Can someone review my AC replacement quote before I sign it?

A replacement quote in a Phoenix July is usually handed over in the worst possible conditions: the house is 92 degrees inside, the salesperson has a tablet, and the number on the screen has a same-day discount attached to it. That is not a moment for careful reading. So read it later, with someone who has no stake in which company you pick. Send us the quote and we will check it line by line — the tonnage basis, whether the outdoor unit and coil are actually a certified matched pair, whether the scope covers the crane and the permit and the line set, whether the rebates it promises still exist in 2026, and where the price sits against ranges we publish. It costs nothing, no one will come to your door, and the written answer is yours whether you hire us or not.

What does AZ Trusted Air's quote review look for (equipment match, scope gaps, padding)?

Pass one: does the equipment actually match, and is it rated where the quote says?

A quote should name a model number for every piece: outdoor unit, indoor coil, and air handler or furnace. Those three together carry one AHRI certified reference number, and the efficiency rating only applies to that combination. Any contractor can look the combination up in the AHRI Directory in about ninety seconds, and so can you. This matters in hard money here, because SRP's Cool Cash program requires equipment listed in the AHRI Verified Directories at SEER2 15.2 or higher, and on a split system it requires that both the condenser and the indoor air handler be replaced — a condenser-only swap does not qualify.

Two ratings are worth holding in your head while you read. The federal minimum for our region on systems under 45,000 BTU per hour is SEER2 14.3, which is the floor, not an upgrade. SEER2 15.2 is the SRP rebate threshold. A quote that trumpets high efficiency while landing between those two numbers has sold you the floor at upgrade prices.

Refrigerant is the other equipment question in 2026, and it is the one homeowners are most often misled about. Manufacturers stopped producing new R-410A residential split systems for the U.S. market as of January 1, 2025, and EPA's final rule published in May 2026 and effective July 27, 2026 allows units manufactured before that date to keep being installed until existing supplies run out. So an R-410A quote is not illegal — but it is a legitimate question, because R-410A carries a GWP around 2,088 against 466 for R-454B, and it is the refrigerant whose production allowances keep shrinking. If a quote prices old-stock equipment at new-stock money, that is worth knowing before you sign. Our R-454B installation page covers what changes on the install side.

Pass two: the scope gaps

Unlike a quote in a moderate climate, a Phoenix quote has two line items that decide whether the number is real: the crane and the attic. Roughly half the housing stock we work on in parts of the Valley runs a rooftop package unit, and swapping one usually means a crane at $400 to $600. A quote for a rooftop changeout with no crane line and no crane exclusion is either absorbing that cost silently or planning to add it later. What we find on Phoenix rooftops in July is that the curb, the gasket and the duct transitions under the unit are in worse shape than the unit itself, and none of that appears on a quote written from the driveway.

The attic is the other one. Homeowners who open an attic hatch in August consistently discover the same thing our technicians live with all summer — air up there above 150 degrees, and flex duct that has been baking in it since the house was built. New equipment connected to leaking duct in that environment loses the capacity you just paid for. A thorough quote either includes duct work or states plainly that it excludes it. Silence on ducts is not the same as ducts being fine. Our duct sealing and repair page explains what testing actually finds.

Pass three: padding

Padding is easiest to spot when there is something to compare against, which is why we publish ranges instead of describing them. Complete installed systems run $5,000 to $7,000 for three tons, $6,000 to $8,000 for four and $7,000 to $10,000 for five, with heat pumps carrying no premium over straight-cool at the same tonnage and mini-splits at $1,000 to $3,000 per head. On repairs the same logic applies: a capacitor is $50 to $200, a condenser fan motor $600 to $1,200. And two line items get deliberately blurred in this market — coil cleaning is $150, coil replacement is $2,200 to $2,600. If a quote says only “coil,” ask which one it means before you sign. The full list is on our published pricing page.

Is the review free, and is there any obligation?

Worth being precise about what “free” means here, because the word gets used loosely in this trade. A free in-home estimate is a sales appointment; it is free because the visit is how the sale gets made. A quote review is paperwork. There is no equipment to inspect, no attic to crawl, and therefore nothing to charge for. You keep the written response regardless of what you do next.

There is one thing a paper review genuinely cannot do, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise: it cannot verify a diagnosis. If the quote rests on a claim about your equipment — a failed compressor, a leaking evaporator, a cracked heat exchanger, a system beyond repair — somebody has to put instruments on the machine. That is a second opinion, and it is $69.95 Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm or $99.95 outside those hours, credited toward any repair we perform. The written report is yours either way. Where a quote review saves paperwork money, a second opinion is the one that occasionally saves a whole replacement, and our repair-or-replace consultation sits between the two.

Practical notes on reaching us: a person answers the phone at (623) 252-6403 twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Arrival is 12 to 24 hours in most cases. One flat rate applies across the entire Phoenix metro and surrounding communities including the Pinal corridor — Casa Grande, Florence, Maricopa — with no travel fee, trip charge or zone pricing at any distance. A quote review needs none of that, though; it needs an email address.

Will AZ Trusted Air beat my quote, or just tell me whether it's fair?

Price matching sounds like a favor and works out as the opposite. If a quote is $3,000 high, matching it hands you a $2,999 problem instead of a $3,000 one. Worse, a matched price has to come from somewhere, and in this trade it comes out of the install: a skipped load calculation, a reused line set nobody evaluated, a crane charge that reappears on the final invoice. We would rather tell you the quote is high and let you take that information back to the company that wrote it. Homeowners do that more often than they expect to, and it works more often than they expect it to.

So the review returns one of three plain answers. The quote is fair and well scoped — sign it, and here are the two questions to ask first. The quote is priced fairly but the scope is thin — here is exactly what to have added in writing. Or the quote is out of line with published Valley pricing, and here is where. Unlike a sales visit, none of those three outcomes requires you to buy anything from us.

If you do want a number from us, it is the same number anyone else gets: the published ranges, adjusted for what your house actually needs. Financing is available through a third-party lender and it does not change the price of the job by a dollar. And before you sign with anybody, spend two minutes at the Arizona Registrar of Contractors licence lookup. The state's Residential Contractors' Recovery Fund, established under A.R.S. § 32-1132, can reimburse an owner-occupant up to $30,000 per residence when a licensed residential contractor fails — but it does not cover work performed by an unlicensed entity at all. Our licence is ROC 317368; check it, and check theirs.

What red flags most often turn up in reviewed quotes?

Two of those deserve expanding, because they cost the most money.

Sizing from the nameplate. Replacing five tons with five tons because the old unit said five tons assumes the original installer sized it correctly for a 115-degree design day and that nothing about the house has changed since. Neither is reliably true. SRP's own Cool Cash application makes the standard explicit: the installing contractor certifies that the cooling load was estimated consistent with ACCA Manual J or an equivalent procedure, that installed capacity is within 15 percent or a half-ton of that estimate, that airflow is within plus or minus 10 percent of the blower's rated capacity, and that refrigerant charge is within plus or minus 5 percent of manufacturer specification. That is a rebate form doing the work a homeowner checklist should be doing. A single-stage system will not get through the SRP application without a load calculation at all; multi-stage and variable-capacity systems are exempt from that particular requirement.

Rebates that no longer exist. This is the live one in 2026. The federal 25C Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit was repealed for property placed in service after December 31, 2025 under Public Law 119-21, with no phase-down — it stopped outright, and the IRS has published FAQs confirming it. AZ Trusted Air is not currently an APS Qualified Technology Installer, so we do not and cannot promise an APS AC rebate to anyone. If a quote you have been given claims one, confirm the program is still active and that the contractor is an enrolled QTI before counting it as a discount. SRP Cool Cash is the one still standing for equipment: $75 per ton single-stage, $150 per ton multi-stage, $225 per ton variable-capacity and inverter-driven mini-splits, up to $1,125, on AHRI-listed SEER2 15.2 equipment, with the application due within six months of installation. Published program end dates disagree between sources we can see — some say installs qualify through April 30, 2026 and others through April 30, 2027 — so confirm the current cycle and amount with SRP directly before you let any quote subtract a rebate from the price. Our rebate concierge page tracks that paperwork, and one more thing worth knowing: SRP allows the rebate to be assigned to the contractor, which is why some quotes show it as an upfront discount and others as a cheque you wait for.

One further pattern, particular to older Valley housing. On 1990s and early-2000s stock still running R-22, a failing system is frequently quoted as a full replacement when the diagnosis itself was never confirmed — and on 1970s and 1980s homes converted from evaporative cooling, quotes tend to skip the duct and register capacity question entirely. Our R-22 replacement page and swamp cooler conversion page cover both, and the AC age checker will date your equipment from the serial number before anyone tells you how old it is.