Today’s, call was from a man who simply could not handle the truth. I get this type of phone call every week. The call started with a man wanting to shop over the phone to get a better price on a compressor change out. (The compressor is the heart of your a/c system, located in the condenser it is the pump that moves the refrigerant through your system, it is like comparing your car engine to your car.) He immediately wanted to give me the model and serial number of the part he needed, (This in it self always amuses me, people must think that I have every part number and serial number memorized!) So as I stopped him from rattling off a series of numbers, I asked him some basic questions first like, how old is your current system? He responded, well it was built in 1988. At that point I told him that that makes his system 21 years old. I advised him that the United States department of energy says (from studies done with your tax dollars) that nation wide the median life of an air conditioner is considered 12 years. In California, due to not having as severe cold, hot or humid weather as other parts of the country, we tend to get a longer average life on our equipment. Replacing a compressor on a system that is all ready well into the replacement window is not a good idea for several reasons. Those reasons are... New compressors come with a factory part warranty of 1 year. (A replacement system can have compressor warranties up to lifetime and labor warranties up to 20 years!) After you invested a large sum of money on what is one of the most costly repairs you can do, you still have a 21 year old system with all the other parts being 21 years old. (You’re going to have more breakdowns.) Now your costly investment on that 21 year old system is still running at the energy efficiency rating of 21 years ago or in other words a new system will use half the electricity of that older system, so your energy savings will help pay for the new system, but you have no energy savings when changing just the compressor. If that is not enough for you then try this, the federal government is phasing out all equipment that runs on Freon R-22, the type of Freon that is in most residential systems including our low cost shoppers system. After Jan. 1, 2010 no new equipment with R-22 is allowed to be manufactured. This will and is increasing the cost of all parts for R-22 systems, as no new systems are built. This is also raising the replacement cost of Freon (R-22) so future repairs are going to be way more costly on older systems. Therefore replacing a compressor on a system this old is really throwing your money away. An other fact is that compressor replacements do not last nearly as long as factory installed compressors, making most compressor replacements a very costly temporary fix. Last when you replace a compressor it is extremely important to find out why the compressor failed? Compressors can fail in a multitude of ways, mechanical failure or electrical failure. In many cases when a compressor fails from an electrical failure it can cause what is called a "Burn Out" This is where the electrical windings of the compressor motor have burned through a very thin protective film that the thin copper windings have protecting them. This will create an acid in the refrigerant circuit. When changing the compressor you have to neutralize the acid by removing all the existing Freon, adding acid neutralizers to the system and installing Filter Dryers (Filters that catch particles and moisture) or your new compressor will be needing a replacement in as soon as a year (or just past the manufactures warranty period.) No matter what the reason for the failure, you have to make sure that the refrigerant in the system is clean, pure and dry. That filter dryers are installed whenever you enter a refrigerant circuit, that the system is purged with dry nitrogen as it is installed and that the system is evacuated to a 500 micron vacuum before recharging the system. These are all steps required by every compressor manufacture but only done by honest and ethical companies and technicians or in other words probably less then 50% of the time. So if you are getting a cheap price on your compressor change and looking for an even cheaper price (over the phone), you are going to get what you pay for, or in other words you are going to get SCREWED! Now I gave this advise to our "shopper" over the phone and for FREE and I told him that if he still thought that changing the compressor was in his best interest, I would be glad to do it for him and I promise to do it right, so at least he has some chance of not throwing his money away and I gave him my price range for this type of work (that I hate to do sight unseen over the phone). My reward for my knowledge and honesty? He hung up on me! So I called him back and told him the fact that he had hung up on me indicated to me that nothing I said mattered and that the price I quoted over the phone must have been obviously higher then what other estimate he had. It was by $200.00 and I can almost guarantee you that that price is the difference that the filter dryers, acid neutralizer, virgin refrigerant, Vacuum Pump and hours of extra labor involved to do the correct job by an A+ rated company with seasoned personnel will cost, that he is probably not getting with the other company. So you see some people can't handle the truth!
P.S. I never did get the chance to tell him that about 40% of the compressor failure calls I do go out on, after an other company has deemed the compressor dead, are not compressor failures at all, many are capacitor or electrical failures or compressors that are shut down on a thermal overload safety. All a much less costlier repair then changing a compressor. So spending the $69.00 diagnostic (refundable with any repair) that I would charge to come out and find out for sure if he realloy needs A compresor, would have really sent him over the edge! Some people can not handle the truth!
