Sigarms
Super Member
I am not going to say that I am an expert or that I know but I'm just going to offer my opinion. I dabbled in HVAC for about 6 months when I was in college and I needed a break from so much school and a little extra money. I then was a service plumber doing hydronic air conditioners in a lot of apartment complexes in Phoenix when I was first married. I plumbed for about 3 years. $4300 sounds fairly reasonable from the figures I remember when doing HVAC. I didn't write those bills. I did however write the bills for the hydronic air conditioners and I usually charged about $2000 to $3000 for them.
A hydronic air conditioner uses chilled or heated water with a fan blowing air by the heated or cooled fins, effectively cooling the air. So these hydronic ac units were sheat metal and copper pipes. I bought them from a little outfit in the middle of Phoenix for anywhere from $400 to $800 a unit depending on the size (we upcharged all parts by 65%). So the rest was labor and some time I had to install new filter doors and put in new ducting, sweat new pipe on, and other odds and ends. In this one specific apartment complex, the original installer never put valves on the individual units and so I would have to shut the whole system down and drain it which would take a least a couple hours for bottom floor apartments which added a lot of time.
Anyway, back to what I was originally wanting to say. I was making $18 an hour while the owner was charging $95 an hour for my labor. I am not going to give you the sob story that all business owners like to give people about how much their business costs and how little money they make. But I will say that I put probably $200 of gasoline into that service van a week depending on how much I drove. I also know that the insurance for all the vans was expensive. Workman's comp insurance is expensive. Paying office girls to write checks and answer phones was expensive (my wife did that for this company for $11 and hour and she was the lowest paid of 4 office ladies). The tools that each service van was outfitted with (besides my own $3000 worth of equipment I invested) was really expensive. Paying me to sit in Phoenix rush hour traffic was for 1-2 hours into Phoenix and 1-2 hours out of it was expensive. I could go on and on and on. The point is, the guy is not pocketing $2300 a day. I do think he makes a really good living and this 20% figure the other guys is giving you is probably low (I would guess its closer to 30%-40%, but like I said, I don't know), but you have to make a lot of money to make it worth it.
I bet you he is making a little money off of the unit he is buying. He purchases it for $1000 and figures he charges you $1500 for it or something like that. His tools, truck, knowledge, work, and product all costs money and being in a trade like that is miserable, so hes gotta charge a good chunk of change to make it worth his time and body wear and tear. I wouldn't do any of that miserable work for less than $25 an hour in my pocket again. If I was going to take a wild guess, he is probably going to shove $1000 in his pocket from that job, or at least profit it and the business will get a lot of it. But you know, a lot of people make that same amount of cash working a lot less hard in a day, I don't think its that absurd. But from the consumer stand point, yeah, it sucks! I would DIY but I am also 24 years old. Sorry for the long reply. And I didn't meant to sound like a know it all or push anyones buttons if anyone feels that way...![]()
The bigger issue is customer service and when you YOU provide service on the job and something goes wrong.
IF you pay for something, you want it done right and done the first time. If something goes wrong, when can they come out an make the fix for you?
You'd be amazed at the amount of "GOOD" hvac contractors there are out there who lose a job by 1-2k, but then they THEY get the call on a job they lost per the install price because they were too high on quoted price, but the guy who had the best price can't come out for another week (or month) because he has a full time job (or whatever his reason is) and that's where he makes his "real" money. HVAC side jobs are "play money because you know you can get them being the lowest price out there.
No one ever wants to wonder what happens if we have a problem with the equipment.
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