Hi, I live in France near the border to Switzerland. Yesterday night my fridge seems to have broken, such that if I try to plug it in it will trip the circuit breaker. The problem is the power cable I believe. I have wanted to get a new fridge anyway, so this is a good enough excuse, but given the current pandemic I’m not really certain the best way to go about this.
I’d like to get a decent fridge with the fastest shipping possible. Currently I’m looking at amazon and migros, which both have shipping policies that will at least take the thing up my apartment stairs and to my door (from what I gathered Darty delivery can only leave it at ground level). Any ideas/suggestions on how to take care of this as quickly as possible?
Edit: as a note I think I misread Darty’s delivery policy, so it seems they can transport it to my apt door.
Look for your local electromenager shop - Extra, MDA, Copra etc and phone to see if any of them are “open” and what they have in stock, and will they deliver it to your kitchen… It may be a touch more expensive than Amazon but you will have a relationship that may well pay dividends beyond that.
I’ve bought a few things from local shop, and as a result they will repair things I’ve not brought from them! And they will come out quickly if there’s a problem.
Thanks Jane - as far as I can tell from google maps all the purely ‘electromenager’ shops around here are closed. I can still order online from copra, MDA, etc, so I’ll have to look into what their shipping policies are and see if ordering from one of those might potentially be quicker.
And Mike it’d be kind of a shame to go that route since I was talking to my landlord about upgrading the fridge recently, so I’d rather not spend extra money on a fridge repair for something I’m just going to replace anyway. But it’s something I’ll have to consider, given the circumstance.
Stella, I have sent the landlord an email, but he has not responded yet.
However, in the previous email conversation we were having before this happened, he said that I was free to upgrade the fridge so long as I got one that was a reasonable price, and that I could take it out of the rent since I would be leaving it for him when I leave. He’s in a different country, so that’s why this, at least until he responds my email, is something I have to figure out and having been given the go-ahead on getting a new fridge anyway it seemed like the thing to do.
Conforama(fr) has sent me several emails suggesting I buy something! You can read about their solution during the Covid-19 crisis here: https://www.conforama.fr/questions-reponses
Boulanger say they will deliver to the door of your apartment. You could then buy some Medipaq furniture sliders from Amazon to help you shift it into position. I don’t know whether they would remove your old one, but you could ask. (I’m looking at an extra freezer from them, so the info is current.)
Darty has always delivered (free) and ‘installed’ (not that installing a fridge or washing machine takes much …). 75km from store, normally delivered within a couple of days (specifically Wed or Sat, that’s when they do the rounds in our direction). Note that it’s not necessarily the nearest Darty, but the one in your Departement. Also delivered to 1st floor in Paris (ordered 4pm arrived 9am following morning!). Of course these are not normal times, but I’ve never had less than good service from them.
Hi Lynne, I was wondering how you resolved your fridge problem and if you now have a lovely new one, particularly as you said you were unable to plug it in so must have been without a fridge for many days. I’m not sure that I would manage without a fridge especially with the current restrictions on going out. Let us know how you got on.
Take care
Izzy x
Hi Izzy, thanks for the interest. I was going to post an update but if you’ll believe it my fridge breaking was only one of the major problems i had last week, so it’s been quite the time. My landlord ended up getting back to me and after some discussion we finally decided to order a specific fridge from Darty. However, when I got to the checkout the site refused to take either of my credit cards (giving the message that the bank had denied the card, or something like that). I asked my landlord to try and it did not work for him either. We then agreed on a fridge from MDA, but I found out in the checkout that their policy seemed to be that they would not take the old fridge away. I personally didn’t care so much, and was willing to have the thing sit in my kitchen next to the knew one if it meant that there would be a new one, but my landlord felt it was important so I gave him a list of sites and asked him to find one.
Since then I had been letting my landlord take care of it but his update Saturday was that he had tried a bunch more with the Darty site and wasn’t able to get through and it seems like I am taking the reigns back on getting this fridge, putting me in basically the same situation as I was a week ago.
on the bright side, it hasn’t been so hard without a fridge once I got used to it. I can still have my usual breakfast (sans juice), soup for lunch, and pasta+veggies for dinner, though I have to be careful about portions since I can’t leave leftovers anymore. Would still rather get things back to normal, though, so hopefully I figure it out soon.
EDIT: Well good news: only 18 minutes after posting this i managed to actually order a fridge from Darty. I think the reason my cards weren’t going through was a billing address issue. The form Darty gives doesn’t allow you to put a US address, and so I had no way to fill in the proper address. The workaround I used was to choose paypal at the checkout and make my account there with the correct billing address. Weirdly enough I tried this same workaround on Thursday and it wouldn’t let me add my card to pay at that point, so I assumed it was somehow broken too. Worked this time, and hopefully by the 7th I’ll be the proud owner of a new fridge.
