Is the person quoting my AC repair a technician or a salesperson?

The person standing in your driveway has a title, and the title is doing work. Technician means someone paid to fix machines. Comfort advisor, or sales consultant, or system specialist usually means someone paid a commission on what you agree to buy. On the same broken AC, those two people have different incentives, and you can feel it in how the visit goes.

Why the incentive bends the diagnosis. When a person earns more from a replacement than a repair, a replacement starts to look more necessary to them, honestly, not even cynically. A cooked capacitor and a dirty coil can be described as a dying compressor by someone whose paycheck prefers that story. This is not everyone and it is not evil. It is just math, and the math is not on your side.

The tells. Watch for a fast pivot from your actual symptom to a whole system conversation. A tablet that has financing options loaded before the diagnosis is even finished. Scary language about your family and your safety, applied to a routine part failure. And the biggest one, little curiosity about diagnosing the specific thing that broke, because the specific thing does not matter if the plan was always to sell a system.

How we are set up. Our technicians are not paid commission. There is no upside for us in selling you a system you do not need, which is why about 60% of the systems we are asked to replace we repair instead, for under $400, on a published flat rate. When replacement genuinely is right, and roughly 40% of the time it is, we show you the repair versus replace math in writing and let the numbers argue.

Ask one question when the quote arrives: are you paid more if I buy a new system? A technician can answer it flat. A salesperson will change the subject. That answer tells you which visit you are actually having.