Sixteen Invoices, One Refused Job: Inside a Tampa Bay Repair Company’s Decision to Publish Its Own Numbers
Appliance repair is one of the last home services where the customer finds out the price after the work is done. One Tampa Bay company has started publishing its closed invoices instead — including the ones that make it look expensive, and one job it turned down.
Ask what a refrigerator repair costs in Tampa Bay and you will get two kinds of answer, neither of them useful.
The first is a national range. The cost aggregators put refrigerator repair somewhere between $125 and $500, with compressor work running far higher. Accurate in aggregate, useless in a kitchen in Carrollwood on a Tuesday in August.
The second is a local repair company’s own price list, and it almost always takes the same shape: drain line from $260. Water valve from $220. Compressor from $350. The operative word is “from.” It is a floor, it can only move upward, and nothing about it tells a homeowner what the last ten customers actually paid.
Teodor Appliance Repair, which has serviced Hillsborough and Pinellas counties for more than a decade, spent this autumn replacing that kind of list on its own website with something harder to write: sixteen closed jobs, each with the final invoice, the part that failed, and the number of visits it took.
What the numbers say
How the Invoice Data Is Collected: Voice Memos, Photos, Part Numbers
The published set runs from $160 to $926, parts and labour included. The midpoint sits at about $330, and fifteen of the sixteen jobs finished under $500.
The cheapest was a maintenance call with no parts fitted at all. The two next cheapest, at $180 and $220, were both blocked drain lines — the fault behind most of the “there’s ice inside my fridge and water on the floor” calls the company takes.
The $926 job is the one worth noticing, because it is the one a marketing department would have quietly left out. It was sealed-system work: a failed compressor replaced together with its filter drier, over two visits, finished the following morning. Published in the same table as the $160 call, with no asterisk.
Between those two extremes the list reads like what it is — a year of ordinary failures. An evaporator fan motor at $245. An ice bin fan at $288. An ice maker assembly at $312. A water valve at $319. A damper and temperature sensor at $327. A start and overload relay at $333.88, to the cent.
When Repair Costs More Than Replacement: the Job They Turned Down
One entry in the company’s published material is not a repair at all.
A customer called about a Kenmore from 2013 that had stopped working, suspecting the start relay or the compressor. The technician replaced the start relay on the spot and the compressor fired up and began cooling. Twenty to thirty minutes later the evaporator coil had frozen over only 25 to 30 percent of its surface — the signature of a refrigerant leak or a restriction somewhere in the sealed system. On the same visit he found two torn door gaskets and a fan motor running in pulses and making noise.
A full repair would have landed between $600 and $800. A comparable new refrigerator sells for $600 to $700.
The technician showed the customer what he had found, explained it, and recommended buying new. The customer agreed, thanked him, and paid the service call. Nothing else.
Owner Andrew Teodor describes the threshold as two lines rather than one: when a repair reaches roughly half the price of a comparable new machine, the customer is told plainly and the decision is handed back to them; past 60 percent, the recommendation is to buy new. The Kenmore was well past 60.
Publishing that case does nothing for the company’s revenue. It is, arguably, the single most informative thing on the page.
How the Invoice Data Is Collected: Voice Memos, Photos, Part Numbers
The part of this that is genuinely unusual in the trade is not the published prices. It is the production line behind them.
After every call, before leaving the driveway, the technician records a voice memo of 60 to 90 seconds answering eight fixed points: appliance type, brand, model and year; the customer’s complaint in the customer’s own words; what the diagnostic actually showed — explicitly including the first assumption that turned out to be wrong; the cause of the failure; what was done, with the part number and whether the part was original or aftermarket; part availability, days waited and how long the repair took; the general area, without street number or surname; and what the technician would have told the customer in advance, knowing what he knows now.
Each call also requires two or three photographs: the failed component in close-up, the installation point during disassembly, and the data plate showing model and serial number. No faces, no interiors, no paperwork in frame.
The internal rules list what may never appear in a recording: the customer’s surname, the exact address, the phone number — and, written down in the same line, invented part numbers and invented prices.
That last prohibition is the one that makes the rest of it mean anything. A company that bans its own staff from making up part numbers has, in effect, made it difficult to publish a case study it cannot stand behind. The part numbers in the published cases — a Whirlpool control board W11196400, a Frigidaire ice maker assembly 243297608, a Samsung ice dispenser door kit DA97-13829C, an LED light module W11683242 — are all checkable against manufacturer catalogues by anyone who wants to spend ten minutes doing it.
What a year of call-outs says about this region
Why Refrigerators Fail in Tampa Bay: Hard Water, Defrost Systems, Storms
The same body of records produces something a homeowner can use regardless of who they eventually call.
Across the twelve months to 31 August 2026 the company logged 2,486 completed jobs across its five service areas. Refrigerators were the largest single category at 685, ahead of washing machines at 648 and dryers at 335. In St. Petersburg the year ran to 131 refrigerator jobs; in Tampa, 101.
Three causes dominate locally, and the company’s technicians name them in the same order every time.
Hard water and calcium. The predictable victims are the parts water runs through — inlet valves, filter housings, ice makers. The less predictable one turned up on a Samsung in Tampa: the small flap that swings open to let ice through to the glass had crusted over with scale until it could no longer close flush, its seal failed, and meltwater ran down the outside of the cabinet. The customer had reported it as an ice maker leak. The ice maker tested perfect.
The defrost chain. A refrigerator thaws its own evaporator every day or two, and four parts share that job: the element doing the melting, with a thermostat, a timer and a sensor between them deciding the moment it switches on. Knock out any one of them and the coil seals itself shut with ice; the fan carries on spinning behind a wall it cannot push air through. The company reports repairing these almost daily, and the failure compounds: a worn door gasket lets humid air in, frost outpaces what the cycle can clear, and the surplus load eventually destroys the sensors and the heater as well.
Storms, July through September. Outages, surges and lightning, against a modern refrigerator carrying two to four control boards — among the most expensive components in the machine. One surge has been enough to take out a pair on the same call.
How to read any repair quote
Four Questions to Ask Before You Approve a Refrigerator Repair Quote
None of the above requires calling this particular company. It does suggest four questions worth asking whoever you do call:
Is the diagnostic credited against the repair? Teodor charges $79 and deducts it when the work is approved, so an approved job costs nothing for the visit. Some firms stack it on top. Either model is defensible; knowing which one you are in is not optional.
Does the warranty cover labour as well as parts? The company publishes ninety days on both. A warranty covering parts alone is worth considerably less than it sounds.
What did the comparable job cost? If a company publishes closed invoices, check yours against them. If it publishes only “from” figures, treat them as a floor.
What percentage of a new machine is this? Cost the replacement honestly: sticker price, plus sales tax, plus delivery, plus getting the dead one carted off. Those extras routinely add a few hundred dollars that nobody budgets for. Below half, repair. Above 60 percent, think hard.
And one thing that costs nothing: pull the grille, clean the condenser coil, vacuum out the compressor bay. In Florida’s heat and humidity it is the cheapest maintenance available on any refrigerator, and a measurable share of “it isn’t cooling properly” calls end there.
About the company "Teodor Appliance Repair"
Teodor Appliance Repair is an independent appliance repair company serving Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, with offices at 12055 Citrus Falls Circle #306, Tampa, FL 33625 and 360 Central Ave Suite 807, St. Petersburg, FL 33701. It services all major and premium brands, works 8 AM to 7 PM seven days a week, and holds a 4.9-star average on Google across more than 600 reviews. The published invoice table and case photographs referenced in this article can be seen at appliancerepairteodor.com Refrigerator Repair St Petersburg. Phone: (813) 212-4513 (Tampa) or (727) 629-5076 (St. Petersburg FL).