The Air Cond & Heating Co

I have been using this company for over ten years. They answer their phones 24 hours a day, the work product is excellent and reasonably priced, and their staff is always on top of things. They call me the day before the appointment as well as when the technician is on his way. I love this company and highly recommend to anyone who has a need for heating, air-​conditioning, plumbing and electrical. This is an extremely well run company whose work product is 100% guaranteed and dependable.

Dishonest Technician/​Poor Customer Service
Just as the 2012 heat wave hit the Midwest, our A/​C decided to break down. It was easy to see what was wrong… looking down into the unit, one of the fan blades was sheared in half. Unfortunately, what should have been just $ 400 for one replacement blade, turned into $ 4000+ for a new A/​C unit!
My husband got on the phone with The Air Conditioning & Heating Company in Carol Stream, IL, the same company we have used for the last 15 years we’ve been in our home. The service technician over the phone told my husband that the blade we needed was not in stock and that it most likely could be overnighted. But until they were able to get out to us with the blade, the main thing my husband wanted to know was if he was able to remove the broken blade, could we operate the A/​C unit until they were able to get here? The house temp was quickly rising at this point. My 19 year old son was standing right next to my husband when he was on the phone with the technician and heard exactly what was told to my husband. The tech explained that it was fine to go ahead and remove the blade and operate the unit, that to do this, though, we should have a continuous stream of water spraying on the unit while it is running to prevent it from overheating. So this is exactly what we did.
After my husband removed the broken blade, when he turned the unit back on, we immediately noticed there was a vibration with the whole unit. He got back on the phone with the technician and told him about the vibration, asked him if this was okay… the technician told him that it should be fine. So we left the unit running and went to bed that night happy that we still had A/​C in the house for the time being. The next morning, when we woke up, we realized immediately that the house was getting warm again. And when we went out to check on the A/​C unit, it was completely shut down, and now the lid was destroyed… it had multiple tears in the metal. We realized immediately that we should not have been running the unit at all with three blades instead of four… but the damage was already done.
As the temp began to rise again in the house, we got back on the phone with the A/​C company, explained to them that the lid to the unit was now broken… are they sure we should have been operating the unit with the vibration? The woman we spoke with couldn’t answer that question, but we were told that the lid we would now need for our unit was out of stock and most likely would take a week to come in. Great… the forecast for the coming week was to be in the high 90s, low 100s, with a heat index as high as 115! We were without A/​C again.
Luckily (I thought) we were scheduled the next day for a technician to come out with the replacement blade. Maybe he’d have a solution to get us operational until the lid came in. When Jim arrived, he took the lid off the unit and quickly determined that in addition to both the blade and lid needing to be replaced, the inside coils were also damaged, too. What originally would have cost us just $ 400 for a replacement blade now jumped up another $ 500 for a new lid and, he explained, most likely another $ 1800 because the inside coils were damaged…$ 2700 in repairs for what should have cost just $ 400 if their tech did not instruct us to operate the unit when we shouldn’t have.
To top it off, when we explained to Jim what happened and what we were told by their technician to do, he got on the phone with people in his office who spoke with the technician that authorized us to go ahead and operate the unit even though it was vibrating… and this technician DENIED telling us this! My 19 year old son was a witness to this conversation and let us know that he heard it, too. We were given a «I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do» response… we would have to cover all the repair costs. The most they could do was give us a discount on a new unit, which conveniently could be installed by the end of the day!
So now we’ve gone from a $ 400 repair to $ 4179 for a brand new unit. The inside of our house was 87 degrees and climbing. We were stuck… no choice but to bite the bullet and purchase the new unit. I think we’ll be shopping soon for a new A/​C and Heating company, too.