I bought my AC at the beginning of this year. Sometimes in Jan 2008. Actually my cooler which was only two seasons old, had given away. Paints were wearing off, and rust had eaten all the metal owing to the high salt content of our water supply. I figured if I had to buy a cooler every two years then perhaps buying an AC would be much cheaper.
so I started my research. the hardcore engineer types were recommending to go for a good assembled one. complete kit is available in market, chawri bazar, new delhi. there are various makes and brand available. or you can buy individual parts of different make. it shall cost you around 12000-15000 for all the good class components. A mechanic shall charge 1500 to assemble and fix. so, your AC can be ready in Rs18000/- . but it has a big drawback. it shall have no warranty.
No customer support, no services. Which can be a huge problem. though there are AC mechnics in almost all locality, but they can not be trusted. I dropped this idea of assembling on account of this only. otherwise I had made a trip to chawri bazar also for the purchases.
then came the option for the branded ones. voltas, samsung, godrej, videocon all these have window ac starting from 16000/-. but they are all B grade AC, not lasting more than 4-5 years. in this range, voltas is considered best value for money. others are also selling.
on top range, there is O’general and Hitachi. O’genral is considered the best in all type of climatic conditions and was priced also little less than Hitachi’s Quadricool. But the retailer ( Navrang of Laxmi Nagar, east delhi) warned me against their poor coustomer care.
this quadricool model has some good feature like dual motor and night sleep.
So, ultimately we opted for this one, which costed us 24, 000/-. 500/- extra for fixing.
This is one purchase, we are very satisfied with. Cooling is superb. controls are very easy. We run AC mostly during the night. average usages is around 6-8hr per day on week days and 12-14hrs on weekends. last two months (Aprl and May) electricity bill was around 2700/- as against 1300/- of last years.
so, electricity consumption is also not very much.