2003 Chevrolet Malibu Heater Pipe - C'mon, Man

When this light kept coming on after repeated top-off's of the coolant reservoir on my son's 2003 Chevrolet Malibu, I asked him to take the car to the Firestone Service Center in the town where he goes to college, that would be Athens, Ohio where he attends Ohio University, and have them see if they figure out what was going on. I knew the car was losing coolant but I could not figure out where the leak was coming from. Often times leaks appear to be coming from one place when they're actually coming from some place else. Firestone did a pressure check and diagnosed the problem as a bad heater core pipe and gave me an estimate for the cost of repairs to be around $460.

While I was thankful for the diagnosis, I was less than thrilled with the estimate for the repair. I thanked them for their detective work telling them it was more money than I wanted to spend. I offered to pay them for their time (bless their heart they they never did) and instructed my son to make sure he had plenty of coolant on hand for the next time he made the two hundred twenty mile trip home as I was going to do the work myself. I mean, how hard could it be to replace a heater core pipe?

Well, honestly, it was a lot harder than I thought it would be but I did manage to get the damn thing out and see that it was fine - it was the rubber o-ring on the end of it that had worn out. That part, which is proprietary - you can't just go to Autozone and find one that will seal coolant off from leaking out of the manifold, ran me $5.26. While this project did take me a while to figure out, once I did, I couldn't imagine a professional spending more than an hour on it. Mark up the o-ring and a $75 an hour labor charge and I would have been fine with $125 even $150 for someone to do the job, especially with the car being at Ohio University some three plus hours away. But, $460? C'mon, man.

Their estimate was that high because the entire pipe, which I bought and returned, runs a cool $100 from Autozone let alone what a Chevrolet parts counter would charge. Mark that sucker up and we kind of see why the estimate was so high. While I don't have access to a shop service manual detailing how much a shop is allowed to charge for repairs, I can only hope they were fair in their estimation to replace something that, candidly, did not need to be replaced.

I'm not so much upset with the shop for giving me an estimate for a repair that really didn't need to be made as much as I'm more leery of shops than ever. I mean, seriously, how many people get charged more for repairs than they should be? Yes, auto repair is a business and especially at name brand shops, they're responsible to a corporate bottom line to get as much out of customers as possible; being unscrupulous, however, is never the way to go about it. Even in this day and age where that kind of behavior is seemingly acceptable. C'mon, man.