Now that we are officially moved and no longer have to worry about getting warranty work done on their work, I can post what I have wanted to for some time now. We were trying to sell our home in Wilson as we were in the process of moving to the Charleston, SC area. The A/C had gone out in the middle of summer while we were trying to schedule home tours of perspective home buyers and I was out of town. So my wife called them to look at our 2 ton split unit Carrier which obviously wasn't working as the upstairs was around 86 degrees and the T-stat was set to 76 degrees. The technicians (I stress the s as two technicians came out to check a unit - first concern, as of course you will be charged for two people and usually one of the people is merely a "helper", a trainee or worse yet, somebody that they can't figure out what to do with, so let him go out with another tech so we can charge for him) did come out. They looked at the unit and said it was the start capacitor for the condenser fan. They didn't have the exact factory replacement on their service van but did have after market components that they were able to use to get the unit running again. Okay, good deal, $250 dollars later for one hour for two technicians and two five dollar capacitors (the Carrier unit uses a single component to act as the start cap for both the condenser fan and the compressor), no big deal, got it done and my wife was able to get the house ready for the realtors to show. Well when I did get home that weekend, I am cutting the grass and working on the yard in the short time that I did have available and I hear the horrible buzzing sound coming from the unit as the fan isn't running and the unit is, not good when it is 95 degrees outside, so I run up and shut off the T-stat so the motor doesn't trip out. The tech comes out on Sunday, but didn't have the factory part again, but had an after market unit. I said I wanted the factory component as the after market required a bit of gerryrigging since the bolt pattern was different and the wiring harness was different and so on and the tech also said that he would have to charge double time anyway to do the work, so let's get the right part. Several days go by, the part is supposedly in, so they come out to replace it, two hours later, the tech has the new part in. The unit is working, the total cost to replace what was always a bad motor, which the original tech(s) should have checked the amp draw after replacing the start cap but didn't was 650 dollars.
When I get home I find out why it took two hours as it was an after market motor, again about 125 dollars from one of the supply houses, so for three hours (should have been two if using the right parts) and at most 150 dollars worth of parts. The unit did work but the price was a bit pricey, the original diagnosis was poor and the fact that they didn't originally tell us that they had to use an after market motor did upset me a little.
To conclude, as a Project Engineer/Manager for Johnson Controls for nearly a decade, if I was at the home, it would have been something I would have fixed by going over to the HVAC supply house as the owners of that Supply House live right behind us and fixing the unit for probably two hundred bucks with the right factory parts. So in the end, I believe the price would have been more reasonable in the 450 to 500 dollar range (using cheaper after market parts), don't know of any acceptable alternatives in the area, but can't suggest them for being too expensive, technicians not doing full and appropriate diagnostics of the problem, and not being upfront about using after market motor until after the fact. read more