Daikin home Split AC units
I have three Daikin units installed at my home, two are 1.5 tonne in the bedrooms and one 2 tonne in the drawing room. Instaled some 3 years ago. All sparingly used as we are a family of 4.
These are great equipment, the 1.5s costed me some 43k a piece + extra cost for the additional ducting length etc. while the 2 T cost me a whopping 63k and customary extras. we also have LG in one of the smaller bedrooms again 1.5T cost me just 23k.
When Daikin is definitely better on performance and noise reduction over LG, off late the performance of Daikin is not so great - God knows what its doing to my power bills. LG is functional and does the job fairly decent only the inseparable Wrrrr of the blower is something we need to live with, being a guest bedroom and minimal use, no complaints and also given the great LG service experince, am not too bothered.
Daikin on the other hand has to learn a lot from their Korean counterparts in service, I am fortunate that I work with a decent dealer in Air Med marketing who give personal touch in service. Daikin however are pathetic, they do not respond to calls while a customary first contact is the only prompt action they do, post this the onus is on customer to close the concern, I need to work with vagaries of Service engineer Mr. Kannan's timetable, perhaps Daikin overestimated its quality and so are undermanned.
Another thrilling aspect in Daikin is the remote control, bulky. poor quality contraptions and invariably fail, Out of the three remote controls I have, only one works now and we keep shuffling it up and down the floors. Another surprise is if we want it replaced, its a whopping Rs. 2500/-. We can clearly see that daikin has not looked at these nuances of the market and dumped the equipment in India assuming the third world will gobble up anything that is engineeried for west. Strangely, one another guest bedroom is with an older trust worthy O'general window unit which works fine, the remote is now 5 years and works perfectly fine. a Lesson or two for Daikin from their japanese counterpart.The cheap cousin LG remote controls while flimsy is enineered for India, Phosporescent buttons, better ergonomics, sleeker and in no way would cost more than 500 bucks, but why worry iyt works just fine.
My next house is getting ready for furnishing end of this year and obviosuly I dont know if my impression on Daikin will last enough to consider their products again. Got some product issues and service issues that needs fixing I guess. While the brand was so strong in my mind at a point that I spent twce as much three years ago over a korean brand, Daikin failed to live as a product and also in service to a large degree.
Would be interested to know of Mitsubishi / Hitachi performace etc.
Umashankar
pumashan@gmail.com
