Onida Redux. Review on Onida WG18N

This story goes back a while. To when I was 12.

I grew up with a strange love for watching television and hating the Onida TV we owned. I suffered much at the hands of that dreaded set even as a child swearing I would never touch another Onida product ever again. Those were my associations with the brand.

Cut to: April 2008. The time had come to purchase an air-conditioner since Indian summers were getting unbearable and all memory of that brand had virtually faded from my consciousness.

As I dived into research about window AC's, I kept coming across that name again and again - ONIDA! But the difference was, this time they were mostly positive. For reasons obvious, I was quite skeptical about burning my fingers with another Onida product. But after thorough research about power ratings and all those technical things, I ventured to get myself an Onida.

I was surprised to see the salesmen recommend Onida over LG, Samsung etc. at the stores I visited: Croma, Vijay Sales, Sony Mony etc. I finally took a deep breath and purchased the Onida WG18N from Vijay Sales(Opera House, Mumbai) for Rs.16, 900.

Installation was quick and fairly painless and the guys came over with the product and installed it in one afternoon though I felt I got slightly ripped off for installation charges. I've had the AC for over 3 summers now(4th is running) and lets say I am a'heavy user' to put it mildly. It is not unusual for me to have the AC running for 18 of 24 hours a day in summer.

So far, the unit has been performing robustly. There have been virtually no breakdowns - except for one which I believe was a PCB problem.

The build quality is great - thick plastic for the front panel though the buttons tend to be sticky and slightly unresponsive. I don't know much about metals but I believe the cabinet is made of thicker gauge steel than its east-Asian counterparts. There is no foul odour from the unit(I clean the filter regularly) and the AC performs really well in pretty much the only thing that matters - cooling.

On quick chill mode - the compressor is supposed to work full power to cool the room as rapidly as possible(which it does).

My favourite setting though is the dry mode - since I live in Mumbai, humidity can be a bigger cause of discomfort than the heat. This mode is extremely useful in such cases and more often than not, my AC is set to that mode. My next preferred mode is the power saver mode.

Fan mode is pretty much just the fan spinning and the compressor is off resulting in drastically lowered power consumption.

Sensi-mode is supposed to be an'intelligent mode' though I am yet to see any evidence of it.

There are a couple of other modes that are not really critical to this review so I will skip them.

Now for the downside:

This is where India brands take the hit. - yes, the after sales support. For the first year I didn't really face any problems but I think Onida or some guys that work there(or someone at Vijay Sales) sells the customer database to some private firm - important details such as names, address, phone numbers. So I regularly receive calls from these firms trying to sell me their annual maintenance contract(AMC). The first time, I fell for it and purchased one for a year costing me 800 rupees for 4 dry service and 2 water service(BDS). I never saw the BDS, I am usually very wary and untrusting of these kind of marketing calls but the reason why I fell for it is important to mention - the caller says that you have purchased an Onida AC recently and the warranty is about to run out and that they would like to offer you an AMC. Obviously, one assumes that if they knew I have just purchased an AC and had my warranty details, the caller must be from Onida. No!

The truth is that they are from some other small set-up posing as authorised Onida service. One such company that I have been getting calls from is'Sainath Enterprises'. On further inquiry, asking specifically if they were calling from Onida, they will confess and reveal the name of the place they really are calling from. I am still not sure who the real authorised service providers for Onida are. This is my only major problem with Onida.

Apart from that, its been a pretty good buy and I wouldn't think twice about Onida if I were to purchase another AC. During my research I came across from some very solid numbers and comparisons from the online community. If the product lasts for a total of 5 years(which I'm sure it will), I would be pretty satisfied.

Note: this is not a technical review of the product or an AC buying guide - there are other far better and more detailed articles about that. It's a record of my experience with the Onida WG18N.