Air Conditioning Repair - Don't Get Over Charged

The sand, the surf... the hot summer temperatures! You get it all in Virginia Beach where I live, and usually on the hottest day of the year you also get the unexpected realization that your air conditioning is not working. So, what do you do when the mercury starts to climb and so does the temperature in your home? Who do you call to fix it and not get overcharged?

Most folks don't know a whole lot about their heating and cooling systems. Maybe they have had some service work done before but in most cases, when your system goes down, you really have no idea where to turn. Most will grab the Yellow Pages or log onto the Internet and search for Air Conditioning repair companies in the city where they live.

Here's the thing though, most contractors know that you may not even be able to begin to guess how much a particular part in your heating or cooling system actually cost so they will inflate the price they pay for it by as much as 1000% or more! And how would you know any differently; this is not something you go through everyday and do you really want to pay another service call to have someone else come out and give you another price?

Chances are you will pay many times more for a part than the next company you would call does anyway and be stuck with another diagnostic charge. It is crazy how much parts are inflated and even the labor.

Awhile back a guy got the clever idea ot charge customers on what he called, "flat rate pricing". This went away from the "parts and labor" charges most people were familiar with. The idea was that a customer could know what a repair was going to cost up front no matter how long it took.

On the surface this sounded great but what it really did was give a company the chance to tell customers we can't give you a break down on parts and labor because our repairs are just one price... on "flat rate price".

Now instead of the customer keeping an eye on a technician to make sure he was not milling the labor charges, the customer has no idea what formula was used to get the price of a repair. No knowledge of part mark up or how much labor was added.

Very rarely are there any parts on a system, especially ones that the technician says he carries on his truck, that cost more than $100 and take an hour or more to install. With this in mind you should refuse a repair that is higher than $275 that can be done "right now".

Anything else I would ask to see the receipt for the part after the technician goes to pick it up. Oh, when it comes to Freon, a lot of companies are charging $70 to $200 per pound as I write this. Truth is, most of these companies are paying no more than $10 per pound even if they get a bad deal when they buy it.

Freon can be put into the system very quickly yet the company will charge you not only a diagnostic trip charge but a couple hundred dollars for 3 pounds of freon they can put into your system in about 10 minutes... it is crazy and you should not stand for it!