Brerah

A well-grounded suspicion

I consider myself to be fairly handy around the house. Part of the reason for this is that I really like to fix things and figure out how to fix things, and another part is that I am cheap. I have a really hard time knowing that the minute the service guy for whatever (A/C, Plumbing, Electrician) steps into your home, his clock is ticking at $100+ per hour.

This morning confirmed all my suspicions and will enforce my hesitancy with calling any of these people ever again.

Yesterday we noticed that the pilot light on our water heater was not staying lit, which consequently means that we have no hot water. I went and re-lit it once and it seemed to work fine. Last night comes, and we notice no hot water, and so sure enough when I check the pilot light, it is off.

This morning I decided to call the plumbers to come out and fix this problem. I had opened the manual for our hot water heater and found out what was wrong (the thermo-coupler was bad) and so I told the plumbing-receptionist over the phone that this was the problem (so as to avoid any unneccessary $100/hr labor charges in diagnosing the problem). She informed me that they charged $115/hr (holy crap!!) and that the part would be $30-$40. I'm resigned to the fact that we need hot water, and so I'm ready to spend this.

Then I get on the internet and find that replacing a thermo-coupler takes about 2 minutes and the part costs about $10.

About 30 seconds after reading this, I'm on the way to the Home Depot to buy one of these, and within 15 total minutes, the new thermo-coupler is installed (literally it takes 2 minutes to take the old one off and put the new one on) for a grand total of $10.63, plus the cost of driving 1.3 miles to home depot. I consider it to be negligible.

And so onward I march in my quest to never be scammed by service technicians again.

posted by corbs @ 7:20 AM