So Sick of Dishonest Contractors

My AC stopped working the first week of July. Not a good thing when its 110° out. I figured out that it was the capacitor (obvious bulging) and called around trying to find a store that is both open and had the part. It was a Friday and the only place I could find wouldn't be open until the following Monday. Not wanting to roast for the weekend I called a local AC guy and told him I need a capacitor and I can even install it myself. He says no problem he has a few and will even install it. He quoted double the cost of the part. I was ok with that.

He gets to my house a few hours later. I have the unit open and capacitor removed. He grabs a capacitor out of his truck, installs it, and still the fan wont kick on. He says "well it obviously wasn't your capacitor, lets go take a look inside". I'm holding my old capacitor in my hand. It has an obvious bulge on top and bottom like a typically blown capacitor and the only issue I had was the fan wasn't kicking on. Obvious right?

So he comes out of my attic and says we are going to have replace the whole unit and started rambling off a bunch of BS technical terms. My neighbor is with me as the guy quotes me 3k to have it up and running in a few days. My neighbor and I look at each other with rolling eyes like this guy must think I am a complete moron. My neighbor says "let me take the capacitor out of mine and see if we can get that fan turning". As he heads across the street to his house the contractor gathers his stuff swiftly, says absolutely nothing, and abruptly leaves. LOL

I found a place the following day that had the capacitors on hand, replaced it, and the AC is working like it always has.

Quoted $3K+ Fixed for $48.00

I wonder how many people that scumbag has ripped off with his bait and switch capacitor BS? He actually installed a known dummy or faulty part as part of his deception.
 
cobbler said:
My AC stopped working the first week of July. Not a good thing when its 110° out. I figured out that it was the capacitor (obvious bulging) and called around trying to find a store that is both open and had the part. It was a Friday and the only place I could find wouldn't be open until the following Monday. Not wanting to roast for the weekend I called a local AC guy and told him I need a capacitor and I can even install it myself. He says no problem he has a few and will even install it. He quoted double the cost of the part. I was ok with that.

He gets to my house a few hours later. I have the unit open and capacitor removed. He grabs a capacitor out of his truck, installs it, and still the fan wont kick on. He says "well it obviously wasn't your capacitor, lets go take a look inside". I'm holding my old capacitor in my hand. It has an obvious bulge on top and bottom like a typically blown capacitor and the only issue I had was the fan wasn't kicking on. Obvious right?

So he comes out of my attic and says we are going to have replace the whole unit and started rambling off a bunch of BS technical terms. My neighbor is with me as the guy quotes me 3k to have it up and running in a few days. My neighbor and I look at each other with rolling eyes like this guy must think I am a complete moron. My neighbor says "let me take the capacitor out of mine and see if we can get that fan turning". As he heads across the street to his house the contractor gathers his stuff swiftly, says absolutely nothing, and abruptly leaves. LOL

I found a place the following day that had the capacitors on hand, replaced it, and the AC is working like it always has.

Quoted $3K+ Fixed for $48.00

I wonder how many people that scumbag has ripped off with his bait and switch capacitor BS? He actually installed a known dummy or faulty part as part of his deception.
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HVAC guys are the worst offenders in my experience.
 
FractalAudio said:
Our well ran dry several times this summer. Comac Well and Pump comes out and says "oh yeah, you need a new well and a new pump and new comodulator valve, piston clamps and Johnson brackets. Minimum of $10K."

"Why can't you just frack it?", I say. "Oh no, the stratification of the mineral gradient below the McCorskey limit is greater than acceptable."

So I call another company. This really genuine guy, Hank, comes out and he says "Why don't you just frack it?". "The other company said the well wasn't a candidate." "Nonsense" he says, "it's a perfect candidate. It used to work, lets get it working again."

So we frack it and it works great.

Now because we fracked it we had to test the water. So out comes Allied Clearwater. They test the water and "Oh, oh, you need a whole new filtration system. Your calcium permanganate filter needs replacing, your Scheffield bypass valve is shot, you need a new bistable anti-backflush piston assembly and a new local ionization destratifier". "Uh, how much is that?" "Shouldn't be much more than $6000."

So I call Hank and say "Hey Hank, do you guys do water filtration?" "Of course" he says. So he comes out and I tell him what Allied Clearwater told us we needed. He gives my that "yeah, okay" face.

He logically says "Let's test the water again and also test it after your existing filtration system and take it from there."

We get the results today: all parameters within EPA limits.
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Hmm, did any of those unscrupulous contractors give you those recommendations / test results in writing?

might be worth reporting to the BBB or whomever licenses them.
 
Joe Bfstplk said:
Movers. Head and shoulders above the lot.
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+100000 had movers hold my stuff hostage in my drive way when we moved to the USA. Said they wouldn't unload without an extra $500 cash. It was a corporate move. I just called the cordinator assigned to me and like magic they were moving things into my new house.

I'd blocked that out until now. God, that move to the USA was stressful.
 
iaresee said:
+100000 had movers hold my stuff hostage in my drive way when we moved to the USA. Said they wouldn't unload without an extra $500 cash. It was a corporate move. I just called the cordinator assigned to me and like magic they were moving things into my new house.

I'd blocked that out until now. God, that move to the USA was stressful.
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They didn't do that to us, but they did send us two experienced movers and two n00Bs. "Hey, you're getting an extra person for no extra cost."

F---ers. They had to do a lot of the packing for us, as I was busy working and running all over looking at houses, and the boss lady is disabled. They didn't bring enough boxes, etc., the truck was too small, the crew chief had to leave early to pick his kid up from school, they sent a second crew chief, and when they decided they had run out room in the truck, they closed up the truck and left. Getting ahold of the main office was a nightmare, as they were based in Texas somewhere, and were not the local company they claimed to be. The n00Bs packed the stuff on our kitchen counter including the butter dish, which they did not check for the presence of butter. It was about eleventy-nine degrees out that whole week. Guess what happened to everything in that particular box when we discovered it, weeks later.... I went back the next day and found quite a lot of our stuff on the front lawn of the old house. Who knows how much and what grew legs overnight. The f---ing f---wits left it all standing there instead of quickly shoving what was staged to go in the truck (but didn't fit) into the garage that was right there next to the front lawn. The n00Bs came and left in their own car. Who knows if they stole anything. When they got to the new house, they unloaded pretty much everything in the garage, including boxes clearly marked KITCHEN. They were supposed to assemble the beds. They set the sleep number mattress on the bedframe and didn't bother finding or hooking up the pump thingie, so we had what amounted to an empty pool float to sleep on. We slept on the floor. What a f---ing nightmare. I still can't find stuff, 3 years later....
 
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cobbler said:
My AC stopped working the first week of July. Not a good thing when its 110° out. I figured out that it was the capacitor (obvious bulging) and called around trying to find a store that is both open and had the part. It was a Friday and the only place I could find wouldn't be open until the following Monday. Not wanting to roast for the weekend I called a local AC guy and told him I need a capacitor and I can even install it myself. He says no problem he has a few and will even install it. He quoted double the cost of the part. I was ok with that.

He gets to my house a few hours later. I have the unit open and capacitor removed. He grabs a capacitor out of his truck, installs it, and still the fan wont kick on. He says "well it obviously wasn't your capacitor, lets go take a look inside". I'm holding my old capacitor in my hand. It has an obvious bulge on top and bottom like a typically blown capacitor and the only issue I had was the fan wasn't kicking on. Obvious right?

So he comes out of my attic and says we are going to have replace the whole unit and started rambling off a bunch of BS technical terms. My neighbor is with me as the guy quotes me 3k to have it up and running in a few days. My neighbor and I look at each other with rolling eyes like this guy must think I am a complete moron. My neighbor says "let me take the capacitor out of mine and see if we can get that fan turning". As he heads across the street to his house the contractor gathers his stuff swiftly, says absolutely nothing, and abruptly leaves. LOL

I found a place the following day that had the capacitors on hand, replaced it, and the AC is working like it always has.

Quoted $3K+ Fixed for $48.00

I wonder how many people that scumbag has ripped off with his bait and switch capacitor BS? He actually installed a known dummy or faulty part as part of his deception.
Click to expand...

The markup AC vendors pull with capacitors is ridiculous. When I was in my HVAC school the teacher told us "See this? It's a $7 capacitor. Takes 15 seconds to change out and you charge $125 for it.". To be fair, they're going to charge at least an hour for labor, so you're pretty much at the mercy of their minimum labor charge. They also told me in that class that capacitors are the most common issue in AC's. I have over 200 split systems on my property and 1 time in 3 years it's been a capacitor.

One of our previous vendors actually pulled the same thing on our owner as they did to you. The AC in his house died and he called the previous chief engineer to send our vendor up to look at it. He lives in a very wealthy, gated community, so they start seeing dollar signs right away. First they told him they changed the capacitor and the unit still wouldn't work and gave him a proposal for a new unit. He had another vendor go look at it and the existing capacitor was still in there. Vendor realizes it's the owner of one of his biggest accounts, installs a new capacitor and told the owner to have a great weekend, no charge.

AC's are my biggest problem. We're in South Florida and not a single unit was maintained until I started working there, most being 20-30 years old. On a good day, I have 3 breaking down, on the average day in August, it's 7-10.
 
RevDrucifer said:
AC's are my biggest problem. We're in South Florida and not a single unit was maintained until I started working there, most being 20-30 years old. On a good day, I have 3 breaking down, on the average day in August, it's 7-10.
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Sheesh, that's out of how many units? Sounds like a huge PITA, must be a big place.
 
Thing with electronics, cars, bikes, construction, most of us are clueless to fixing those. We're only taught relatively useless skills to become good office or factory drones. All the things that could make our lives actually better in order to become more self reliant you'll have to learn yourself. As a result knowledge is power. Most people do not have the right kind of knowledge, which means that those who do are put in a very advantageous position. And I reckon not all contractors/mechanics/repairmen start out as crooks and many won't. But the temptation will always be there as people become more and more clueless to the ever increasing number of appliances that enter our lives. And it takes character to resist that temptation. Kinda like how cops have to resist the urge to accept sometimes hefty bribes to look the other way when they make such meager salaries.
 
Dave Merrill said:
Yeah, but I can normalize your database. How is that not a useful household skill?
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iaresee said:
You really should have this already. I recommend: https://1password.com/
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Agree, mandatory, between work and the rest of my life, have to have a pw manager. How can you function without one? Unless you use the same password everywhere, ugh.

I've been on Last Pass for a while, not perfect but useful, and SO much better than nothing. Most of my passwords are long and random, as it should be.
 
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