for a guy missing most of his teeth to replace in 2 minutes
A good reminder to not test unknown capacitors with the tip of your tongue.
Comment on 98 degrees upstairs, ac stopped working at 8am.
lemming741@lemmy.world 2 days agoMotor capacitor for an A/C compressor. A $15 part that a service company is going to charge $400 for a guy missing most of his teeth to replace in 2 minutes.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
It’s going to depend on the area, but it shouldn’t cost quite that much for residential work. Hell, I’m a commercial refrigeration/hvac mechanic and my bill would still be less for that repair. You actually made me curious so I priced it out. TLDR if you don’t want to read below it comes out to $310 before taxes. So unless you’re in a stupidly expensive area your price should be under that for this repair from a residential HVAC tech. My best guess is that it would cost about $250 in my somewhat low cost of living area if done properly by a residential tech.
Price breakdown-
We upcharge a bit on parts depending on their cost (cheaper parts are upcharged more) but we also get a discounted price from the supply house so the actual upcharge amount is a bit weird to calculate. We do have one of these caps in our system (its 440V instead but oversizing doesn’t hurt) and our unit price (markup included) on it is $25. If this system has other start components then you would want to change those as well but I don’t know what this system looks like so I’m going to assume that only this cap is needed. Depending on the distance from the shop we charge a one time truck charge. However the main reason we have variable truck charges is because we’re more specialized and some of our customers are over 200 miles from our shop. Odds are for residential work you’d be working with a local company and for local work we charge our minimum truck charge of $45. If this was durring business hours then we charge $120 per hour. Afterhours rates are much higher of course but usually nobody is calling a tech afterhours to work on residential AC. Drive times to and from the site are included in the billed hours.
As far as time required a quick cap swap could easily be within our 1 hour minimum depending on drive time to the site but with this situation I would guess 2 hours may be more likely for reasons I’m about to explain. The cap is obviously bulged so any tech worth their salt would pinpoint it immediately. Of course any tech worth their salt is also going to check out the other components to ensure that there isn’t a reason the cap blew. That means checking contactors, compressor windings, and ither caps. Once the new cap is installed that also means checking running amps and inrush current. While you’re at it you’ll want to at least check refrigerant line temps because that’ll give you a rough read on the system charge and state of the coils. For this unit I wouldn’t be hooking gauges up unless something was off with the temps and couldn’t be easily explained. It’s also just a good idea to watch the system run for a bit and make sure it cycles on/off correctly to make sure it’s not short cycling or something. With all that you could be looking at an hour onsite. Depending on the system and the delays you can’t really shave that down much if the tech is going to be able to see the unit run. If you cut out watching the system run basically entirely you can shave 30min off that but that’s also a sure fire way to get a callback for something you didn’t catch. The bigger issue though is that this is a dual value cap. It isn’t going to be standard van stock and until the tech gets onsite they won’t know what cap they need. So you’re looking at that tech also having to make a trip back to the shop to pick up the correct cap. I carry universal caps in my van but those are much more expensive so they’re really only for emergency repairs or to temporarily run a system if we need to order a specific cap. So if we assume 15min from the shop to the customer and the tech has to make that trip 4 times (out to customer, back to get part, back to customer, and back to shop when done) then were looking at an hour just in drive time.
So in total we have 2 hours of $120 per hour labor + $45 truck charge + $25 part = $310 plus relevant taxes.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 1 day ago
I used to work as an ac parts coordinator in a very affluent area. I know what they cost and those bills these people were paying were disgusting!
Zombiepirate@lemmy.world 2 days ago
When I used to fix cars we would sometimes have the service advisor ask us to do work for free. “Come on, it’ll just take you ten minutes!”
I’d tell them that they can do it themselves if it only takes ten minutes. “But I don’t know how to do that!”
You’re not just paying for the part, you’re paying for the knowledge, time, and tools of the technician.
rumba@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
And to be completely honest, if you call an HVAC repair company, they’re likely to do a whole PM cycle on it. Flush the condensate line and pan, clean the coils and the heat exchanger, replace the contactor if you have one, take the temperature differential to make sure the unit is operating reasonably well, replace the blower belt it’s not direct drive. I PM the unit myself every spring and fall. I probably should have had eyes on that cap though.
Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Yeah, teating caps is also a pretty regular part of our PM process. Especially because thatbone looks like it may partially be a run cap and a system can often run perfectly fine without a run cap except itnwill cause the motor to pull higher amps and run hotter. Catching a bad run cap early is the difference between replacing a bad cap and replacing a burned up motor.
rumba@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
That’s good to hear, thanks for that. Yes it’s a dual cap. I’ll have to dig out my LC meter and add that to my list.
It was a new build, my old plays I didn’t stay on top of things and ended up paying for it. I decided to do a better job here.
My very first maintenance I went down to look at what I needed to do. It’s a trane unit, so the evaporator coil and the condensate pan come out on a slide which is pretty fancy. The condensate line, combustion and exhaust air are all PVC and they glued it all so you couldn’t get the tray out. (The air lines don’t even go into the box they just ran it past the front for spite I think)
Hope you don’t mind if I ask you two questions, not holding you accountable or anything.
What are you guys using for condenser coil cleaner? I just got some off-the-shelf home Depot stuff but it looks sus. I pulled the case and separated the coils out at the two-year mark and followed the instructions on the cleaner. I didn’t see any physical dirt anywhere and there’s no leaves or debris. Without physical dust dirt or debris do you think just hosing it down from the outside on PM is fine?