America's new millionaire class: Plumbers and HVAC entrepreneurs

I wonder if that's the reason my HVAC guy tried to charge me $700 for running a thermostat cable less than 8 feet (that I later did myself in less than 30 minutes).

This is the typical trade tactic for rejecting a job that is too small to be worth your time. He still has to come out to your place, with his truck and tools, and install that 8 feet of cable. He could spend that same overhead doing an 8 hour, much more profitable job.

So he bid an outrageous amount. If you had said yes, he covers his overhead. If you reject it, he does something more profitable with his time.

RE ".... If you had said yes, he covers his overhead..." Really - a overhead of several hundred dollars. Seems far fetched to me.

It's not just the overhead of showing up, it's the opportunity cost of not doing contiguous hours at a bigger job. It's very difficult to fill up a day with 45-minute jobs all over town, so he's basically working part-time if he takes a small job.

How much would you charge to fix a what someone calls "15 minute bug" in office to new corporate customer on other side of the city? Considering that you would also take care of all paper work involved such as generating invoices and paying taxes.

Even easy job is probably going to take a few hours between scheduling overload, driving to and from the site, figuring out what needs to be done, and actually doing the work. Expensive? Possibly. But doesn’t seem out of bounds. How much would you charge to drive to an office to solve some problem even if it turned out to have an easy fix? I can’t imagine quoting much less than that.

Completely irrelevant, considering my private residence is not a corporation and doesn't generate anywhere near the same revenue. Nor does the "bug" involve having several months of context on how an IT system operates.

Nor does it entail the same amount of liability in case something goes wrong. The failure mode for running a cable is...there's no cable connecting the 2 points.

Let's say he can do two such jobs per day and has 50% overhead. That puts his hourly rate at $700/4/2 = $88. That's good money, but it's probably less than what you make.

Overhead which probably includes warranty of the work and materials, and liability in case he damages something doing the work along with the additional regular costs.

Not to mention there's the possible, "I don't like you," fee.

The fact that a company has more money is what seems irrelevant. Messing with electrical wiring seems like more liability than messing with code in most situations. By all means do it yourself if hiring someone costs too much.

It takes time (plus money) to drive all over the place giving quotes for simple jobs that people end up getting multiple bids for and/or end up not hiring anyone in the end. Those costs aren't provided as charity, but rather has to be baked into the price of the jobs that do get accepted.

Trade quotes include opportunity cost. Driving to your house and doing the 30 minute job could easily eat 1/4 or more of their daily billable hours depending on travel time and schedule inefficiency. Opportunity costs can vary widely depending on lots of factors,

The other issue was in most jurisdictions homeowners get exceptions on licensure requirements for small jobs done in their own home, a pro has to cover this cost. Also I’m guessing you didn’t need to pull a permit for the low voltage line, very possible one was not required but not necessarily.

People who might not be so brilliant are down voting you when you're completely right. A business generating revenue can pay much more for help than a private customer, because that expense helps them making money.

That is exactly what I am charging if some client wants me to do some crap on their website that takes me 2 hours. And my only overhead is needing to invoice them and switching from another project. Because I rather make progress on some project that actually pays my bills long term

Where I live , there is a "call out fee". that prevents tradesmen from not being paid for time costs driving to job investigations .... The customer also pays for the needed diagnosis time too. So I do not see a reason why not do small jobs.

Charging a callout fee ( charge for tradesman to just come to job site) solves this problem. Any diagnosis time is also charged.

Hah, after a nearly $17,000 HVAC replacement, I was poking away at my new smart thermostat and trying to configure it for the two stage furnace and AC (the old one was single stage)...

Thermostat: your system isn't wired for two stage.

Me: ?!?

Look under thermostat, nope, previous wiring. Call installer company (one of the biggest in the area). "We'll come out and have a look tomorrow." They do, and give me a similar quote, maybe $500ish.

Uh, no. I paid for the installation of a two stage system. That installation should include the wiring to run the system as a two stage system.

Another call and it was no charge, but I shouldn't have had to make either call.

And then of course, being the "cynic" I am, I wonder how many people with this company that have brand new two stage systems happily running on single stage.

This is after I was told if I waited for the off-season, there was a 15% discount. But the AC died at the start of summer, so I said, I'll take it ASAP. I made a down payment, duly waited... and then was told - the night before the install - that they wouldn't be there, because they had no stock of the air conditioner (what, you just discovered that now?). No big deal, my furnace was working fine. I'll wait. Six-eight months. Which, fine, it got installed before next summer. But if I'd known that you had no supply, and were never going to be able to honor the installation window, I'd have opted for the "off-season" install.

Hah, most places here charge a callout or quoting fee that they will refund when you order from them.

> The other issue was in most jurisdictions homeowners get exceptions on licensure requirements for small jobs done in their own home, a pro has to cover this cost.

In my state, a plumbing license from the state costs $139 and lasts three years. That's not exactly onerous.

> Also I’m guessing you didn’t need to pull a permit for the low voltage line, very possible one was not required but not necessarily.

I'm yet to meet a contractor who doesn't pass permitting costs on to the customer.

I bought a new furnace and central air widget once, following a flood.

High-efficiency, dual stage furnace. There were cheaper options, but I didn't want the cheapest option.

I fixed it myself on two different occasions when I'd woken up to a super-cold house in the middle of the night, with both fixes relating to condensation building up where it shouldn't. (One of these was a manufacturing fault that was corrected by slightly shortening a rubber hose, and the other was an installation fault relating to the drain plumbing.)

Sure, I could have called the next day and maybe they'd have shown up eventually to fix it (maybe for "free"), but meh: I got it sorted, my fixes were cromulent and safe, and I had a warm house sooner instead of later. The installation manual contained enough theory of operation that it wasn't too bad for me to get a solid understanding of the concepts at play and to proceed with good confidence.

It was a scorching hot day in July before they showed up to charge the aircon so that it could be used, and they never did come back to set it up for two-stage operation despite promising to do so (so I paid extra for nothing).

4/10, at least they managed to graft on the new duct work with good transitions and reasonable tightness, and it was somehow reasonably well-balanced by default.

(I'd have configured the dual-stage bits myself, too, but I didn't have the right tools. It's been a rather long ago now, but IIRC I needed two digital thermometers to make sure the heat rise was correct and a manometer to correctly set the first-stage blower speed. Buying these tools would have been cheaper than paying for a service call with another company and was kind of a no-brainer to me, but another flood came by before I had the chance and forever changed our perspective on living in that location.)