You may see this (very long, sorry--I wanted to be thorough!) review on a few different websites but I thought it was very important that I share my experience with NE Generator since they will have cost me several thousands of dollars in damage due to gross incompetence and negligence. They ruined my barely-used Kohler generator and after I asked them to rectify their mistake (which two other companies have confirmed was definitely their fault) they brushed me off.
My wife and I moved into our new home about 2 years ago at which point the Kohler generator (that we were thrilled to now own) immediately broke down and required servicing. Neither of us had owned a generator before so we were surprised to find that a simple service call and tune up was going to cost us about $200-$300. We called NE Generator since they had been the ones to install it for the previous owner and though they were more expensive than most we decided to go with the company that would be most familiar with the system. It turned out to be a simple fix and they just needed to update the firmware to get it running again. As part of service call, they also ran diagnostics and changed the oil and filter. This is where things went terribly wrong.
A few months later, the generator broke down again. We called NE Generator, described the error code we saw, and asked them to come take a look at it. They weren't able to schedule us in a reasonable amount of time so we had a different company come out instead.
This technician came out within 24 hours and quickly determined that the generator was dead. It turns out NE Generator's technician did not properly install the oil filter and the filter literally just disconnected. When the generator next turned on, all of the oil completely blew out (it was all over the generator and surrounding grass). Running without any oil caused the pistons to fuse to the cylinders and effectively destroyed our generator. We had yet another company come out to give us an additional quote and they confirmed that this was definitely due to NE Generator's faulty work.
I want to make it very clear that I'm not out to get NE Generator. I was really hoping we could get our generator fixed under warranty and just bypass dealing with NE Generator again. Unfortunately, both companies had made it clear that this catastrophic failure was definitely caused by NE Generator and because it was considered a "human error" it wouldn't be covered under warranty.
We had no other choice but to reach back out to NE Generator. We simply asked them to fix the generator since their technician obviously caused the problem. However, they refused and claimed that (1) we hadn't been doing regular maintenance on the machine and (2) the error message we originally reported to them did not indicate a catastrophic failure. These arguments made no sense though: first, NE Generator had broken the generator before it was due for annual maintenance, so of course we did not schedule it. As for the error message issue, the two other companies discovered the generator actually reported two errors at the same time though it only physically displayed the one (hence we only reported the one). The second error was definitely an indicator of the fused engine, but NE Generator never bothered to come diagnose the problem so they never saw it. When we explained these things to NE Generator, they simply blew us off.
Now we have no choice but to look into taking NE Generator to small claims court, but in the meantime we wanted to get this review out there in the hopes that other people aren't put in a similar situation. Their website (as of 2/23/2020) states "New England Generator takes tremendous pride in making sure our customers are 100% satisfied with our sales, service and installations." and yet this is clearly untrue since they wouldn't even bother looking into our problem which they so blatantly created.
I would highly discourage anyone from using this company to install or service your generators. Not only are they expensive to begin with, they won't stand behind their service, and you could end up in a similar situation as us: with a destroyed, barely used generator and out thousands of dollars to get a new one. read more