The people you depend on to keep you cool in the dog days of summer are HVAC companies. But are some air conditioning repair men actually taking advantage of you. Recently we went undercover to find out what’s really going on.
When your air conditioner breaks,it’s an emergency. No one likes to be excessively hot not to mention the effect the heat has on air quality which makes it difficult for those with breathing problems. So,when it breaks,you call the AC Company of course trusting them to come and fix the problem at a fair price,but… are they really providing you the best solution at the best price? We’ve found that some companies are blowing you hot air when they hand you that big bill.
We called in a few companies to cool our house down. But when these AC repairmen show up we found that many of them were either being dishonest or all together incompetent. One after the other tried charging us big money for repairs that other experts say we didn’t need. We set up our test of these companies right smack in the middle of a heat wave.
First we rented a house in Delaware and had 3 AC experts inspect our system from top to bottom. –-– All 3 reported that the AC system was in great to very good condition. Then we brought in another expert to set up a common and easy to fix problem with the system. He set up a simple broken wire that shuts the unit down. He said he would charge less than $200 to fix it. We found that other technicians tell us that you need other work done to fix this problem. This begs us to ask,”Are you either being incompetent or are you just simply being dishonest”?
Once we set up the easy to fix problem,we called in six separate AC companies to come out and fix the problem. The first contractor finds our broken wire but instead of fixing it he wants to charge us for an expensive part. The part he wants to charge us for is called a capacitor. He wants to charge $395 to replace a part that we originally had inspected and found it had absolutely no problems. We called him out on this assessment and he left in a huff declining to comment or return our calls.
The next guy finds and fixes our broken wire rather quickly. But,instead of leaving it at that,he recommends we replace an expensive part saying that the unit is leaking combustible fluid. He claims it needs to be fixed today in order to fix the problem. The cost,$692! The part he claimed was leaking simply displayed harmless rust.
The 3rd company tries to charge us for several expensive parts totally $850! The 4th company claimed we needed new parts as well,including one that didn’t even exist in the system. The price for his repair… $950! At least this company ended up firing that technician for his dishonesty. The 5th and 6th companies did the same thing with trying to charge us for unnecessary repairs and parts.
In the end,6 out of 6 companies tried to charge us for parts and repairs we did not need. Honestly,we did not expect to see this level of dishonesty or incompetence from so many HVAC contractors in the area.
Experts say that you should get your unit serviced every year so it doesn’t break in the middle of a heat wave but even if it does of course despite what we found there are actually very honest A/C companies out there. To make it easy to find one in Delaware at least,we recommend you start with -.