Full Transcript
Hey Garage Door Fans I’m Chris Wilke with C&W; Canada Garage Doors and welcome back to The Garage. I’m here today with Matt Rogers, owner of Mondo Mechanical how you doing today Matt? Awesome, yourself? Good and the reason why I invited you here today, Matt, was to talk a little bit about maintenance. Very important both of our fields. But before we get into all that, Matt, why don’t you tell the people at home a little bit about your business? Mondo Mechanical has been around since 2007. Now there’s kind of two phases of my business. I subcontracted for about 10 years and then 2017 had a falling out and I’ve been full up since then so we started essentially two years ago with a bag of tools and a truck, to three full-service rigs and pulleys two years later. Nice. Well done. So I’m really glad that your business is growing because you’re obviously very good at what your field is and so I know that you do a lot of installs as well as just just upgrades and stuff like that, but what about maintenance? What’s the most important thing to know about maintaining your HVAC system? So when it comes to HVAC systems which a lot of people don’t even know what it is, is heating, ventilation, air conditioning. So anything that moves air is essentially HVAC. A lot of people do not do maintenance with them because they don’t know. You know, we all drive cars, we all do oil changes, we all change your tires, we need to have washer fluid (which I need to do in my truck) but no one knows that they have to change your filters regularly. How often we have to change our filters. Should it be serviced? Should it be cleaned? There’s two parts to an air conditioner - most people don’t know that, so there is a lot that needs to be done and should be done anyway. I think that our field shares a lot of those same similarities that way because that I would say the furnace as well as the garage door are the two biggest appliances in your home, and often times they go unnoticed as long as they’re working. We think, okay, it’s fine but we really do need to service these things because we use them every day, especially in the wintertime. Speaking of which, can you tell me a little bit about what you say to clients about maintaining their system and why it’s so important? Okay. Number one I look at is, not to beat a dead horse, but maintaining our vehicles. We all do it a vehicle is a depreciating asset. Your home is an appreciating asset but we neglect it. No one fixes things until it’s broken. Most of the time of general maintenance on your HVAC system or your plumbing system can prevent after hours emergency calls or major expensive repairs. And after hours emergency calls something your company obviously does. It probably happens way too often And my phone is never off my side. I’ve answered my phone in Mexico, Newfoundland, in the mountains, and dispatched guys. And I was going to ask about that. You have dedicated team for something like that as well, so it’s very easy to get a hold of Mondo Mechanical if you ever need an emergency like that. Again, in my industry as well, I have a lot of times where people, it’s just something very simple could fix the situation. A little bit of maintenance could have gone a long way. Rusted or broken cables are a big thing with me in my industry. When cables snap, people panic and the door goes cockeyed and again a little bit of lubricant, a little time spent on the garage door could have prevented something like that. And what kind of maintenance should people be doing to their HVAC systems? Is it something they can do on their own or is it something that professionals should only be doing? so there are a lot of companies out there that will tell you you can’t do any of it on your own. They want to lock you into some contracts, lock you into some deals. It’s not a bad idea, but there is. The most simplest thing you can do as a homeowner is change your own filter. You do not have to hire me to change your filter, you don’t have to buy the filters off me. I prefer it, but I like to make sure that you just change your filter. Changing your filter regularly, whether it’s... well, some of them need to be changed almost monthly If you’ve got animals, if you’ve got those one-inch filters, every month to change them and that will keep me away from having to fix things. A filter a day keeps Mondo away. Except probably not a day. Very very similar to my field as well with garage doors a lot of times about just a simple service call once every two years can prevent a lot of dangerous things from happening, such as your cable snapping, or hinges breaking, or catching these things that would become a serious problem. Also, homeowners should be lubricating their door at least once or twice a year. I recommend once before winter and once after winter, just because the winters in our province seem to be very dry and the dryness is an enemy to anything that’s moving. Have you ever had a situation that where a little bit of maintenance could have prevented something very very serious from going wrong? Absolutely, so there’s a ton of stories that we can go into, but I’ll use one recently here. We have a client who has a tankless water heater that also does their domestic water heating and also powers of fan quell, so it heats their home. So it’s getting double usage just compared to a standard system. These systems need annual maintenance. It’s no if’s, and’s, or maybe’s that they absolutely do. A lady called me when it was minus 20 or no it wasn’t minus 20, it was already spring time. We got lucky there. She .... last winter and she had no hot water. So went out there. Long story short, it took two days of servicing this. I had to cut in proper servicing belts because the installer cheaped out and didn’t put them in. We had to do that and all said and done it was over $1000 maintenance bill to get this thing up and running and we almost had to replace it. Thing was four years old but if you did just standard maintenance it could be 150 bucks a year. You don’t have that breakdown - she was without hot water for three days because of just the headaches of finding someone and then for us to get out there and do it over the two days. So doing the scheduled maintenance on that would have saved those headaches and here system would have kept running smoothly. I have a very similar story where when I arrived on site the garage door was hanging in the opening completely out of the tracks just suspended by the garage door opener and that was because he had never had maintenance done. The door was over ten years old and everything seized up, and because he’d never had maintenance done no one had checked to see how powerful the garage door opener was working so he pulled the entire door out of the opening and it was suspended there. So, a very dangerous situation and unfortunately there was nothing you can really do in a situation like that. We had to replace everything. So again, just a simple call, 100 bucks every two years. It’s fifty bucks a year to make sure that your garage door is a safe, secure, and managed properly, properly lubricated and working because it is the most used appliance maybe aside from the furnace in the home. No one really uses the front door anymore. Everyone kind of uses their garage door, especially in Alberta where our winters are super super fierce, so it’s very important to maintain your door as it is maintaining your furnace. And I couldn’t agree more with you. Is there an actual danger to not maintaining your HVAC system? Yes, we ran into two situations this last year. I knew the people personally, they actually did some work on my home and we got a call from their brother that they were put into a hospital. There were two brothers living in the home. They had carbon monoxide poisoning. One guy had open-heart surgery the week prior and just got home and the furnace was producing... their venting system was producing carbon monoxide back to the home. They both almost died. People that I knew and their furnace was older and even though they knew me and I kept telling them it’s time to change that furnace (the last three years I’ve told them that) and they just kept putting it off, putting it off and almost resulted in a death because they didn’t listen. It was just an old system. Maintenance wouldn’t have helped that situation, if they were maintaining it from the start, but the furnace was over 23 years old at that point. So when’s a good time for maintenance and what’s a good time for replacement? So maintenance should be done yearly on your air handler, two years max depending on you know if you have a house, kids, all that stuff. When it comes to replacing of a furnace, I like to tell people at the 17 year mark you better be planning it and you’re on borrowed time after that. You know, 20 is the kind of the magic number, but if you’ve done regular maintenance and you take care of it, there’s no reason why I can’t last way past that and also keep your efficiencies down. And I gotta say it’s the same with the garage door. With the service like I said once every two years please lubricate your garage door at least twice a year - once before winter, once after winter and again it keeps your door running smooth because it can be very dangerous if you have an unmaintained garage door. Especially if you have little ones or pets, because that is one of the largest moving appliances in your home and we’re using it every day. So it’s a good idea to make sure that it keeps functioning flawlessly, especially when you have a technician who knows what they’re doing. Just to add in there real quick Chris, because you know some people think that maintenance is a costly thing because they’re living on a tight budget, where if you do the math maybe I don’t have to do it because it just saved that money and ten years down the road I’ll just buy a new door. But what about the inconvenience? There’s a money factor to our time, there’s a huge inconvenience when the garage door breaks down, the furnace breaks down, the electrical breaks down, or whatever, there is a huge inconvenience factor and sometimes a safety factor. So is that purely maintenance worth putting your safety and time at? Such an excellent point. Thank you for that Matt. And with that, I think we’re gonna wrap it up today. It’s been amazing talking with you. Can you tell people at home where they can find you? Yeah so they can find us on Google. I always tell everybody to Google us first. It’s one thing for me to tell you how great we are but go check out what other people say. And find us on our website at mondopronto.com. We also have a Facebook page and Instagram page and you can always call us at 17 8 0 2 3 3 5 4 0 4. Awesome and Garage Door Fans, you know where to find me: CWgarage.ca, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. 17 8 0 2 6 6 1 2 4 8 and as always when your door’s in trouble, you call C&W;!