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Ralph Mowery

In article ,
says...

Taxed and Spent wrote:
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 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.