Keep Above
Repair or replace the air conditioner
An air conditioner that's stopped cooling has the usual two ways back: fix this unit or fit another. Each side takes its cost and its years — the repair's extra years, the replacement's expected life — and is counted over its own span to a cost per year, the only figure the two share. No winner is declared.
Your estimate, not the page's
Not counted while this is $0
Your estimate, not the page's
Not counted while this is $0
Comes off the replacement
Put in what the fix would cost and what a replacement would cost. Nothing here is read from your accounts, and nothing is saved.
| Repairing | Replacing | |
|---|---|---|
| Up front | — | — |
| Running costs over its life | — | — |
| Total over its life | — | — |
| How long that covers | — | — |
| Cost a year | — | — |
| Cost a month | — | — |
This is one of the tools built into Keep Above
Keep Above is a budgeting app where you enter your bills and income and it works out the balance you need to keep — so you can see what's safe to spend. No bank connection, no ads on your data.
About this calculator
What counts as the repair cost for an air conditioner?
The full quote to have it cooling again — call-out, the capacitor, fan motor, compressor part or regas, and labour. The cost per year divides that whole amount by the extra years you think the repair would buy, so a partial figure would flatter the repair side.
What goes into running costs a year here?
Cooling runs long hours in season, so where the old unit and a replacement would draw noticeably different amounts of power across a year, that difference is a real yearly figure for the boxes. Where they'd draw much the same, both boxes can stay at $0.
What is the matching time?
The number of years the repair would have to carry the air conditioner for its cost per year to match the replacement's — a position in the arithmetic, nothing more. When running the old one already costs more each year than the whole replacement does all-up, no length of time would match, and the page says so.
What about selling or scrapping the old one?
Whatever the old unit would fetch — scrap, or a trade-in where an installer offers one — comes off the replacement's cost. For many units that is close to nothing, and at $0 the box simply does nothing.