Repair or replace?

Start with age

Air conditioners and furnaces commonly last 12 to 20 years with maintenance. Heat pumps run year-round and typically land nearer 12 to 15.

Where your system sits in that range changes what any given repair bill means. The same part failing on a five-year-old system and a seventeen-year-old system are different situations.

A rough test

Multiply the repair cost by the age of the system in years. If the result comfortably exceeds replacement cost, replacement is usually the better decision.

It is crude and it is not the whole answer, but it captures the right instinct and it is hard to argue with once you have run it.

When repair is usually right

Under roughly ten years old, a discrete component failure, and the rest of the system testing healthy. Capacitors, contactors, igniters, flame sensors and blower motors are all repairs that genuinely buy years.

When replacement enters the frame

Compressor failure. A refrigerant leak in a coil. Repairs starting to cluster rather than arriving singly. Or a system running R-22, which has not been produced or imported in the United States since 2020 and now depends on reclaimed stock.

Efficiency belongs in this column too. Fifteen years of standards movement is not nothing over a long cooling season.

What to ask for

Ask what failed, what else is likely to fail next, and what the system is worth keeping. That is a more useful question than asking for a yes or a no, and it is answerable.