Repair or replace?

The 50% rule

The most useful shortcut: if the repair costs more than half the price of new equipment, replace it.

It is not an absolute, but it captures the essentials. A $2,000 repair on something worth $4,000 new might buy you two years — during which you keep paying the running costs of inefficient equipment.

Then age

• Under 10 years, minor part — repair, no hesitation. It has half its life left.
• Over 15 years, major part — compressor, heat exchanger, blower motor: replacement is nearly always the better call.
• In between — the unit’s own history decides it.

The signal that should settle it before any other

A second major failure inside two years.

The components of a system age together. When the first one goes, the rest are the same age and have run the same cycles. Repairing equipment that has just failed on you twice is financing the next service call.

What the arithmetic usually misses

Three things that never appear on a repair invoice:

The efficiency gap. A 1990s furnace often runs between 65% and 80% AFUE. A current model reaches 96% or better. On a Quebec heating bill, that gap is not theoretical.

The rebates. Replacing with a heat pump opens up financial assistance that a repair obviously cannot access. Sometimes that alone flips the arithmetic.

The timing. Equipment replaced in September, by appointment, costs less and schedules better than equipment replaced in an emergency on a January Sunday, with whatever happens to be in stock.

What we do

We give you the repair price, the replacement price, the applicable rebates — and what we would do in your position.

If your equipment is worth repairing, we repair it. We have no interest in selling you a system you do not need: our customers often come back fifteen or twenty years later, and that model does not survive high-pressure selling.