Air Con Installer - Part 1

I have been "hunting" around for a reliable and responsive air con installer to install a Mitsubishi Starmex System 4 for my house, so I started to ask shops/companies to give me a quote based on the following requirements. As my house's existing air-cons were serviced by Aircon Designs (AD), I asked my hubby to call them up to give us a quote. The company told him that they would first need to do a site survey before giving us a quote, so we arranged for a site survey. Subsequently, the sales executive quoted us the following.

MXY-4A28VA / MSY-GE10VA X2 + MSY-GE13VA + MSY-GE26VA at $4,450 nett.

To supply labour & material to install 1 set of Mit StarMEX inverter multi split wall mounted type A/C complete with 1/2" Thermaflex class "O" insulation, refrigerant G23 copper piping, diameter 16mm drainpipe, 3 core 40 Keystone control wire, 2.5mm wiring from condenser to isolator, PVC casing at expose area, vacuum system, charging in refrigerant gas, testing and commissioning

Compressor 5 yrs, Fancoil/Spare Parts 1 yr warranty by agent.
Installation workmanship 1 yr warranty.

I asked the sales executive to quote me for MXY-4A28VA / MSY-GE10VA X3 + MSY-GE24VA and the price was $4,390, which is only a savings of $60 for downsizing the 13VA to a 10VA and the 26VA to a 24VA. I also asked him if he could bundle in any free servicing since we have been their customer for so long (they installed our existing air-cons and been doing the servicing for the past many years), he told me "NO"! Oh well, so we gathered that there is no need to be loyal to any particular company.

As I've been researching quite a bit on the materials used for air-con installation, I asked the guy why G22 is not used. The reply was that it's because G22 is 0.71mm and G23 is 0.61mm, is 0.1mm thicker and for HDB, there is a lot of 90 degree bend, so G23 holds up better than G22. Well, I'm not quite sure if the reply was exactly correct... I found out from the web that G22 is harder to bend, so an installer needs to use a pipe bender to bend and the result will be a nicely bent pipe. If the installer uses hands to bend the pipe, it may result in some acute angle. Hence, are they trying to avoid using G22 so that they can do the job instead?

If we want to upgrade to G22, we would have to pay an additional $50 per set of piping. I figured it would probably end up to be around 4.5k if we were to engage them. Well, since they don't appreciate customer's loyalty, we decided to get more quotations for comparison. After comparing AD with few other companies, we decided to drop them from our consideration because

1. The price is on the high side.
2. There is no freebies to sweeten the deal for a long time customer.
3. The reply on why G22 is not used doesn't fully convinced us.

I'm revealing the company name for some of the air con installers since we have already ruled them out based on our evaluation. Up next will be Part 2 of the Air Con Installer Series, and it will be on Gain City (GC), so stay tuned...