What we charge

Most companies in this trade will not put a number on a page. We will. You should be able to work out whether we are in your range without spending twenty minutes on the phone first.

Hourly rates

All work is billed hourly. Which rate you are on depends on what kind of arrangement you have with us. On-call and PM work carry a four-hour minimum; a retainer drops that to two.

The step-up is a daily threshold, not a weekly or per-job one. An eight-hour day never reaches it.

After hours, weekends and shutdowns

Available, and often the right time to do the work. After-hours and weekend calls are billed at the higher rate from the first hour — $175 with a PM agreement, $250 without. There is no separate surcharge stacked on top and no multiplier to work out. Retainer clients are the exception — a 2am Sunday callout bills at the same $125 as a Tuesday morning.

Why the gap is that large

It is not a loyalty discount. When we already hold a PM agreement with you, we know your equipment before it breaks — we have the baseline readings, we know what is installed, and we are not spending the first two hours of an emergency call working out how your plant is put together.

That makes every callout faster, and we pass the difference on. The $75-an-hour gap is roughly what that unfamiliarity actually costs.

Controls and automation

PLC programming and troubleshooting, HMI and SCADA screens, getting machines onto a network and building dashboards is billed separately from mechanical and electrical work: $165 per hour with a PM agreement or retainer, $250 per hour without.

It is a different job. It is the scarcest skill on the truck, and it is the work that stops the same fault happening a third time — so it is priced as its own line rather than hidden inside a blended rate.

What a PM agreement includes

(The full agreement page walks the whole offer, objections and all.)

• Scheduled recurring visits — monthly, quarterly, or on whatever interval your equipment justifies, running a defined route.
• A written PM programme — the schedule, the tasks and the intervals, documented so your own team can run it when we are not there.
• Priority response — PM customers move to the front of the queue when something goes down.
• Equipment baseline and records — vibration, thermal and insulation readings tracked over time, so drift is caught while it is still drift and not yet a failure.

Retainers

For plants where an hour of downtime costs more than a day of labour. A retainer is a monthly fee that buys response time, not just a discount.

• On site within six hours for a line-down call on a weekday, and first thing the next morning at weekends. That is a commitment we can actually keep, which is why it is the number on the page.
• Two-hour minimum instead of four. A forty-minute fix does not cost you half a day.
• No after-hours premium. Every hour is $125, whenever it happens.
• Travel is on the clock. Billing starts when we leave for your site rather than when we arrive. On a short job far from base that is usually still cheaper than a four-hour minimum with free travel — and it is why we can hold a six-hour response across six counties without a call-out fee.
• One purchase order a year instead of one per visit.

If your downtime costs under roughly $800 an hour, a PM agreement is usually the better fit and we will tell you so. Run your own number with the downtime cost calculator.

Other ways we bill

• Flat rate for defined jobs. Once the scope is known — a PM route, an install, a repair we have already diagnosed — we will quote a fixed price. No meter running.
• Maintenance contracts. Ongoing scheduled coverage. This is where we do our best work, because we stop being the people you call in a crisis.
• Time and materials for diagnostic work where the scope honestly is not known yet.

Parts

Your choice, per job. Supply them yourself and we add nothing — if you have a stores function and preferred vendors, use them. Or we source them at cost plus 20%, which covers finding the right part, getting it here, and carrying the warranty if it fails.

You will always be told which of the two is happening before we order anything.

Travel

No mileage, no fuel surcharge and no trip charge anywhere in the core service area. On-call and PM visits are billed from the moment we arrive; retainer visits are billed from the moment we leave for your site, which is what pays for the six-hour response. Travel outside the core area is quoted up front, before we drive.