Mitsubishi Heavy aircon warranty: what it actually covers

Mitsubishi Heavy publishes two periods for Singapore units: one year on parts, five years on the compressor. Those are not two versions of the same cover. They are cover on two different things, and the gap between them is where most disappointment happens.

The one-year parts warranty governs almost every fault you will actually meet. Indoor fan motor, control board, thermistors, the outdoor fan, the expansion valve, the drain pump. All of it sits under twelve months. After the first year, a board failure is your cost regardless of how much compressor warranty is left on paper.

The five-year term is narrow by design. What it covers is one component and nothing bolted around it: a statement about a single part, not a service plan for the system.

A covered compressor is a free part, not a free job. When a compressor fails inside the five-year window, Mitsubishi Heavy supplies the replacement. Everything required to fit it is a separate matter: the labour, recovering and recharging refrigerant, pulling a vacuum, replacing the filter drier, and flushing the line set if the failure was a burnout.

Push back if a technician quotes a compressor replacement as fully covered, and push back just as hard if the quote treats the compressor itself as chargeable. Both errors are common. Ask for the quote split into parts and labour before you agree to anything. The line for the compressor should read zero, and the rest should be itemised.

A burnout changes the sum considerably. An electrical compressor failure sends contamination through the refrigerant lines, and a proper repair flushes that loop out instead of bolting a new compressor onto dirty pipework. That work is not warranty work. It is also not optional. A shop that skips it is setting up the replacement compressor to fail the same way, outside warranty this time.

Have the failure cause written down before the old compressor leaves the site. Once it is gone, nothing remains to settle whether the failure was electrical or mechanical.

Mitsubishi Heavy's published Singapore terms do not say whether the warranty clock starts at purchase or at installation. That silence matters more than it looks. A unit bought during a renovation and installed three months later has either three months less cover than the owner assumes, or exactly as much, depending on an answer nobody wrote down.

Settle it at the point of purchase, not at the point of failure. Ask the dealer to state the commencement date on the invoice, and keep the installation record alongside it. Two dated documents beat any later conversation about what was meant.

Register the unit as soon as it is installed. Registration links your model and serial to a purchase record on the distributor side. An unregistered unit is not automatically uncovered, but it turns a routine claim into an evidence exercise at the moment you are least equipped to run one.

Mitsubishi Heavy states plainly that the warranty does not cover ad-hoc service. Routine servicing and chemical cleaning stay on your bill, in year one and every year after. Nothing about holding a live warranty makes maintenance free.

The same maintenance sits on the other side of the ledger. Manufacturer warranties across the market treat neglect as grounds to reject a claim, and a unit with no service history is a weak claim regardless of what failed. So servicing is excluded from cover and expected as a condition of it at the same time.

Servicing by any competent provider protects the warranty on a Mitsubishi Heavy unit. Some other brands are stricter, and a small number tie an extended term to servicing by the manufacturer's own crew. Mitsubishi Heavy does not publish that restriction, but the general lesson holds: check who is permitted to touch the unit before you book anyone.

Past year one, the warranty rarely decides the repair question. A four-year-old unit with a failed fan motor is out of parts cover and inside compressor cover, which is to say the remaining warranty is irrelevant to the fault in front of you. The decision reverts to the ordinary one: what the repair costs, weighed against the unit age and the state it is in.

The exception is any fault that might be the compressor. There the remaining term is worth real money and worth confirming before anyone dismantles anything. A unit that trips on start, hums without turning, or runs without cooling may be a compressor, a capacitor, or a control fault, and those are separated by testing rather than by symptom.

Confirm the diagnosis before the warranty position is assumed either way. The failure mode of a warranty claim is rarely a rejection letter. It is a compressor replaced without the paperwork that would have made it free, or a capacitor replaced as a compressor because nobody tested first.

If the unit is approaching the end of year one, bring forward anything you have been ignoring. Intermittent faults, a noise that comes and goes, cooling that is not quite what it was. Those are cheap to report inside the parts window and expensive to discover outside it.