this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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Mildly Infuriating

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[–] EatMyPixelDust@piefed.blahaj.zone 10 points 1 week ago (11 children)
[–] lemming741@lemmy.world 27 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Motor 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.

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.

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