How to Choose an Aircon Servicing Company in Singapore

Most people book aircon servicing when something has already gone wrong — it is not cooling, it smells, or water is dripping down the wall. That is the worst moment to work out what you are buying, because the words on the quotation all sound like they mean the same thing and they do not.

Every company in our comparison that describes its work at all describes these separately, and the price gap between them is large. General servicing is routine cleaning: filters, the blower wheel, the drain pipe, a check of the gas pressure. A chemical wash applies a chemical solution to the coil and blower to shift what routine cleaning cannot. An overhaul goes further again — the unit is dismantled, and reassembled afterwards.

Across the companies we researched, general servicing was published between $40 and $65 for a single unit, chemical washes between $80 and $110, and overhauls from $100 to $180. Two companies distinguish a chemical wash that dismantles the unit from one that does not, and charge differently for each. If a quotation says only "chemical wash", it is worth asking which one you are getting.

This is the single biggest reason published prices mislead. Headline rates are almost always volume rates. One company in our comparison advertises servicing "from $20 per unit" — that rate starts at five units; one unit is $45. Another runs from $50 for one unit to $115 for six, then drops to $16 per unit at ten or more.

A three-room flat with two or three fan coil units will rarely pay the advertised per-unit rate. Before comparing two companies, work out the total for your number of units and compare those.

Of the nine companies whose sites we read in detail, only two stated whether their published prices include GST. Both said prices exclude it. The other seven left it unsaid — which at 9% is enough to reverse the order of two otherwise similar quotations. We have not assumed either way in this comparison, and nor should you.

Contracts in our sample ranged from $160 a year for four quarterly visits to multi-year packages priced by system size. One company’s packages are only available for systems bought from that company, which is stated clearly on its site but is easy to miss — it means the advertised package price is not available to most people shopping for a servicing company.

Contracts also generally cover general servicing only. A chemical wash or a repair discovered during a contract visit is usually quoted separately.

"Warranty" in this trade usually means workmanship, not parts, and the differences are wide. Among the companies we researched, published terms ranged from one month covering leaks after servicing, to 90 days covering a recurrence of the same fault with the return visit, labour and transport all stated as free. Two companies published nothing at all. One published the word "warranty" with no duration attached, which is not a term you can rely on.

Worth asking: how long, what counts as the same fault, and whether a return visit is charged.

Some aircon companies publish their UEN — Singapore’s unique entity number — in their site footer. Many do not. It matters more than it sounds: if something goes wrong and a phone number stops being answered, the entity number is how you find out who the business is. Where a company does not publish one, a government register entry can establish it instead.

BCA registers contractors for air-conditioning works under a workhead called ME01. It is worth knowing what that does and does not tell you: it establishes that a firm is registered, at a grade, until a date. It says nothing about residential service, pricing or how a job will be handled. It is also far from universal — when we checked the companies most visible to Singapore consumers, the majority were not on the register at all, which is why we treat it as one piece of evidence rather than a qualification to look for.

None of this tells you whether a company does good work. We have not tested that, and a website cannot show it. What these questions do is make the quotation mean something specific, so that when two companies give you different numbers you can tell whether they are pricing the same job.