What a $75 service call actually buys you
Every other shop in this market advertises a free estimate. It is the most successful piece of marketing in the history of the trade and almost nobody stops to ask the obvious question, which is who is paying for the van.
Nobody does free work
A visit to your house costs somebody something. Fuel across the county. An hour of a licensed contractor's day, which is a finite number of hours. The van, the insurance, the license that took years to earn and money to keep current, the gauges, the meter, the vacuum pump sitting in the back that costs more than most people's washing machine.
None of that becomes free because the word free appears on a website. It gets recovered. The only question is where, and the answer is always the same: inside the quote you get at the end of the visit, spread across every customer who says yes, including the ones who did not need the work.
So a free estimate is not free. It is prepaid by the people who buy, on behalf of the people who do not.
An estimate and a diagnosis are different jobs
This is where the word does its damage, so it is worth separating.
An estimate is a price for work that has already been identified. You want a new system. Somebody measures the house, sizes the equipment, prices the job and hands you a number. That is a bid, bids are part of selling, and there is a decent argument that a bid should be free.
A diagnosis is finding out what is wrong. It is the actual skilled part of this trade. It is a person reading pressures against the outdoor temperature, checking a capacitor against what is stamped on the can, measuring amp draw and static pressure, and knowing which of eight possible causes of warm air is the one in front of him. That is not sales work. That is the work.
When a company offers a free diagnosis on a broken system, one of two things is true. Either the visit is being recovered inside the repair price, or the person they sent is not there to diagnose anything.
What the hour contains
Warm air out of the vents has roughly eight common causes and they range from a part that costs less than lunch to a system that has finished its life. Sorting them out looks like this.
- Gauges on the service ports, with the pressures read against the actual outdoor temperature. The same reading means different things at 78 degrees and at 104.
- A meter on the electrical. Capacitance on the run capacitor compared with the rating on the can. Amp draw on the compressor and the condenser fan. The contactor, looked at for pitted or welded points.
- Superheat and subcooling, which is how you tell a low charge from a restriction from an airflow problem, three faults that all present as a house that will not cool.
- The indoor side. Filter, blower wheel, coil, drain pan, float switch, and static pressure across the air handler, because a duct system that cannot move the air is a problem no part replacement will solve.
- A look at the whole system rather than the one component making the most noise. The loudest thing is not reliably the broken thing.
The part that actually matters
Here is the real argument, and it has nothing to do with the money.
A technician working for free is being paid out of what he finds. A technician paid a fixed fee gets the same $75 whether the answer is a capacitor or a whole new system. That is not a small difference in how the visit goes. It is the difference between somebody looking for a problem and somebody looking at your system.
It also makes it possible to say the sentence that costs a shop money: this is fine, fix the cheap part, and put the rest away for a replacement in three years. Nobody on commission says that out loud.
What it does not buy
Being straight about the limits is part of the deal.
- It does not buy parts or labor on the repair. It buys the diagnosis and the price.
- It does not guarantee the fault will appear while somebody is standing there. Intermittent faults are the hardest thing in this trade, and an honest technician will tell you what he ruled out rather than invent a certainty he does not have.
- It does not buy a slot this afternoon in the second week of August. Two people can only be in one house at a time, and we would rather tell you tomorrow morning than promise today and not turn up.
- It does not obligate you to anything. If you want to take the diagnosis and call somebody else to compare, that is a reasonable thing to do and the diagnosis is still yours.
The terms, and the part we cannot tell you yet
This is a proposed site, and there is one thing on it we genuinely do not know.
Proposed wording. Two Seasons publishes the $75 fee and has never published what it includes, so the sentences below are ours until Tony corrects them.
Our proposed version: $75 brings a licensed contractor to your house in a window you agreed to, gets the system properly diagnosed, and gets you a price before anything is touched. If you approve the repair on that visit, the fee comes off the invoice. If you do not, you owe the $75 and nothing else.
Three questions we are asking rather than answering: is it really credited toward the repair, does it change on a weekend, and what happens when the fault does not show itself while we are there.
The full version, including those questions and the things that move the price of the actual repair, is on the pricing page. What a real diagnostic visit looks like in order is on the AC repair page.
Hours are Monday to Friday, 7:00am to 5:00pm, and Saturday and Sunday by appointment.