2 September 2017

The condenser that almost depleted us all of our savings

My wife came home with some bad news one evening saying our air conditioner in the car is not cold anymore and just blowing hot air. It’s a stuff of nightmare, driving in the car windows down without air conditioning. So we head to the nearest car air cond workshop and the mechanic suspected something is leaking since the air cond gas has depreciated considerably. Not wanting to do a full blown repair on it yet, we asked the mechanic to refill the gas first and put in that little green indicator oil to find out which part of the system is leaking.

After that the car was cool again but only for a while. Exactly one week later, I turned on the air cond one morning and it was just blowing hot air again. That’s when we knew for sure that some major repair is needed. So we went back to the same workshop and the mechanic quoted RM1,400 to open up everything, replace the condenser and other parts if necessary. Since it’s a fairly expensive repair we decided to consult a few more workshops, who knows we might get a lower quotation. True enough, the next workshop we enquired upon quoted just under RM890 which was a fairly significant reduction. The workshop was not exactly bustling like the first one we went but it is a air conditioning workshop. It is run by a middle-aged chinese man with his family in tow.

As usual, the repair takes the whole day and when I went back to pickup the car later is was cool as a cucumber again. But one problem though, the air cond switch doesn’t turn which is not really acceptable especially after the amount of money we spent. He then took another hour to fix that and when its finally fix then I get to go home. That said, the air cond dial still doesn’t feel as smooth as it used too. I know he got the car air cond cool again but that defective switch kind of spoiled the entire thing. I don’t think he’s fully competent in fixing all type of car air conds and I can’t really recommend his workshop.

It’s true what they say - you pay peanuts you get monkey rate jobs. The other important lesson from this episode is you’ve got to have savings for rainy days and car breakdowns. My wife and I had been saving some money for our new home and also emergency things like this and they came in pretty handy that day.