ifuckinghateyou.com - your enemy's enemy is your friend.

posted February 18, 2010 10:11 AM PST

A small victory

My mom has been in Florida for the past two weeks. I agreed to look after her house while she was gone. I went in there yesterday to check it out and make sure her plants didn't need water, and I noticed it was cold. Really cold. 36F to be exact. So I called the furnace people right away and set up an appointment for this morning.

So the guy shows up today, and he's a huge jerk from the start. He just seemed like he didn't want to be there... but his job is to be an on-call HVAC tech. He should be lucky to have a god damn job as it is. Anyway, the problem ends up being a bad pressure switch and a bad inducer fan motor. The furnace is only three years old, and came with a 5 year parts warranty. So I say

"Those are covered under the warranty, right?"

"No, your warranty is void. You didn't have any preventative maintenance done since this was installed." He says.

"Wait a minute, what kind of maintenance?" I ask

"The reason these parts break is from dirt accumulation. You really need to have this cleaned out twice a year." He explains. Now, the inducer fan motor can definitely break from dirt buildup if it's REALLY bad. No doubt. But not after three years, and not in my mom's house which is wicked clean. Not to mention that I am well aware of the problem because the inducer fan motor in my own furnace happened to break (and was replaced under warranty no less) around the same time this unit was installed in my mom's house. Therefore I knew what would happen if it got dirty, so it HAS been kept clean. By us. We just didn't pay these assholes $80 a pop to clean it. (that's $800 over the span of the 5 year warranty if you're keeping score) A cleaning is basically dusting out the inside of the control unit, and blowing compressed air through any motors or moving parts to dislodge dust and debris. EASY.

"Well wait a minute, that was never explained to us when the furnace was installed, and I'm pretty sure it's not in the paperwork either. You can't change the rules like that on us." I countered.

"It doesn't matter. Lennox needs to see a copy of the service record, and they won't send us the parts if we can't provide the record. Now maybe if you paid for a service agreement, which is $160 for two cleanings, I can fudge some of the numbers and get them to agree to replace these parts, but you really need to be doing the regular maintenance on the unit" He said.

RED FLAG

"Well, quote me the price for the parts out of warranty and I'll talk to my mom about it when she gets home." I replied. I didn't want to drag this out because it was obvious this guy was trying to milk me for money. And it was at this point that I recognized the guy, because he had a birthmark on his face. This asshole came out to my house two years ago to charge my AC system and told me that I "really need to have the system cleaned so it would run more efficiently" and he would do it for $80. I agreed, thinking he had some sort of special equipment to do it. WRONG. What does he do? He goes and gets the hose from the side of the house and sprays off the condenser unit outside. I already do that every spring. I thought we was going to clean the evaporator coils that were inside the plenum. So when I asked about that he said

"You have a downflow furnace. There's no access to the plenum. I can't clean that."

WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST PAY YOU $80 TO DO?!?

Anyway, back to today's issue. So dickface gets me the quote for the parts. $260 for a pressure switch, $600 for the inducer blower, and $60 (each) to install them. I know that's fucking robbery, so I say thanks and send him on his way. After he leaves, I look up the parts and see that the switch is only $45, and the blower is $120. They are very easy to replace too. The only reason not to do it myself would be to maintain the warranty.

So I call up the jerk off's manager and explain what happened. He explains that the service record BS is a new policy, less than a year old, and that it was unreasonable for fuckface to try and hold me accountable to it when I had no way of knowing about it.

So now the parts are being replaced under warranty. That was my small victory this morning. Now I just need to find a job.

last updated February 18, 2010 10:33 AM PST