Champaign Heating & Air is really good at customer service, I will give them that, but they over charge and push you to spend when not necessary. My wife and I have spent thousands on them before I realized what was going on. They are so nice on the phone it is hard to think they may not have your best interest in mind.
About 9 years ago we bought a new house and needed the furnace replaced, while they were there they said we would be lucky to get another year out of our two AC units and really stressed we would save money in the long run if we replaced them now. I'm sure that high efficiency was part of the discussion, but the compressor was the main focus. Keep in mind the AC unit was fully functional, worked great. Skip ahead 4 years, compressor goes out on the NEW A/C unit, good thing we replaced the old one. They said it had to do with the length of some line that goes to the unit being too long (this was a while ago and I may not have detail 100% correct) but my response was the unit that was there before ran fine for several years and you talked me into replacing it with this one that doesn't. After many angered phone conversations and the threat of writing a bad review, they agreed to do the work at half price.
We moved again last year in august 2016, in September the AC unit was not working so I called Champaign Heating & Air. They said it was a bad converter, I believe, whatever converts the power output to the compressor (it has to send more power to start up??? That's what they told me). It was the end of the season so we did not run the unit much after that obviously. Spring comes around and two days into AC use the same thing happens. Champaign Heating & Air come out again and said it was the compressor this time, I just could not believe that so I called to talk more about it. They gave me this story about how my motor in unwinding, very common. I was mad that they didn't see this last fall and now I've paid for two service calls at $170 a pop not to mention the repair last fall. They refunded me this service call fee and I decided to call another company in town I see around often. $69-dollar service call to see it had a bad wire, we replaced and tested the compressor and guess what NO UNWINDING.
If you charge $150 to look at a unit at least take the time to fully diagnose the issue. read more