Repair a twelve year old dryer for 180 or replace it with a 600 basic model Advice

Before you decide either way, check the vent. Two cycles to dry a load is the single most common symptom of a blocked or crushed vent hose, and it is free to check.

Pull the machine out, disconnect the duct, and look at the whole run to the outside including the flap on the wall. Lint packs into the elbows and behind the flap. I have seen a machine that everyone had written off run like new after ten minutes with a brush and a vacuum.

If the vent is clear and the element genuinely is dead, 180 on a twelve year old dryer is reasonable. Dryers are simple machines, the drum and motor outlast everything, and elements and thermostats are the normal wear parts. The rough rule I use is that repairing is worth it up to about half the replacement cost, and 180 against 600 is comfortably inside that.

One thing to weigh that people leave out: the element and the thermostat usually fail together for a reason, and that reason is restricted airflow overheating them. If you replace the parts and do not fix the airflow, you will be doing this again in two years. Fix the cause and the repair is money well spent.

On new machines, the honest comparison is not 600 versus 180. A basic vented machine at 600 will use meaningfully more electricity per load than a heat pump model, but heat pump models cost roughly double and take longer per cycle. At five loads a week the running cost gap takes years to matter, so I would not use efficiency to justify buying now.

The part I would check is whether parts will still exist in three years. Twelve years is around the point where some manufacturers stop stocking, and a machine you cannot get a drum belt for is a machine with a fixed end date regardless of how well the repair goes. A quick search for the model number and the words drum belt tells you a lot.

If you are handy at all, a heating element on most vented dryers is a genuinely easy job. Two panels, a couple of spade connectors, four screws. The part is often 40 to 70 online with the model number. That changes the maths from 180 versus 600 to about 60 versus 600, and it is a decent first appliance repair.

Twelve years is nothing for a dryer. The ones from that era are simpler and generally last longer than what you would replace it with, which will have a board in it that costs more than your repair quote when it fails.