Several weeks ago, I received a coupon in the mail from Patriot Pros advertising an air conditioner tune-up with free furnace check in the mail from Patriot Pros. I... read moreSeveral weeks ago, I received a coupon in the mail from Patriot Pros advertising an air conditioner tune-up with free furnace check in the mail from Patriot Pros. I set it on the counter and forgot about it for several days. Then we got our first 90 degree day in Castle Rock, and my daughter called me at work to tell me that the air conditioner was blowing hot air and was not cooling the condo.
To add a bit of history, when I moved into the condo in 2011 the air conditioner was doing the same thing. I called another company, they came out and checked it, and said the unit was fine, it just needed to have the Freon charged. They did so, and it worked fine for the next seven years.
Fast forward back to Friday several weeks ago, I went home, grabbed the coupon for Patriot Pros and gave them a call. I spoke to a gentleman that said he could have someone out the within several days. I was surprised that was possible as we were starting to get into the upper 80s and low 90s at that point. He said that one of their master techs had scheduled time off, but his plans fell through, so he working, and his schedule was “pretty much open all week”. So I scheduled an appointment. I told the gentleman in the call center that I could not get home until 2:30 that day, he said it would not be a problem since the tech’s schedule was open.
Come that afternoon, I arrived home at 2:25. At approximately 4:15 I called to ask where the tech was at as I never 1) received the confirmation call they said I would get that morning, or 2) a call from anyone saying he was running late. After several minutes of hold time, the woman that answered the call said that the company vehicle the tech was in had broken down and they were trying to figure out what to do. (If you’re familiar at all with Castle Rock, you can walk from one end of the town proper to the other and back in an hour and a half, let alone drive a vehicle though town.) So I said fine, let’s reschedule, I have no choice. She rescheduled me for several days later, and said something about a credit towards the $47. This never happened, I was still charged the full amount.
Several days later, I received a confirmation call that morning as expected, and later that day got a knock on the door. I answer, a gentleman entered and introduced himself as Javier, owner of the company. He said that he normally didn’t go into the field, but they were so busy that he ditched the suit in order to help out with the calls. This made me think as the gentleman I spoke to a week earlier said that they had a master tech whose schedule was “pretty much open all week”, but at least someone showed up this time.
I told Javier that I changed the filter regularly, and even swapped it out early this month several days just to make sure the unit was getting air flow. I also informed him that two years ago the blower was cleaned by a professional as my allergies were acting up and I had read somewhere that a dirty blower in the AC could cause this.
Javier then proceeded to open up the furnace and look it over. He looked at the motherboard of the unit and quickly pointed out a transistor with a *barely* darker ("you have to look REALLY hard") part of the board next to it and said “this transistor is smoking, this is what’s causing that dark area. It could fail at any time”. He then took a picture of the blower MOTOR and said “whoever cleaned this didn’t do a very good job, look at how dirty the motor is. It could fail at any time.” He then looked at the bearing housing on the front of the unit and said “see this dark ring? That means your seal is leaking oil, the bearings could seize and fail at any time.” He then showed me a picture from his iPad of an extremely dirty coil and said “we can’t look at yours without removing the whole unit, but it could look like this, it could fail at any time.” He then had me touch the copper line that is used to return the warm Freon to the outside condenser and said “you see how hot this is? It should be lukewarm. You could have low Freon.”
He then started showing me prices of blower motors, bearing housings, and whole units, and started the hard sell, telling me “for the cost of the parts you are almost at the cost of a new unit, you should just replace this old one. And this is a right here, right now offer, I can’t guarantee that price once I leave.” Total to replace the unit: $10,400+, including a “permit fee” of $499 (the city of Castle Rock charges $50 for a permit).
We then went outside to look at the condenser. Javier asked if I had access to a hose because the unit was “dirty”. It has some pollen on it, but it was cleaned well two years ago when the blower motor was cleaned, so it was not dirty like some of the other units next to it behind the condo. We hosed it off, didn’t even need a nozzle to get the pollen off. He then hooked up a temperature gauge to the two lines (in and out) and got readings. He showed me that the temperature on the inbound line was around 30-10 degrees, and said “this should be between 34 and 38 degrees, which could be an indication of low Freon.”
He had mentioned Freon twice now, so I asked him about it. He said several things. First, he stated that the unit used R22, which was no longer being produced as it was ozone depleting. Second, he said if he were to recharge the R22 it would be very expensive as stores of what’s left are getting low, and to replace it they would need to change out all of the equipment to go to the new R410, so he was back to the hard sell. He never even offered to charge the R22, even if it was expensive, to see if that would solve the problem, even temporarily.
After that we talked for a few minutes, he charged me the full $47, and was on his way. Please note, there was no “tune-up” on the AC, just a hard sale pitch and collection of money. If I were to take my car to a dealer for tune-up and all they did was hose it off and hook up a reader to the computer, I would not be happy. A tune-up implies actual work will be done I would assume.
The next day I got home and got out my Shop-Vac to see if there was any cleaning I could do. I took the covers off of the inside unit, and stuck my camera back by the blower. What I found was that, while the motor Javier showed me had dirt on it, the actual blower itself was still clean from the cleaning two years ago. I then pulled off the cover to the upper unit off to see if I could get to the coil. I could not remove the inner panel to clean it, but I was able to pull it back far enough to get a flashlight in and take a peak. The coil was not dirty. I even had my 20 year old daughter take a look, asked her what she saw. “It looks like the thing in the car that you put the green stuff in.” She may not know that it is called a radiator, but she knows what it looks like and the correct fluid to put in it. Anyway, I asked if she saw any build ups of dirt or dust, she said “no, it actually looks pretty shiny.”
I called several other places and asked if they were able to charge Freon, more specifically R22. They said they no longer carried R22, but had MO99, an ozone-friendly replacement for R22 that can be added directly to the existing system. Please, feel free to Google this.
So I had another company come out, they looked over the unit and said that, while old, the unit was in great shape and serviceable, and just needed Freon. When asked about the blower motor being dirty, they said that the blower itself was clean and that’s what mattered. I then asked about the bearing housing, the tech said that in the case of a catastrophic seal failure there would be no warning. However, with a slow leak like the one on my unit, when the oil gets low enough, there should be knocking and rattling, an obvious sign that something is wrong. The gentleman also said that the outside condenser looked fine, but if it is to be cleaned properly a product called Hydro Foam should be used, not just low pressure hose water. The gentleman then proceeded to charge the Freon, and the system is working like new. No hard sell, no fear mongering, just service.
Make sure you get other opinions. If the owner of the company is not interested in performing service, just playing the fear-mongering card and hard selling, beware that his techs may doing the same. read less
Meghan Bodah11/22/2019
