20 Best Appliance Repair Tools in 2024 for Your Technicians

The need for appliance repair professionals is increasing in the residential and commercial sectors. It is a $5 billion US industry with over 78,000 employees.

The industry is in a profitable position with the demand and supply rate in proper balance. But little do people know about the costs of operating this business.

One of the most important operating expenses in an appliance repair business is invested in the required tools. The right appliance repair tools and equipment are necessary for the repair, replacement, and installation job.

The type of tools used for a particular repair or replacement project contributes to the overall billing cost. Without any further ado, let’s get started with the tools list.

20 Must-Have Appliance Repair Tools for Technicians

Now that you have understood the idea behind owning just the necessary appliance repair tools, you might have a question about what comes under the necessary list?

To help businesses pick the must-have tools for their appliance repair technicians, here is an explanatory list of 20 of them for you to pick.

The list of tools in the form of categories are:

Safety tools category

1. Safety goggles

Safety goggles will protect your appliance repair technician while working in dusty areas. Moreover, it will prevent chemicals or debris from directly contacting their eyes or anywhere around them.

2. Working gloves

You should prefer adding two pairs of work gloves to the appliance repair toolkit. Get a leather pair and a rubber pair. The leather one will protect your hands while working in an environment full of harmful materials. And use the rubber gloves while working with chemicals or in any such chemical-rich environment to avoid direct contact.

3. Industry-grade boots

Get industry-grade boots to get a strong grip at the work site and also to protect your feet from any possible chemical spill. Apart from that, an appliance repair technician might have to lift heavy objects while working with appliances.

There might be incidents where some heavy objects might fall off due to imbalance and land on the workers’ feet. This might cause catastrophic injuries, which are avoidable by wearing industry-grade safety or working boots.

4. Safety clothing

You need to get protective clothing for your employees to help them add an additional layer of protection for the skin from chemical sprays and other harmful debris when repairing appliances.

5. Disposable shoe covers

As your technicians might be on various projects in a day, they cannot just walk into any customer’s house with dirty shoes. Disposable shoe covers will make sure that your customer’s floors stay clean from mud, dust, and debris that comes in with the shoes.

Moving Tools Category

6. Appliance glides

Some appliances cannot be fixed at where they are installed, for which your team needs to bring them out to open space. Lifting heavy appliances is not always a good idea, and the use of heavy lifting equipment in all projects might be expensive for the business.

So, the appliance glides are just like mats which one can add as an extra floor layer at the base of an appliance. This way, the technicians can pull the appliance easily by dragging the glide mat.

Hand Tools Category

7. Electric drill

Prefer getting an electric drill (preferably cordless) along with different drill bits. The cordless drill will help you approach some complex appliance repair jobs easily. Suppose some appliance parts need to be screwed to hold the parts together. In that case, a cordless drill will serve the purpose.

8. Pliers

Pliers are of different types, and you will need multiple ones for carrying out appliance repairs. A standard type of plier can be used to easily release hose clamps. The needle nose pliers are preferred for gripping the small appliances to work effectively. The channel lock pliers might be essential to tighten or loosen water hose fittings.

In addition to these, keep wire cutters in this set as well. They mostly come with the plier sets, but if they don’t, get them separately.

9. Putty knife

In some repair jobs associated with appliances, the staff will need a putty knife to carry out jobs such as prying, scraping, and spreading putty.

Such knives are used by the appliance technicians to detach the small clips within the gaps of the appliance’s body that holds the panels together. Hence, it also helps disassemble an appliance to let technicians work on it easily.

10. Screwdriver set

You must get a set of screwdrivers that consists of Torx, Philips, and flathead types. Different appliances come with different types of screws with varying heads. So, your team should be available with all types of screwdrivers on the site to avoid delays in the job.

11. Wrench set

Your team of repair executives can work with all of the appliances if they just have a socket wrench and an adjustable open-end wrench in their wrench set. These hand tools will help you get started with most of the repair, replacement, and installation jobs.

12. Nut driver set

As the name suggests, these nut drivers serve the purpose of handling all types of bolts and nuts. Make sure to get both imperial and metric sizes. It is because some of the appliances need to work with both imperial and metric fasteners.

Appliance Meter Testing Category

13. Multimeter

A multimeter is one of the specialty tools you will need in your technician toolkit. It is used for testing or diagnosing the electrical components of any appliance.

Most of the tests conducted over a multimeter indicate the flow of current in the electrical part that you are testing. The multimeter helps the technicians decide which part needs replacement or repair.

14. Voltage testing pen

Voltage tester pens are precise tools that are used for testing the voltage line in wires. It keeps the technicians safe when touching any live wires with their bare hands. It is a diagnostic tool that again helps in identifying the root cause of the problem within minutes of a technical visit.

Cleaning Tools Category

15. Handheld steam cleaner

The chemical spills on your customer’s expensive flooring might leave a permanent stain. So, it is the job of technicians or repair staff to do the cleaning before they leave their property on completion of the job.

A handheld steam cleaner will make it easy for you to clean the floors or any spilled surface easily and in a short span of time.

16. Small vacuum cleaner

Bring along a vacuum cleaner as well to take out the loose dust and debris from the customer’s home after the repair job is done.

Assisting Essentials and Tools Category

17. Toolbag

You must get a tool bag to easily store and carry all necessary tools to a work site. Make sure the bag is of good quality material to be able to handle the weight of all the tools stored in it. It should be robust with a good gripping handle for easy carrying.

18. Strong phone case

Most of the service-related updates will be conveyed or noted through a mobile phone. And while the technicians are at field jobs, there is no assurance of what might be the circumstances while dealing with heavy and bulky appliances.

Therefore, it is important that along with all the right tools, you should have a durable and robust phone case to prevent damage to it.

19. Essential items

Here is the list of a few essential items that can come to use at a repair site to some extent:

Step ladder
Ropes
Spirit level
Extension cord
Duct tape
Pen and notepad
Thread sealing tape
Extra wires
Flashlight

20. Digital scheduling software or tool

In the end, you need to consider shifting your business management to a dedicated appliance repair business scheduling software. It will make it easy for you to schedule the jobs for your technicians in just one click.

Moreover, such digital tools will help you with proper lead management, order tracking, billing, and invoicing services. Most of your business operations will be digitized, and the back-office support needs will gradually be reduced.

So, among all the necessary and must-have tools, it is important that you get hold of a business scheduling software.

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FAQs

Is it worth it to fix an appliance?

A thumb rule for considering a repair for an appliance is to estimate its cost. If the cost of repair is more than 50% of the cost of a new appliance, then you should prefer getting a new one instead of investing ample money in repairing the broken one.

What specialty tool will you need for most appliance repair projects?

Some of the specialty tools that you might need for most of your appliance repair include a nut driver set, multimeter, and screwdriver set. Basically, it is not possible to decide on the tools one might need while working on a specific appliance.
Therefore, the technicians often go for a casual visit to the site with only a few tools for an inspection. If the problem seems solvable with just those tools, then they might just get over with the job on an inspection visit itself.
But if the problem seems unidentifiable, then the technicians will go back to the site on another date with all the tools and necessities.

Why do we need to repair appliances?

Appliances need timely repair and maintenance to avoid high energy costs. The older appliances and their electrical parts lose their efficiency over time and draw more electricity for normal functioning. As a result, the energy bill increases.
Therefore, get your appliance serviced once every year to know when you have to let go of it and replace it with a new one.

What is the average cost of repair for different appliances?

Here is the average repair cost for different appliances in the US:

Repairing a freezer costs an average of $348
Repairing a cooktop costs an average of $264
Repairing a refrigerator costs an average of $242
Repairing an oven costs an average of $226
Repairing a washing machine costs an average of $221
Repairing a dryer costs an average of $209
Repairing a microwave costs an average of $195

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With FieldCamp, you can easily assign new jobs to your available technicians immediately. You can share the job briefing with your technicians that your customers shared with you. It will give an idea to your technician about the intensity of repair job they can expect.

Apart from that, you can also track your employees and monitor their availability or progress on an assigned job. Our software is ready to process your invoice in just a matter of a few seconds based upon the values you input over the asked fields of the portal.

You don’t have to spend ample time training your employees to use this software. It already has an easy-to-understand interface that will help your employees understand the usability of this software in just one brief demonstration.

FieldCamp can help you shift your appliance repair business operations to an automated and digitized workspace. Take the 7-days FREE trial today and experience its unique features, and then decide to embed it with your business operations. Get in touch to know more!