Broken air conditioning. Who's paying?

[Sp0cK]

So I've been living in this 1 bedroom apartment for about almost 6 months now and I have a small problem that the aircon stopped responding to the remote control about 2 months ago. At that time I had a mechanic looking at it and said it would be a 400rmb fix.

When it happen I told the house owner about the problem, which he simply replied with. "We gave you one that was working, so you pay the repair costs." Although, it's quite an old aircon and because it's definitely not my fault - I think it's fair the owner pays for it.

How does this work in China? my chinese friend said; "there's no rule for this":wall

[anonymoose]

That's a tricky one. I had a similar problem once, and the landlord agreed to pay for it.

Anyway, I don't know what's wrong with your aircon, but 400 RMB seems rather a lot. If I were you, I'd get a second opinion before going ahead with anything. It may really require 400 RMB, but there's also a good chance that you're being ripped off here. I don't remember exactly how much the repair on mine came to, but it was under 50 RMB, as far as I recall.

[Sp0cK]

It's a bit of a strange problem. The airconditioning works fine. The remote works fine. But it simply stopped responding to each other. So can only physically use the on/off button on the machine.

perhaps if I should try a different remote

And yeh I do think the repair guy was ripping me off with just a simple issue like this. So I send him away straight away after "四百块钱“ came out of his mouth

[msittig]

We live in company apartments and our remote controls are really generic ones that work with both the wall-mounted and free-standing A/Cs in our house. You just have to walk it through a training process so it can figure out the code that matches the machine (at our house, it's #66). Maybe you could try one of those? They're less than RMB 20 on Taobao:

http://search.taobao.com/search?q=%BF%D5%B5%F7%D2%A3%BF%D8%C6%F7

[imron]

Is there a button on the remote to sync it to an airconditioner that you accidentally pressed without realising it?

[abcdefg]

Change the battery in the remote if you haven't already tried that.

[Sp0cK]

haha 不好意思 somehow it forgot to remember the 品牌 (model nr, as stated on the remote)

didn't even realise it was a universal remote. Quite funny that the repair guy screwed the entire thing open and investigated the machine for like 20min and came to the conclusion that it was broken. So much for Chinese honesty!

[imron]

That'll be RMB 400 please