collapsed, rendering it unusable.

The buyer, an unnamed woman, went back to the manufacturer, and asked for a replacement, telling the business the vacuum was not durable.

The business told her the vacuum had worked for a “reasonable” period of time, the implication being that during an average adult life, a person might expect to have to buy 12 or 13 vacuums.

Angered, the woman took a compensation claim to the Disputes Tribunal, but she had a wider mission in mind than just getting her money back.

She wanted the tribunal to issue a stinging indictment of “our throwaway society and find that goods sold should last longer and be able to be repaired”.

The tribunal exists to sort out small-scale money claims of up to $30,000, though that is rising to $60,000 after a law change. The change is expected to see thousands more cases added to the roughly 13,000 cases it hears each year.

Some of the cases it handled this year were brought by people offended by the short lifespans of household appliances.

It has been a year in which short-life appliances and the right to repair have been debated fiercely, including in Parliamentary hearings.

But New Zealand seems no nearer to instituting a right to repair on household appliances, such as whiteware, after Government MPs recommended against passing Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson’s Consumer Guarantees (Right to Repair) Amendment Bill.

The case of the collapsing vacuum had an earlier twist. Just two years after the woman had bought it, its motor had seized up and had to be replaced.

This led the woman to believe she had been sold a flawed machine that did not meet the durability test of the Consumer Guarantees Act.

That act requires goods sold to be of acceptable quality, which includes their being durable as judged by a “reasonable consumer fully acquainted with the state and condition of the goods, including any hidden defects”.

Tribunal referee Bernardine Hannan disappointed the woman.

“In this case the vacuum is five and half years old,” she said. “The vacuum is at the lower end of the market, with some robot models selling for up to $3000 or more.”

Robot vacuums had a hard life, Hannan said.

“I would be surprised to learn that a reasonable consumer would expect to get five and half years’ continuous use out of it at that price point. It may be disappointing, but not unexpected.”

Though the referee did not reference it, Consumer NZ publishes a list of reasonable appliance lifetimes, and the vacuum cleaner lifespans are fairly short, at eight years for a vacuum with a cord, and just five for a cordless vacuum.

According to Consumer NZ’s estimates, a person might expect to have to buy 12 laptops, eight to 12 vacuums, eight microwaves, eight TVs, six dishwashers, six washing machines, five to six fridges, five clothes driers in their roughly 60-year adult lives.

As yet, New Zealand does not have an ewaste product stewardship scheme, so a large amount of ewaste ends up not being recycled, but tipped into landfills.

Hannan also ruled that the seller had not breached the Consumer Guarantees Act by not having spare parts available.

The record in the tribunal for the shortest lifespan of an appliance was a $1769 refurbished laptop that failed after just 50 days.

When it was assessed, the fault was found to be water damage. The business that sold it claimed the damage must have been caused by the new owner during the short span of weeks they had owned it.

However, the referee in that case said evidence of dirt and dust inside the laptop, on top of the water damage, indicated that the machine had not even been properly cleaned by the company that refurbished it, and that “one could assume that the pre-existing water damage also would not have been found”.

The company had to pay the buyer $1769.