Haier Domestic Appliances

Haier are based in Qingdao, China where it was formed in 1984, and are now one of the largest appliance manufacturers in the world. Impressively in such a short life it is now billed as the world's fourth-largest white goods manufacturer. It has 240 subsidiary companies and more than 50,000 employees around the world. Haier, which produces everything from fridges and washing machines to TVs and mobiles, was ranked 86th most influential brand in the world by World Brand Lab in 2006, the only Chinese brand to be ranked in the top 100 for three consecutive years. It is also the official home appliances sponsor of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

However, that doesn't mean to say that they are any good, it only means that they sell a lot of stuff and their track record on reliability thus far has been nothing short of abysmal.

Haier have produced primarily dishwashers and some refrigeration for brand names such as Diplomat, CDA, White Westinghouse, Teka, Hygena and many more besides as well as starting to creep into even more mainstream household name brands now.

Now Haier have launched into Europe under their own brand name and, in the UK at least, were being sold exclusively by Comet. Now that partenership has broken up with comments from some Comet engineers that the applainces were so bad that Comet binned them and Haeir have decided to go it alone.

Haier Appliances

Of course being Chinese and being a new brand name that nobody has ever heard of means that Haier's pricing structure is, to say the least, aggressive. This means that in order to attract customers, both retail and trade, the prices have to be very low to make the appliances attractive as otherwise they would offer poor value when compared with any of the established brand names. This is a very common practice and tactic in the industry but it does mean that lower quality build and components are used to achieve the low prices generally. It's a two edged sword in short, you can either have low prices or high quality, but not both.

Due to this, in our experience Haier appliances are very cheap but it is extremely important that you are aware that the quality is far from good.

Let's cut to the chase with Haier, the repair trade at least think that these appliances are absolute rubbish from what we've seen so far. The build quality is appalling on them, failures come thick and fast and spares are an absolute nightmare to get a hold of and, when they do, expensive.

We have had extensive experience with the refrigeration products and, still more so, with the dishwashers. Failure rates of over 50% in the 12 months warranty period is not uncommon to be reported by brand owners that have bought these machines in.

To work on, especially the dishwashers, they are not nice and it appears that little or no thought has been given to aftersales service using old technologies copied from what were considered to be poor European products in the first place.

In short if you haven't bough a Haier machine and are thinking about, don't do it.

If you have bought one and found this due to "issues" with it, you have our sympathies.

Haier Spares

This is a complete and utter nightmare.

Haier spares are just a complete and total mess. As of 2011 there was only one source for spares (apart from Comet who are very expensive) who seems to charge very high prices and offers trade no discounts as they have exclusive access to the parts. Some of the prices, relative to teh cost of the finished applainces, are just completely stupid. There's no nice way to dress it up.

What we have got in the store are some Haier parts that we have been able to cross reference with machines used by other brand owners that we can (mostly) get the parts without too many problems.

Do bear in mind though, most Far East companies appear to have little interest in aftersales service or spares, in some cases they would appear to have none at all. They will sell you a new appliance though.

Haier Service

Service is currently through independents usually but, even under warranty, they struggle to get spares. Service does seem patchy with no actual structure to it but, since Comet dropped the brand, discount retailers such as Argos and others are the only ones that appear to be selling this brand.

Many repairers won't take on Haier repairs due to the issues and the high recall rate, you fix one thing and something else breaks soon after.