Listening to you blither your words of dispair is painful. In case you havent noticed, the design of new high tech energy efficient equipment requires a vast array of knowledge and specialized tools to "PROPERLY" work on them. I know that word is a tough one for you PaPaPeng but get used to it. I have no ideal what kind of toys you are working on that require only a screwdriver and wrench to repair. When you can tell me you understand static pressures, gas pressures, CO and O2 readings, temp rise, subcooling, superheat and how they each apply to a hvac system and make it run properly then maybe I'll listen to you. Until then, get your damn refrigerator off the back porch and go crawl back under that rock you came from. Bubba
Read my other post on a guy who wants to know how to select a furnace. The best way is to take a good look at the construction of one (they have their whole range of models on display) in the HVAC supplies warehouse. Ask their very helpful and knowledgeable salesguy (he's a licensed journeman HVAC guy) anything and everything you want to know. Every supply shop must have such a guy to provide accurate information so that they won't get sued for giving the wrong info. No charge, no BS about pricing or technical details. You get educated at the same time. That allows you to decide if you want to do the job yourself or hire a tradesman. Allows you to spot a flakey ripoff artist on the phone and drop him from consideration right away.
Same supply shop guy will also give an educated guess as to ordinary furnace problems and point you where to look to do the repairs you might need. Go look at the furnace and decide if you want to fix and/or buy the module too. Or get someone to do it for you. What you do inside your own house is your nobody's businessa. What a tradesman does inside your house for pay is a regulated business.
When you make a case how a car owner need to know about engine construction, performace parameters, brakes, shocks, etc. in order to drive a car then come back and convince us. Throwing all that useless data around puts you as a ripoff artist right away. Are you telling me that you are going to tweak those as settings when you install a furnace? The furnace comes as is and you are not allowed to change anything or else void the warranty as well as break the law. At most you only adjust the air for the burner to get a clean blue flame.
For sizing the furnace just ask the supplier what similar sized houses in the neighborhood have installed. Every manufacturer offers at most three to four furnace sizes which is the range of common houses sizes. (800 sq ft to 3000 sq ft.) Larger houses have double furnaces. Get the same furnace capacity as have other houses and you can't go wrong. Heat is heat. The amount needed to heat a house to a set temperature is the same. Your gas bill is the same. At worst an undersized furnace (by one model size, you can't even make a bad goof) may cycle more often. Furnaces are built for years of troublefree performace.
As for the newer high efficiency furnaces the expensive part is the electronics board. The most a service guy can do is to replace a blown fuse. The board itself can't be repaired on site. Hard to troubleshoot, won't have the right component part to replace, unreliable desolder-resoldering, etc. Butcher the board and the supplier won't accept it for a trade-in exchange. So all our Bubba can do is a board swap and charge you an arm and a leg. If the board is indeed the problem you can do a board swap yourself just as you would your PC.
For everything else this is where that visit to the supplier to take a good look at the insides of the furnace is a wonderful learning experience and money saver. You get to know how to open up the panels for access and where every inside is located and interconnected. Its easy to think through the likely source of the problem. Read the owner's manual. All components are designed to operate safely for years in a hot environment. They are therefore made simple and tough. Its a piece of cake to locate and fix anything once you know what's inside..
Just crossed my mind. Do you actually adjust CO, O2 levels or do you just fake reading them with some instruments with unfamiliar dials to bamboozle your clients? If you are the guy who installed the furnace and those readings were out of line its says a lot about your professional competency. You risk losing your license. If you are just there to fix a simple problem and you pull this stunt to convince them their furnace needs major surgery then you are a fraud and a criminal. CO has specific symptoms that any doctor can diagnose. Their furnace would be still running and their CO poisoning diagnosed first, long before they would think of calling you. They don't need you to test for CO on a regular service call and scare the shit out of them. There nothing you can do about O2 levels. CO poisoning problems would appear first long before they suffer from lack of oxygen.
The furnace burners can only put out heat at a fixed rate and do what it does. ON fire up. OFF shut off. That's it. There's nothing to adjust. That's BS about temperature rise being a factor in your troubleshooting and service provided. Sub cooling in a furnace? LOL. Superheat? Very LOL.
Heh Joe, give the guy a break. He already told you his previous service guy retired for health reasons and wasn't able to make recommendation for another company. If your heat was out in the middle of the night and it was getting cold, how much investigating would you do? Sure, it's always a good idea to ask around if you can. But sometimes you may not be able to.
Asking for a diagnosis and cost to repair BEFORE telling them to go ahead and fix it would have probably gone a long way to avoiding this.
Heh Joe, give the guy a break. He already told you his previous service guy retired for health reasons and wasn't able to make recommendation for another company. If your heat was out in the middle of the night and it was getting cold, how much investigating would you do? Sure, it's always a good idea to ask around if you can. But sometimes you may not be able to.
Asking for a diagnosis and cost to repair BEFORE telling them to go ahead and fix it would have probably gone a long way to avoiding this.
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Honestly, if my winter sleeping bag couldn't get me through the night, I would've gone to a hotel and dealt with it in the morning. $85 for the hotel room seems like a drop in the bucket compared to getting reamed the way the OP did.
Honestly Ping Pong. The more you type the dumber you look. I cant believe Im going to waste my time replying and trying to educate you but Im going to put one last glimmer of hope that you have one ounce of a working brain in that thing on your shoulders you call a melon.
1) HVAC supply houses do NOT have their entire line of furnaces on display. Usually they have one. A true HVAC supply house does not even let residential customers in the door. Why? Because they know what a hassle it is to sell an uneducated idiot like you a furnace and then get it or every part back in warranty because you cant install it properly. You have to have a license and an account before they will talk with you. You must obviously talking about a place like Home Depot. There, they usually put one guy in place and only at busy times. Usually he doesnt know a whole hill of beans about anything except to get your information so they can send out a salesman to sell you a furnace whether you need one or not. What they dont know, they will make up on the spot so you get that warm and fuzzy feeling (kind of like when you piss you pants).
2) For you to think that a furnace comes as is and already set up to work properly makes you the dumbest thing alive. THis is not a refrigerator. Once it is installed the gas pressure and blower speed needs to be set. If its a two stage furnace BOTH hi and low fire gas pressure needs to be set. You then need to check the temp rise through the furnace to make sure it is within the proper range AS PRINTED on the rating label on the furnace. You then need to check static pressure with a mamometer to make sure you actually have the correct air flow being delivered and not too high which will burn out a new motor before its time. You can also use a CO detector to fine tune the burner. Very simple to do but I wont "learnt" you everything today. Oh, and NO, Im not talking about your $25 plug in CO detector. This is a Bacharach meter designed to test for CO in a home or furnace. I really like your statement that a furnace comes as in and you cant change any adjustments or you will be breaking the law and voiding the warranty! That one still has me laughing.
3) To size a furnace you do not just ASK someone behind the counter and hope someone guesses it right by using square footage. You have a competent HVAC company come in and they do a load calculation on your home. Google "Right J" or go to Wrightsoft.com to get a clue what this is all about. You dont honestly believe that a 2000 square foot home in Alaska and the exact same house in Sunny Florida are going to use the same size furnace or air conditioner, do you? Oh, thats right. You ARE that dumb so you probably do believe thats true.
4) So you think a new furnace has only a new circuit board and fuse, eh? Totally clueless you are. Im not even going to bother with that one other than the fact that an expensive board doesnt always just fail because its bad. You need to look for WHY it failed so the new one doesnt do the same thing.
5) I think its funny to hear you think you can look inside a furnace and know whats wrong and what to fix.
Once again I'll say it. You PaPaPeng head are a fuquering joke and a discrase to all humanity. Get a gun and blow your head off now. It will do us all a favor. BUbba
Bubba, since you are in the business, it would seem you are in a good position to answer the OP's question. The OP gave a description of the parts and labor charges from the bill. You may need more info, which you could ask for, like the specific furnace and whether the repair was during normal business hours, etc. But you should be able to answer the question of whether the repair cost of $700+ was within reason.
Watch bubba add to the bill his expenses for a two week holiday in the Carribean too.
Yoh bubba. How long will it take you to install a new furnace? Or to fix the OP's problem. With all those bells and whistles you say are necessary you will have to make your time and labor estimate match the work involved. Now a lot of people lurking here won't know squat about furnaces. But they know the time taken and can see the labor taken the last time they had any work done including an installation. Be inventive.
Trader, Unfortunately, I cant answer the price question. I mean I could, but it wouldnt make any difference. You see, prices vary widely, and I mean WIDELY. It depends on what part of the country you are in and what company is doing the work. Take for example this: I got a call from a new customer. They said a company had come out and quoted them $8000 for a 95% gas furnace. (No, that isnt a typo). They wanted a price from us. Our price was about $3300. They wound up using a company that is Big appliance store that is know for cheap hack work. I believe they got it for $2200. Thats about as wide as you can get. Whats right and whats wrong? I know I charge what I need to make a decent profit and keep my company growing. Pricing over the internet is basically a waste of time. Bubba
Depends. We've done a few in 3 hrs and some have taken 1-1/2 days. All depends on the extent of the job.
I wouldnt know. I wasnt there.
I consider those "bells and whistles" a necessary part of the proper installation and start up of a new furnace. Its obvious that will all that" looking around" and "questioning" you have done of all those supposed "know it alls" youve been asking that you've forgetten to look at an actual installation manual. Its all in there on the proper start up of a furnace. It does require the skill of actually reading though................something that Im sure is very difficult for you PingPong boy.
Kinda of sounds like you are describing yourself PingBoy.
A sock stuff in your piehole would be a benefit to yourself right now
Furnaces are built to work for years without trouble. You don't need to know anything about how they work for fixing the most common problems. That's why HD, Lowes, Canadian Tire, etc. can sell furnace parts for the home owner to do repairs himself. The instructions are right there on the package and in several languages. People who are expected to read those instructions to do the fix don't need to be experts in anything.
The most important regular maintenance is to change the filters regularly. The advantages are obvious. I have seen furnaces where the houseowner had not done so for years. Their furnaces still work. Vacuum the insides of the furnace during the warm season so that the furnace will work fine in winter.
There are three items that (most commonly) go wrong. The 24Vac voltage to the gas valve, the thermocouple and the thermostsat. To work on furnace switch off the power supply to the furnace.
2.1 Before switching off the power do this. There is a pair of wires from the small transformer to the gas valve. If the wire looks flakey, that is the insulation is baked hard or broken, or just looks old, replace the wire anyway. Its easy to do and eliminates right away flakey wire as the source of the problem while your try other fixes. Measure if there is 24 volts ac at the gas valve screws after replacement. If not measure if there is 24Vac at the transformer end. The thing that must happen is 24 Vac at the valve screws. If there is no voltage at the transformer any harware store will sell you a new one for under $20.
2.2 The next item is replace the thermocouple. This costs less than $20. If that doesn't solve the problem put back the old one and return the new one for a refund.
2.3 The third item is the thermostat. Disconnect the thermostat and connect the two wires together. If that fires up the furnace you need a new thermostat. If it doesn't go to the furnace and from the connections diagram that is pasted in the furnace in the junction box short the wires there. If it still does not solve your problem put everything back as before (leave the new wires in 2.1 as installed).
Then call the gas company and find out what they provide as service. They have seen a lot more hairy home fixes than you can imagine so they are not going to frown on your attempts to fix your furnace.
If like me you like to really get into the guts of the furnace go to a HVAC parts supplier's store that trademen also go to and ask for advice and to purchase parts. The two I went to belong to two large National Chains. You get treated as they would treat a tradesman as to parts pricing and advice. If there is something that you shouldn't be doing he will tell you. You won't feel as if someone is protecting his turf and not telling you the full story.
Beyond that call a tradesman. Just hope you won't get one from hell like our bubba.
If you need to put in a new furnace go to 4. and get excellent advice. You will learn enough to make an intelligent assessment of many overhyped claims from different vendors. If you ever met a TRANE salesman you'll know what I am talking about. TRANE makes excellent furnaces. But they are no different from their competitors'. You pay a few hundred bucks extra for their "independent" salesmen's hype. Ask them what makes their furnace super efficient as compared to the other brands. They will bamboozle you with unverifiable numerical data in the style bubba's earlier rant, but nothing of technical substance because they don't even know how one works. TRANE hires retired authority figures like teachers and policemen to do their sales solicitations. Most people would be too respectful to ask hard questions.
If there are skilled folks around...why do things like this occur... Years ago (before we had NAT,about 12yrs) I bought a gas range from a large appliance dealer. I had to buy a propane conversion kit (couldn't order it that way). The dealer would not do the conversion, the gas company wouldn't either (I assume they had liability issues).
I followed the directions, and assumed my own liability...I needed no degree...it was straight-forward.
Trained people are under pressure...they sometimes make mistakes. If you are patient, logical, and read the directions...you can make many repairs yourself.
He specified the parts replaced and the time required. Clearly, if you wanted to, you could tell him how much you would charge someone for the parts and labor. Everyone understands that the price is going to vary depending on location and who does the job. But for example, if someone questioned the price they were charged to have the front pads and rotors replaced on a 2003 Pontiac Gran Prix, which involved 2 hours labor, the question is easily answered. The prices for the parts, either straight from the dealer or aftermarket are available. And labor here is about $75 - 95 an hour.
Answer to the question the is:
Dealer parts: ~ X Aftermarket: ~Y Two hours labor ~ $160
Now sure, you will get a range. The price is likely going to be higher in NYC than in Iowa. But a reasonable price, as opposed to a rip-off for the same job, isn't going to vary so much that a reply to the question isn't possible. And I would say that from the description provided by the OP as to the parts replaced on the bill and the time involved, plus maybe a simple question of two for more info, anyone in the HVAC business could surely state what they would charge, if they wanted to be helpful.
Exactly why I charge flat rate pricing. I quote you a diagnostic fee on the phone. I come out and diagnose the problem. I then have you sign my invoice stating what Im fixing and what Im replacing. The total cost is shown. If agreed, I repair it and get paid. If you dont like the quote, you now know the fix, you pay me my diagnostic fee and Im on my way. Bubba
Boo hoo. I'm standing here in my living room and I'm freezing. The baby can't drink his formula because it's frozen in the bottle. All the kids look like the Michelin Man because they're wearing all the clothes they own.
I call the hvac guy. He comes right away. He fixes the problem.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Warmth.
Arghhhhhhhh. The bill is $700, and he was here forty minutes. Why should I have to pay him to come right over, fix my calamitous situation, use a $300 circuit board and a couple of simple to install (though very expensive) parts?
IT'S NOT FAIR!
Well, just tell him you won't pay, to go on the roof and pull the parts he installed, and go back to frozen oatmeal.
Life IS made up of choices. You can choose to be cold if you want.
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