I will NEVER use Maximum Heating & Air again. They have serviced our unit seven times over the past five years, and I used to be a very loyal customer. I took great pains to recommend this business to all my friends and family and maintained faith in their honesty and fairness for years, but one day last spring they came out to replace our old capacitor and left the box for the new capacitor they had just installed in our yard. When we found the box we decided just for kicks to Google the capacitor's item number... Turns out Maximum charged us THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS for a part that we couldn't find for more than $20 online. Now, I expect a certain amount of mark-up on brand-new parts and understand that I am also paying for the skill and expertise of the technicians, but $300 for a part that only cost the company between $9-$20 on top of the service fee is just down-right exploitative, especially considering the fact that they were only at our home that day for about 20min., and the dishonesty from Maximum didn't stop there...
We have an electric heating unit, and when our heat went out just a couple of days before Christmas this year we knew we didn't want to call Maximum, so we scoured through reviews and talked to friends and family and ultimately decided to call Service Heating & Air. We thought our thermostat was going bad, that maybe we had caused it to short out with the steamer we had been using to remove wall-paper right before it stopped working... turns out the timing was just a coincidence: The technician from Service Heating & Air discovered that Maximum Heating & Air had left our primary heating element entirely disconnected from the unit, forcing the unit to run solely on its auxiliary/supplemental heat. It just so happens that this is not the first time we've encountered the same problem - we've called Maximum Heating & Air literally every winter since 2009 because our unit would always wind up stuck in auxiliary mode, blowing mostly cold air. They also had to come back every spring to fix our air conditioner during the same time frame - the temperature would start heating up outside, so we'd switch the unit to A/C for the season and, every single time, without fail, we were met with the flow of luke-warm air, so we'd call Maximum and they'd come to their thing. We never thought they might be intentionally rigging our unit to require service every time the seasons changed. There's more...
The technician from Service Heating & Air was utterly flabbergasted as to the state of the wiring inside of our unit. He was so confounded by whatever the hell was going on in there that he actually believed *WE* had tried to repair it on our own at first. As soon as we began explaining our past experiences with Maximum, it became clear that Maximum had either sabotaged it or had consistently sent us technicians who simply had no flipping clue what they were doing. Maximum had wired the unit to bypass the control board as such that diagnostic equipment would interpret the board as having failed, or gone bad, and in need of replacement. WTF?!? The technician from Service Heating & Air was knowledgeable enough to uncover this ruse before he charged us for a new board, and I can't help but wonder if the next step with Maximum would've been their telling us we had to buy a new control board from them. The icing on the cake - Maximum had programmed our thermostat for a GAS unit, and it had been stuck in the wrong setting for FOUR YEARS!!! The tech from Service Heating & Air had to completely rewire our unit to correct Maximum's mistakes. He did three times more work than Maximum ever had and was about three times cheaper. Our unit now blows truly hot air for the first time since we've lived in this home.
I honestly can't explain why Maximum provided such awful and seemingly dishonest service to us for so long... I don't like to be paranoid and I'm usually not one for conspiracies, but it's now very hard for me to believe that they weren't just setting us up to need more and more service from them. Until the incident when we paid $300 for a $9 capacitor, they had always offered us just enough of a deal price wise to make us believe that they were really looking out for our best interests. There was always this nagging question of "why do they always have to come so often?" in the back of our minds, but we chose to trust their expertise until they completely ripped us off, and now that we've received the opinion of a second, more experienced technician from another company, we're pretty convinced that Maximum was engaged in a calculated effort to maintain our need for their service.
In short: DON'T CALL MAXIMUM HEATING AND AIR, and if you're already a long-time customer who has used them for repeated service calls, consider having another technician come out to evaluate the state of your unit's wiring. read more
