Just out of curiosity, what do they charge for R22 these days? Figure residential central air and sold / installed by a professional, licensed tech on a service call. Service call & labor charged separately. I'm sure it's gone way up in recent years.
Saw something on TeeVee the other day , IIRC it's around 40-50 bucks a pound .
It was way up, but it has come down now that new units are not using it. Most of what is available has been recovered. I'll let you know once we get the bill from our service company.They are charging our R-22 system tomorrow.
IIC, it was $60+ a few years ago and is now closer to $40 to $50.
It migh not be the actual cost of the R22. Last year I had a service call that turned out to be a bad capacitor. For a less than $ 50 capacitor ( allowing a fair markup) it cost me about $ 350 for the service call. The service man was here just long enough to take a cover off the unit, look at the capacitor, go to his truck and get one. Almost no time to find and replace the bad capacitor.
They don't even bother to fake it anymore.
One time, I paid $91 for a twenty minute job, changing a master brake cylinder on my van. "we just flat rated it out."
Knowledge. Parts. Tools. Skills.
Some times, the parts is the smallest section of the final bill. One tradesman I used to know said one time "if they could do the job, they would do it them selves and never call you. You can do the job, they can't. And you have to charge accordingly."
- . Christopher A. Young learn more about Jesus .
Who is "they"? Amazon?
Who "they" are is clearly spelled out in the orginal question:
"a professional, licensed tech on a service call"
I never said they should only bill for the cost of the capacitor. But why stop at $350 for a 5 minute service call. Why not $1350?
How much time did it actually take, incluiding driving to & from the customer? You have a tech who being paid all day, a truck, and a lot of parts in that truck, plus what I presume is hefty insurance, especially liability.
$350 sounds steep but it's clear they can't just charge 5 minutes and expect to stay in business. I have no idea what the going rate is as I've not had a tech out in a while. I had a bad condensing unit cap several years ago but I was able to take care of that myself by picking one up at Grainger the next day. Similarly a stuck contactor one time.
I just asked the service company owner. Right now he is paying $30 a pound.
I did not go into the whole story. When I called about the heatpump I was told it would be a $ 89 service call to find out what was wrong. Reasonable to me. In probably 10 minuits he had found the bad capacitor and replaced it, maybe not that long. Then came the shocker.. We were talking while he was working and I told him I worked on many electrical and other things at work. He asked me what I thought the capacitor would cost to replace it and I guessed $ 50 knowing that was way high just to get one at the parts store.
He showed me a chart of the standard company repair charges and that capacitor was in the $ 350 level. Funny thing about the level of charges was that he said he could give it a 'spring tuneup' for $ 100 that included cleaning the coils inside and outside. It took him much longer to do that. I had him to do that so I could see how it was done. I learned a lot from that.
I got on ebay and ordered a capacitor and a relay that may go bad at sometime so I can replace them myself the next time. The total cost was less than $ 30 for both of them.
That sure is a deep, philisophical question. I don't have the answer.
I have a lady friend who lives in a more expensive town a couple over. She hates it when she calls a service guy or contractor, and the first thing they ask is "what city do you live in?" She gets charged more because of where she lives - not distance, but house prices.
Yeah , that's HIS cost , but what is he charging his customers for it ?
I'll let you know when we get the bill.
The gas itself is not that expensive these days. Getting a guy to put it in is.
You could put a positive slant on it and say they are giving a discount to those less able to pay!
You could put a positive slant on it and say they are giving a discount to those less able to pay!
That could be truth however it also known fact, that different town have different user tax laws! State and city taxes are base where the work was perform and not where the service company is located.
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