Appliance repair that starts
with a diagnosis, not a quote.
TrueFix Boston covers 51 service areas and 124 ZIP codes across Greater Boston — the city's neighbourhoods, the Cambridge and Somerville side, the northern towns out to Lexington and Reading, the towns south through Brookline, Quincy and Needham, and the North Shore up to Salem and Gloucester. No one prices your repair before they have seen the machine.
What we do
TrueFix Boston repairs household and light-commercial appliances across Greater Boston: refrigerators and freezers, washers and dryers, dishwashers, ovens, ranges, cooktops, microwaves, ice makers and wine coolers. We service 27 manufacturers, from mass-market platforms through to the built-in and professional equipment that renovated kitchens here run to.
We are a repair company rather than a retailer, which matters more than it sounds. We do not sell you an appliance, so we have nothing to gain from telling you that yours is finished. What we are paid for is finding the actual fault — and the difference between an evaporator fan and a sealed-system failure, on the same “fridge isn't cooling” complaint, is several hundred dollars.
That is also why we ask for the model number when you book. With it, the parts that typically fail on that specific platform go on the van before the technician leaves, which is the single biggest factor in whether the call finishes on the first visit rather than the second.
How a repair runs
- 01You call or book online
Tell us the appliance, the brand, the model number if you can reach it, and plainly what the machine is doing. Quote any error code exactly as it displays. Mention the building — floor, lift, permit parking, shared basement — because all of it affects the visit.
- 02We schedule to a route
Each part of the metro is worked as a block rather than dispatched across the whole footprint. That is what makes an arrival window mean something instead of being a morning-or-afternoon guess.
- 03The technician diagnoses on site
The fault is identified before it is priced. If the cause turns out to be the installation rather than the appliance — a blocked vent, a restricted drain, a marginal circuit — you are told that, because no part will fix it.
- 04You get one price, and you decide
Parts and labour together, approved before anything is dismantled, and it does not move once the machine is apart. If the repair is not worth doing, you hear that instead of a quote.
Four rules we do not bend
We wrote these rules down because keeping them occasionally costs us a job, and we keep them regardless.
Diagnose Before Quoting
No estimate pulled from a script over the phone. The price comes after the technician has traced the fault, and it covers the repair that fault actually needs. The same complaint can have causes an order of magnitude apart in cost.
One Number, Agreed First
Parts and labour in a single figure you approve before anything is dismantled. It does not move once the machine is apart, and no separate labour charge appears at the end.
We Say When Not To Fix
If the machine is not worth the repair you are told that at the diagnosis, before you have committed to anything. Nobody here earns a commission on parts.
Treat The Building Properly
Floor protection, appliance sliders, water off and lines drained before anything is pulled, gas isolated at the shut-off. On original floors and stairs that is not a courtesy, it is the job.
The housing we work in
Boston has some of the oldest housing stock in the country, and four broadly different kinds of it within a few miles. Each breaks appliances its own way.
Brownstones and rowhouses
Back Bay, Beacon Hill, the South End, Charlestown
Almost every appliance here is a retrofit — a dishwasher teed off a sink supply, a range in a chimney breast, laundry added to a closet. The junctions are where the faults start, and getting the machine out without marking a century-old floor is genuinely half the job.
Triple-deckers and two-families
Dorchester, Southie, East Boston, Somerville, Roxbury
Three households on one basement, one set of risers and often one laundry pair. The exhaust climbs the height of the building with several turns in it, which is why so many dryer complaints here turn out to be duct problems rather than parts problems.
Condos and high-rise apartments
The Seaport, downtown, Kendall Square, Brookline
The building is half the work. Certificate of insurance filed with management, service lift booked, and building staff told in advance. Compact 24-inch and stacked-closet equipment as standard, because that is what these kitchens are fitted with.
Single-family and built-in kitchens
West Roxbury, Newton, Milton, Belmont, Needham
Real basements you can work in, full-size equipment, and — in the renovated kitchens — panel-ready columns and professional ranges that are worth repairing far past the point a freestanding machine would be replaced.
What working here actually teaches you
Four things about Greater Boston that change what we check first — and that most generic appliance advice gets wrong for this market.
The water here is soft, and most appliance advice assumes it is not
Greater Boston drinks MWRA water from the Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs; Cambridge draws its own from Fresh Pond. Both are naturally soft, around one to two grains, dosed with sodium carbonate to lift pH and protect old lead and copper service lines. So limescale — which drives appliance guidance across most of the country — is rarely the answer here. What we actually find is sediment shed by century-old iron mains and building risers, and detergent dosed for water far harder than what comes out of the tap. Dedham and Needham are the exception: they run on local wells and are genuinely harder, and we say so on those pages.
Four months a year, refrigeration is being asked to work outside its rating
The spare fridge in the basement, the chest freezer on the back porch, the beer fridge in an unheated garage. Below roughly 38–40°F a single-compressor appliance stops calling for cooling at all, because the fresh-food side is already cold enough, and the freezer quietly thaws while the machine reports nothing wrong. It is one of the most common calls we take and one of the most commonly misdiagnosed. A garage-ready model solves it. A new thermostat does not, and we will tell you so rather than fit one.
Salt air is a real variable on this side of the water
East Boston, South Boston, Charlestown, Winthrop, Revere, Chelsea and Quincy sit close enough to open water that corrosion reaches terminal blocks, relay contacts and control-board solder joints. It rarely produces a clean failure — you get intermittents instead, an oven that will not light on a damp morning and works fine that afternoon. When a cabinet comes off and there is green on the connectors, we clean and re-terminate that harness section rather than swapping one part, because otherwise the next failure is one connector away.
Access is part of the appointment, not an afterthought
Resident-permit blocks, streets with no loading zone, walk-ups with a turn in the stairs, basement doors only the owner has a key to, and declared snow emergencies that take whole streets off the table. Every one of those costs time that comes out of your window rather than ours. We ask about them at the booking because planning the stop is cheaper for everyone than a technician circling the block.
Who comes to the door
A small team rather than a dispatch pool, so the person who diagnoses your appliance is usually the person who comes back to fit the part.
Ray came up through sealed-system refrigeration, first on a manufacturer warranty route that covered everything inside 128 and then on commercial refrigeration in the Seaport. He started TrueFix because the routes he worked paid per stop, which quietly rewards a fast guess over a correct diagnosis — the whole business is built to invert that.
Dana handles the panel-ready columns and professional ranges in renovated Newton, Brookline and Back Bay kitchens, plus the 24-inch and stacked-closet laundry that fills condos in the Seaport and Kendall. She measures the doorway, the turn in the stairs and the appliance before anything comes out of a cabinet.
Marcus runs the restaurant, cafe and laundromat accounts from Somerville and Allston out to Quincy. He works the pre-open window so a kitchen never loses a service, and writes up the documentation the Boston Inspectional Services people ask to see.
Nicole plans the day around the things that actually cost time here — resident-permit blocks with no loading zone, a Storrow or Pike backup at the wrong hour, a declared snow emergency taking a whole street off the board. She also handles condo boards, building management and certificates of insurance so you do not have to.
Where we actually drive
51 service areas and 124 ZIP codes. If your address is not on that list, we will tell you rather than take the booking.
Book a technician, not a call centre
27 brands · 51 areas across Greater Boston · diagnosed before it is quoted