Bad day
This weekend didn’t go as planned. Two nights ago I noticed a squeaking coming from my A/C air handler. It was one of those squeaks that you try to ignore and pretend you didn’t hear it. Well yesterday morning my daughter complained about the noise coming from the air handler. Well I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I figured that it needed to be lubricated so I called the A/C company to schedule a check-up.
Well last night I get home and the sound was 10x worse. and there was a faint burnt smell. “Shit this can’t be happening!”, I thought. So off went the A/C and I called the A/C company for a service call. I was going to have to wait until today which meant I was going to be without A/C for the night. With that thought off I drove to Wal-Mart (that’s right the only store with fans at 10:30PM) and bought two 18″ fans. That fan made sleeping great. I only noticed the heat when I got up to use the restroom. By the morning the temp was about 81F.
Now the waiting game started. With the short notice and being a Saturday the service “window” was 7AM-7PM. What do you know they showed up around 5PM. By this time the house was up at a comfy 87F. The guy noticed right away that the blower fan was seizing up. Lucky the parts are still under warranty. Piece of cake, all I have to pay for is labor. He told me that he didn’t have a replacement and it would have to be ordered. I was already looking at rooms for the Motel 6 across the street. He then called another guy out and they ended up being able to rig up a different blower. The downside is the blower stays on all the time (not the A/C). I will take that any day over no A/C.
So then after 3 1/2 we sit down and go over the pricing. I honestly didn’t have a good number in my head about the labor cost, but I was thinking around $300. It was close, it came out to $616. I asked if he pulled that number out of his ass (in nicer words) and he showed me his pricing book. That was a flat rate for the labor no matter how long (or little) it took. The blower was around $600-700 so I guess I should be lucky that parts were covered.
The worst part about all this was I planning on seeing my dad and attending my friend’s going away dinner. Both plans didn’t happen, 
but I will be meeting him tomorrow for our last mountain bike ride in San Antonio. 
