Is a Heating Element Easy to Replace? What 400 Units Taught Me About Maytag Appliance Packages

When I moved our apartment buildings onto Maytag appliance packages in mid-2023, our total appliance spend over the next twelve months dropped by roughly 29%. That sounds wrong—or rather, it should sound wrong, because the Maytag sets cost more on the purchase order. Ours ran about 30% above the builder-grade bundles we had been installing for years. The budget improved because we stopped replacing appliances that could actually be fixed. The parts supply mattered more than the brand name on the front panel.

If you manage property, you have heard some version of this question: “Is a heating element easy to replace?” It sounds like a DIY question. It is really a purchasing question. What people are asking is whether that dryer is worth saving or whether they should budget for a new one. After five years of appliance purchasing for 400 units across three properties, my short answer is: usually yes—if the part is available. That “if” is where good machines earn their keep, and where cheap ones quietly cost you twice.

To be clear about who is writing this: I’m not an appliance technician. I’m the office administrator for a 35-person property management company. I manage all appliance and maintenance supply ordering—roughly $350,000 a year spread across 25 vendors. I report to operations and to finance, so I hear it when a tenant’s dryer is down and I hear it when a purchase order runs high. When I took over in 2020, I inherited one rule: make sure the invoice matches the delivery. That rule does not prevent bad buying decisions. I learned that the hard way.

Why a More Expensive Maytag Appliance Package Won the Budget Battle

The wake-up call was 2022, when we replaced 47 appliances across three buildings. Every one of those replacements was an emergency. No planning, no comparison, no negotiation—just “the tenant needs a working refrigerator today,” and me paying full retail for whatever the supply house had in stock.

So I ran the comparison I should have run in 2020. I went back and forth for two months between a builder-grade package and a Maytag appliance package for apartment units. On paper, the cheaper option won the first round by about 35%. But our maintenance supervisor said something I still repeat: “A cheap machine doesn’t fail less. It just fails differently.”

He was right. The machines we threw away were often under six years old. They did not die from one dramatic failure; they died from a $40 part we could not source. The model was discontinued, the replacement design changed, or the parts diagram was impossible to find. So the whole appliance went to the dumpster.

Maytag machines are not invincible. We have replaced belts, timers, thermostats, and heating elements on them. But those repairs were possible, which made them affordable. Once every unit used the same platform, our maintenance team stopped juggling parts for four different dryer brands. Fewer SKUs made our small parts inventory useful instead of decorative.

Here is the crude math that sold finance. Our distributor’s September 2024 quote had a builder-grade washer-dryer pair around $1,600; in rental use, that pair had been lasting us about five years, or $320 per year. A Maytag washer-dryer pair in the package we ordered was roughly $2,400. Our oldest data point comes from a property we acquired in 2021: its Maytag washer-dryer pairs were installed in 2014 according to the previous owner’s records, and as of late 2024 most were still in service. That is a small, imperfect sample, but it bent the cost-per-year curve in the right direction. The 29% savings in our records did not come from that math alone. It came from buying fewer emergency replacements: 33 appliances in 2024 instead of 47 in 2022. Verify current prices with your own distributor before budgeting, because appliance pricing moves.

Maytag Dryer Parts, Heating Elements, and What Repair Actually Costs

Here is where the dryer enters the story. Once you manage Maytag equipment, the search phrase “dryer Maytag parts” shows up in your browser history more than you expect. It is not a glamorous search. It is the search that keeps dryers out of landfills.

Take heating elements. On most electric Maytag dryers we own, the heating element assembly sits behind the rear panel. Is a heating element easy to replace? Yes—if you have someone who is comfortable disconnecting power and handling electrical components. It is not the hardest repair our team does. The hard part used to be getting the right part without a two-week wait.

Our maintenance supervisor replaced a heating element in about 90 minutes last year, including cleaning lint out of the cabinet and checking the vent. The OEM part cost us around $90—if I remember correctly, that was March 2024 pricing from an authorized parts supplier. A local repair company quoted us over $350 for the same job. Multiply that difference across a building full of dryers, and the repair-versus-replace decision stops being close.

One caution: I tried an aftermarket $35 heating element once to save money. It failed in under a year. The OEM Maytag part cost almost three times as much and is still running. In parts, cheap is not always cheap. Also, this advice covers electric dryers only. Gas dryers involve gas lines. I am not a gas technician, so I don’t give advice there—we call a licensed professional.

What the Best Hard Floor Scrubber Machine Taught Me

The same logic applies outside the laundry room. Our housekeeping team asked me to find the best hard floor scrubber machine for corridors and laundry rooms. I did what buyers do when they are in a hurry: I picked the cheapest model that looked good on the first page of search results. Big mistake.

The scrubber worked fine for about eight months. Then a motor-brush assembly failed. The manufacturer had no local parts support for that particular model. The repair shop could not tell us when a part would arrive, because the manufacturer could not tell the repair shop. We eventually replaced it with a commercial-duty machine from a company that publishes parts diagrams and has a real distributor network. It cost more. It does not clean dramatically better. But when it breaks, we can fix it in days rather than replacing it in months. You are never just buying a machine. You are buying the supply chain behind it.

Morton Salt for Water Softener Is the Boring Purchase That Saves Real Money

Here is the supply item that makes the rest of this article work. Every six to eight weeks, I place an order for Morton salt for water softener at two of our three properties. It is not a machine. It is not exciting. It is a 40-lb bag that prevents the kind of damage nobody sees until it is expensive.

Our municipal water report for 2024 listed hardness around 12 to 15 grains per gallon. At that level, mineral scale builds up on heating elements in water heaters and dishwashers, and it can shorten the life of inlet valves and any washing machine that heats its own water. Our water treatment contractor once said that most of the heating element failures he gets called out for in this area come from neglected softeners and old tank scale, not defective parts. That is his anecdotal observation, not a peer-reviewed study, but our repair invoices support the pattern.

We buy Morton salt by the pallet. If I remember correctly, the last pallet order in Q4 2024 worked out to about $9 to $11 per bag from our janitorial supplier. Per property, that is a rounding error in our budget. Replacing a water heater—or explaining to a tenant why hot water takes twenty minutes—is not a rounding error. The boring purchase protects the expensive purchase. Simple.

When the Maytag Appliance Package Is the Wrong Answer

I don’t want this to read like a commercial for one brand. The Maytag appliance package made sense for our situation. It is not automatically right for yours. If you own a building you plan to sell in two years, install the least expensive equipment that meets code and keep the savings. If you have no in-house maintenance person, the labor side of a repair changes the math completely—you may be better off replacing under warranty or through a service plan. If your water is already soft, stockpiling salt is just shelf clutter.

A heating element is not the right fix for every dryer. If the main control board has failed on a twelve-year-old machine, do not throw parts at it. That unit has lived its life. Replace it, and choose the platform you can actually support. For us, that platform included the same appliance family across multiple units, an authorized parts supplier two towns away, and a maintenance team willing to open panels instead of writing off machines.

Pricing and product availability change constantly. The numbers above came from our purchase records, a distributor’s September 2024 quote, and memory; they are reference points, not guarantees. Verify current rates before you put together your own budget.

So, is a heating element easy to replace? My answer is another question: “Can you get the part this week?” If yes, repair it. If no, replace it—and next time, buy the equipment that makes the answer yes. That is why so many of our purchase orders say Maytag. Not because the machines never break. Because when they break, we can find the fix.