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QUESTION:My neighbor called me over, said that the AC/Furnace and basement
lights were off but the breakers weren't tripped. So I looked, found
one labled basement lights which seemed to be tripped but very little.
I turned it off, then on and the lights came on but the furnace didn't.
I told her to turn the fan on at the thermostat. She did, the lights
went off. She wanted to call an electrician, I suggested a furnace man.
Saw her a little later and she thanked me for the suggestion. The
repair guy came, run a few tests, said that it looks like a job for an
electrician. Then he tried one more thing and determined that it was
the furnace blower motor. He replaced it and everything was working.
It's a 13 year old Carrier High-efficiency furnace. The motor and labor
was $310.
This seemed like a lot to me. I didn't say so.
What do you think, was she over charged?
ANSWER: You didn't say where you live. That price could be very fair in
Manhattan and a bit high in McCook, Nebraska.
There's a tremendoues difference in cost of living between different
parts of the country and people in the repair business have to live too.
The repairman had the diagnostic skills to find out what was wrong and
you didn't.
Sure, you could shop around and buy a new blower motor for maybe $50 and
put it in yourself, like I did last year. But that turned out to be a
bigger PIA that I'd expected because the sods who'd originally installed
the air handler routed the refrigeration lines right over the access
panel for the blower. So, instead of being able to just slide the
motor/fan wheel out in one piece I had to disassemble it while it was
inside the air handler squeeze it out past the refrigerant lines and
then put the new one in the same way. It felt like doing dentistry by
acessing the teeth through the patient's rectum.
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