So, the furnace has been acting up the last few days. It never has run right, being grossly oversized for the house (thanks, previous dipsh*t owner!), but the last few days it refused to run at all.
I did a little research, and discovered that furnaces are kind of like cars - you can spend as much as you wanna spend, depending on size, bells and whistles, warranty, etc. I figured that if I needed to replace the sucker, the furnace itself would cost somewhere between one and two grand. Add in labor - maybe 500 bucks, I figured, for a full-day install, and there ya go.
I called the furnace dude and asked him to come out and take a look, saying nothing about replacement, only that it wasn't working correctly and needed to be fixed. While he was tinkering and adjusting and doing furnace things, I said, "So, if it turns out this thing needs to be replaced, what are we looking at?"
"Oh, geez, at least three grand," he said.
"what?," I squeaked. I'm pretty sure my voice went up at least an octave. "From what I can figure, I'm looking at between one and two grand for the furnace. It's gonna take at least a grand for the install? It's a plug and play, for Pete's sake! How long could it take?"
"Oh, well," the dude said. "I could probably cut you a deal on the labor. Say, eight hundred."
This guy is a one-man operation. I will eat my HAT if it takes him longer than four hours to swap out a furnace. Eight hundred divided by four is two hundred bucks an hour.
Holy sh*t, I shoulda been a furnace dude.
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2 comments:
In my experience it is always the new codes that you have to meet that drive up the cost. I think they change the codes every year around here.
fmcetc., yeah, because it's a gas furnace, the town Code inspector would have to check the work after the install. But that's a minimal fee, if any - at least around here.
In any event, he replaced the "control board", and it's working fine now.
And just to be a dick, I checked the invoice - his hourly rate is $67.50. I guess he was planning on moving in for the week if he had to do the install?
I get it that some contractors charge by the job - two hundred bucks for a toilet install, for example. But a thousand dollars to pop in a furnace just seems ... excessive.
Ha - I wonder if I'm on some kind of contractor sh*t list - "Don't go to that lady's house - she'll argue the bill all day long."
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