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 budgets, 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 | — | — |
Does it matter that an air conditioner only runs for part of the year?
Cooling is seasonal, so the years the repair side asks for are not years of continuous service. A fix made part-way through a hot spell carries the rest of that season, and then the unit stands idle until the next one comes round. The field still counts in whole years, so what it is really measuring is how many more cooling seasons the unit would see.
The running-costs boxes work the same way. A difference in the power the old unit and a replacement would draw does not spread evenly across twelve bills — it arrives in the months the compressor is actually running, and outside those months the two would sit at much the same cost. The box takes a yearly figure even so, because that is the unit the cost-per-year result is built from.
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.
A replacement arrives as one bill on one day, which is the kind of expense a sinking fund exists for — how budgeting apps handle money set aside for later bills.
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. Where cooling the house with the old unit already takes more each year than the replacement does all-up, there is no number of seasons that would bring the two level, and the line says so instead of printing a figure.
What about selling or scrapping the old one?
Whatever the old unit would fetch comes off the replacement's cost — scrap value on the metal, or a trade-in where an installer offers one. A unit taken off a wall or out of a window often brings nothing at all, and at $0 the box drops out of the arithmetic.