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Comment by sema4hacker | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it would be nice if everything was easy, fair, and equitable. But:

Almost anyone can become an Uber driver without much effort. Not true for plumbers and HVAC people.

There are so many drivers available they're waiting for your call. Any decent plumbing/HVAC company has a backlog.

All Uber drivers are centralized under one pricing system. Plumbers/HVACs control their own pricing logic. I've never gotten contractor estimates that weren't across a huge range from low to high.

You can never trust a referral unless it's from someone you know that received the service themselves.

Uber vs. plumbing/HVAC is apples and oranges.

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I agree. The comments in this thread don't seem to understand how skill trade work operates at all.

One truism is that any halfway decent tradesman always has about 10x the amount of work waiting for them as they can accomplish. People who can do the job well are always in demand.

Uber for plumbers would be a disaster because the only plumbers who have the free time for waiting around for on-call work are the ones who are terrible at their job.

Just like you have many taco places on UberEATS/doordash, you could have many plumbing/HVAC companies to chose from along with common tasks, etc.

Uber Eats does not have to deal with past taco installations.

HVAC repair does.

Honestly if you use greer or some budget-tier mini splits it's easier just to install a new one every time than to fix them. It would work for 99% of residential cases and be cheaper.

A lot of the 'real' HVAC companies will basically push you to buy new shit if anything is broken anyways, so may as well use that model in a way that's actually economically efficient and just have teams of essentially unskilled unlicensed "Uber" goons that only know how to install a brand new X brand mini split and that's the way they fix literally everything.

If you already have a mini-split, that has some truth. Most AC's in Houston are not mini-splits.

And the segment of the homeowner market that takes pride in doing the cheapest possible improvement is limited and not one that makes a lot of business sense to cater to as an HVAC company. Because not only does that segment not open its wallets wide (if at all) but also because cheap HVAC systems are cheap in part because of the places that costs are cut such as noise and manufacturer support.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that people don't get joy from the noisy installation they installed themselves and maybe even joy from dealing with the lack of manufacturer support for that unit.

Only that people don't find delight in the crappy unit they paid to have installed once they realize it;s crappy. And as an HVAC business, that's your problem and not one worth having.

If It weren't for the HVAC licensing gangster system where armed police would show up and stop me, I would absolutely start a company ripping out whatever broken system you have and with the business model is I would replace it with a small menu of mini split systems I have goons trained to install for cheap.

There is massive pent-up demand for this. Even poor people fix their HVAC system if they have a spare buck. I recently met an elderly lady (yard sale to pay her HVAC bill) who paid $15k, her hearing was shit and she seemed about dead, she wouldn't have given a single shit if it was a little louder. But in any case, I've installed many Daikins (for myself) and for not much more money they are as quiet as the sound of the moving air.

It's probably the plumbers that have to deal with past taco installations if we're being honest.

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