Labor Time to Replace Compressor Seals

[mulieri]

Last year I took my Legacy into the shop to recharge the AC. I cost about $50 plus a fee bucks in environmental fees. I noticed the AC stopped working again.

 

I brought my Legacy in again (now I live in a different State). They replaced the compressor seals and recharged the system. They charged $200 bucks in labor (for 2 hours), plus parts, and an much higher environmental fee. In other words, it came out to be 4x the cost of the recharge that I had done last year.

 

Does this seem high, or is this work more complicated than I am thinking it should be?

 

Thanks.

[projectrang]

yah, thats def expensive. We charge half an hour for that job, and its really easy

[Opie]

AllData shows the following labor for that repair:

 

Evac & Recharge A/C system: 1.4 hours

Replace Compressor seals: 0.5 hours

 

So just about 2 hours labor, plus the freon charge and the enviromental fees. Seems reasonable to me.

 

On a side note it is very rare that the seals are the problem on Subaru A/C systems, the high and low pressure lines usually leak before the seals do.

[mulieri]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not familiar with Alldata. However, from prior experience with recharge ($50), and the data suggesting replacing the compressor seals is about 0.5 hours, I would still have to conclude that I was overcharged.

 

The dealer claimed they were going "by the book" without regard to actual time spent. Sounds like a scam to me.

[WhatV8]

Personally sounds about right to me. With all the regs surrounding a/c refrigerant and the equipment shops have to purchase/maintain, it is no wonder anything related to the a/c system will cost over $100.

 

BTW, who knows of a dealership that doesn't charge straight book time for a 'standard' job?? Sure some mechanics can regularly beat the book times, but only for certain jobs.

 

A friend of mine worked in the parts department of a dealership and stated that the book times were actually pretty aggressive, especially for rookie techs. One time one of their tranny techs was booking 2-3 warranty tranny rebuilds a day, which is listed as an 8-10 hour job per the book. A corporate auditor spotted the reporting and investigated how someone who clocked 8 hours per day on his time cards was booking 16-30 hours per day for his work logs. They came to find out that he completely short cut the rebuild and only replaced a fraction of the parts that were required for the rebuilds, which is how he was able to punch out that many jobs per day. The tech was fired and his supervisor suspended w/o pay for 2 weeks for allowing the practice.