It ends the same every time….
We all know the Hallmark movie story. You watch one Hallmark movie and you have seen them all. Sure the characters change, the scenery is a little different, the plot slightly changed, but they all end in similar fashion. And the best part is, we know how it's going to end, yet we still catch ourselves getting emotionally drawn in and getting glued to the couch to see it through.
I feel the exact same way about those super cheap, or even free furnace or a/c inspections, or whatever other fancy name they want to call them. If you’re not in the industry, it can be easy to see these ads and think that it's a spectacular deal. “Get my furnace inspected for winter for free, that's a great deal”. You don’t become America's largest Trane dealer by offering thousands of free HVAC inspections every year, you get there by selling units.
Lets just look at the numbers to help illustrate how we know how the story ends.
First, you came to learn about this deal from some form of advertising. It may have been a social media platform, TV, Radio, whatever the media was. That ad space was not free. Now, there are varying levels of cost across all forms of advertising, but the ad was not free to run. The cost of the advertising has to be made up somewhere.
Second, you have to schedule the appointment. Maybe it's an online form, maybe a person takes a call, maybe it's an email? The person taking the call and booking the appointment, the software that allows you to schedule online, hosting email servers, whatever form of scheduling being used, costs money.
Third, we are driving to you. And we are not driving some fuel saving Honda Civic. No, we're driving a full size van or truck that is sucking down 12 miles to the gallon. On top of the ridiculous amounts of fuel our service vehicles use, we have them overloaded with massive amounts of expensive tools. Add in insurance and maintenance, and it's scary to see how much it costs per mile to drive our vehicles to your location, to do a “free” hvac inspection.
Fourth, tech salaries keep going up. And consider this, they are not sending the person that is fresh out of school to do these low cost furnace maintenance. They are sending the senior techs, who are just as good at selling as they are repairing. These senior guys have the experience and training to convenience you your 6 year old furnace is ready for the scrap yard compared to the person who got out of school 3 weeks ago. And those senior techs are being paid at a senior level. Between drive time and the time spent doing the inspection/maintenance, the $39.99 special is not even covering the hourly expense of the technician.
So that leaves us with only 1 option: Your unit is broken, or about to break, and you need to spend some serious money to fix it or get a new one! This is where those sales, I mean senior techs shine! They have likely spent just as many hours in sales training as they have HVAC training.
Is there an alternative?
Of course there is. Find a company that is charging a fair price to start with to perform your heating or cooling maintenance. There are several of them out there, you just have to look. So how much should a heating or cooling system maintenance cost? That will depend on the company doing the work and the services provided. Every company has a different hourly rate and performs slightly different work. But consider that it will take around an hour to complete when done properly. I would consider $90 the lowest possible rate a company can charge without the need to upsell repairs or add ons to the service.
JBH Heating and Air has offered our clean and check service for $99 for the last 6 years. Depending on the type of system, we are spending an hour to an hour and a half cleaning and checking all components of the system. This price allows us to spend a proper amount of time on the system, cover our costs and not require any upselling. Do we find issues that we recommend addressing during the maintenance? Of course we do. Capacitors get weak, water leaks happen and so forth. But we are not dependent on those items breaking on covering our cost.
JBH Heating and Air’s main priority when providing heating and cooling system maintenance, is ensuring a season of worry free operation. Which is also why we offer a 6 month no breakdown warranty with our service. In the event your system does break down, we bump your call to the top of our service list, and apply a $99 credit to your invoice.
If you have fallen victim to one of these free/low cost HVAC maintenance scams, or are just in the market for a new heating and cooling company, JBH Heating and Air would love to have you as part of our comfort family.
