Having an aircon in your house is an important household asset as it helps to bring greater comfort to you while you sleep, study or do your office work.
This is especially important in this current pandemic situation, whereby the COVID-19 has forced many of us to work from home and communicate from our rooms since common public places such as libraries and offices are closed.
While it is important to get the best comfort out of our homes from our aircons so as to create a conducive environment for our activities, we cannot help at times when our home aircons sometimes get spoilt.
It is hard to sleep well at night if your bedroom is not cooling enough. Your work productivity may be affected if you are not used to working without the aircon on. Hence, they need contractors to get repaired.
So if you need aircon repair for your home aircon units, here are 5 things to consider.
Know your aircon situation well
The very first question you have to ask yourself is – what is really happening to your aircon?
Does it produce a sound that is unusual? Does it not produce enough cooling air?
You have to describe exactly the problem of the aircon and the situation of the environment in order to decide on getting the repair done for you.
This is because you will have to convey exactly what happened to the aircon service providers over phone calls or emails properly in detail.
With the correct details, they can decide the proper equipment and manpower and send them down to inspect your unit.
Different problems need different specialised help.
For example, does the malfunctioning of your room aircon also affect other room aircons too?
Or is it only your room aircon?
It may be your own aircon foils that are clogged, or it may be an external installation issue that has a problem with its compressor.
Is it that your aircon is leaking water?
Different types of repair depend on the different types of situations or problems.
Know your aircon
Not everyone is technically or engineering inclined or trained professionally.
Having said that, there are some aircon details you should be clear of before you engage the aircon repair company – model, brand, type and the history (the number of years or months you have installed this aircon).
It is best that you have kept your aircon installation manuals you got when you first purchased it.
Once you get all this information on hand and make a phone call or email, then the engineer on the other side is able to analyze from their own engineering specifications and make decisions on why and how to repair properly.
By this way, it will be easier for them to troubleshoot your aircon on site when they investigate your home aircon themselves.
Another factor to consider from your aircon information is the warranty.
The warranty card is of utmost importance because a proper warranty can help you enjoy a complimentary service on your aircon for up to the length in time specified in the card.
It can be 1 year, or 2 years, depending on the agreement put forth in your warranty information.
If some of your parts are spoilt and need replacement before the warranty period expires, then you are in good luck as they can be replaced free of charge.
Otherwise, it can be costly to replace.
Hence, it is important for you to register your warranty or keep your warranty card as warranty proof.
Find a reliable aircon repair company
The next thing to consider is that you must be ready to do your own search for a good aircon repair company or contractor.
Please check properly if there are reputable contractors in your own neighbourhood. If you need to, please ask your friends or relatives for good recommendations. Word of mouth helps a lot.
If recommendations are insufficient for you, then do an online search in Google called “aircon repair” and you will get tons of results.
Compare them according to the reviews by real time users. If somebody has recruited that worker previously, you will have the option to find out about the technician’s aptitude from online reviews.
More often than not, these reviews are accurate and useful.
Do a comparative study of their price quotations as much as possible.
Try to get about 3 quotations at least before making a decision on the final one.
Most aircon companies charge according to what parts of the aircon need repair. It is usually the price per fan coil unit. Or it can be a repair service for an aircon printed circuit board.
Though the quotation can only be a rough estimate from the first check, it is still worth the comparison study before deciding.
Experience of the aircon company
You must perform research on the experience of the contractor when it comes to aircon repair.
You can do this by having a detailed conversation with them. These are some of the questions you can ask during the discussion:
- What are the experience the company has with this particular problem
- Does the company specialize in a specific area only
- Does the company have any customer review
- Does the company offer other services
From the answers they give you, you can tell and infer on how professional their services are, not just with their given knowledge but with the particular situations they have gone through. One good tip is if they have told you what troubles or hassles they went through and how they overcame them. And so, with these, you can make your own decisions properly.
Additional services
At times, your aircon may need to be cleaned thoroughly because the aircon is badly clogged or choked.
In this case, an overhaul is necessary to repair the aircon. During overhaul, the aircon is dismantled by parts and washed chemically. This process is called chemical washing.
Chemical washing is different from chemical cleaning in that chemical cleaning involves only a spraying on the surface of the fan coil before washing away the chemical with water.
Chemical washing, however, is more thorough because it involves stripping down the complete fan coil unit. It involves cleaning out the chemical residue found inside the fan coil because failure to do so may lead to corrosion.
The cleaning or washing is to be done when it is very obvious that the parts are investigated and found to be choked. A proper professional repair man can help to do the cleaning with the appropriate equipment he has on hand.
Conclusion
Many people in Singapore take air conditioning for granted and get into panic or frustration when their aircon units become faulty and require repair.
With working from home becoming the norm for the foreseeable future, it is expected that the load on your residential aircon units will be higher and correspondingly the chances of them breaking down will increase as well.
For the sake of your comfort (and for some, sanity), having a reliable and trusted aircon repair company that you can call for assistance whenever required is a life-saver.
Keep to the points mentioned in this article and you should have no problems finding an aircon service provider that suits your needs. If you’re needing aircon repair service right now, talk to us.