Invisible

The furnace developed a horrible clatter the other morning. CLACKETY CLACKETY CLACKETY, something spinning and smashing into the metal box of the furnace. And of course, the vents were sending the racket through the whole house with a hollow fury.

It was twenty nine degrees outside, and we had to go to work. Coming home to a cold house did not hold much appeal, and the repair shop said they couldn’t make it until “between one and three.” I knew cable installers and their vague promises of showing up in a time FRAME instead of at an actual TIME were the first signs of a plague. Everyone has the disease now.

But we had time to go to the office for the morning, and on our way out the door, my mate called his brother the HVAC guy. To our great joy, he was able to come by our house at lunch time, and take a look. The repair shop, with their ninety six dollar “visit fee,” their “diagnostic fee,” and their “parts and labor” fees, were now our plan B.

HVAC. Aitch vack. Heating, ventilation, air conditioning. The men of HVAC wear old cotton shirts with their names on the pockets, and non-shrinking brown trousers. They have greasy toolboxes and dented trucks. They tell terrible jokes, and swear, and have extra jobs on the weekends that they do while they’re waiting for the paint to dry on that addition they’re building. They walk through office buildings, banging on aluminum brackets and muttering about intake fans. And they are completely invisible. Do you remember the color of the eyes of the man who turned on the air conditioning for that one day in February when the temperature got up to sixty degrees? Do you remember that the man was there at all?

My mate’s brother took the cover off the furnace and saw that the motor shield was broken. This shield is a piece of vented plastic that goes over the furnace motor, to force cool air over the mechanism. Without this shield, the motor could overheat and die, which is a terrible thing on a twenty nine degree day. Our shield still partly clung to its screw, and whacked into the cover with every rotation.

A two dollar shield was procured and installed without anyone using so much as a screwdriver. While he spun the locking nut into place, my brother in law told us that repair shops don’t usually replace the shield, because it’s easier to sell the customer on a sixty dollar motor. Only, you don’t charge sixty, he said. You charge a hundred and eighty, plus labor. Labor on a standard residential furnace motor is ten minutes with a socket wrench. Maybe twenty if you’re really slow, and new to the whole HVAC thing.

By the numbers: The repair shop would have charged ninety six for the visit, fifty for the diagnostic, one eighty for the motor, and seventy five for the labor. That’s four hundred and one dollars, for a two dollar part requiring no tools to install it to fix a problem that could be diagnosed with bare eyes in five seconds.

Or, put another way, there was a fee of three hundred and ninety nine dollars to make you see the man in his old cotton shirt.