Robert sent out a guy who toiled for more than two hours, 75 minutes of which were spent standing at his truck on the phone. My unit didn't have any freon, so he told me it would be $320 to do a freon leak test.He didn't have his own dish soap for leak checks and his batteries were dead on his freon scanner. After pressurizing the system with freon instead of nitrogen, which is a lot cheaper, He told me the compressor wasn't leaking but he thought there was a leak on the air handler and that he would need to replace the fitting on the liquid line. The quote he gave me for the estimated job cost was $1142 plus tax.
I called some other companies who were reputable and would seemingly have higher rates and they were baffled by the quotes. When i asked the tech from Robert why the job was quoting so high and could he walk me through the costs, he told me "that's the price in the book."
I had enough alarm bells going off by this point to shut the process down, so a service manager came out and started the "Monty Hall/Let's Make a Deal" routine, wanting to know what i thought the service was worth. to be fair, i paid their $85 service fee to cover them coming out. I wish now that i hadn't.
I then called another company who came out and did their own leak check at a cost of $65 ($25 for nitrogen charge and $40 for a vacuum pull) He informed me that there indeed was a leak on the air handler liquid line. Then he took his crescent wrench and tightened the nut and Presto. No more leak. After the service charge and adding freon to my system, my total bill was $375 which was about $767 plus tax cheaper than Robert's price.
I called the service manager back and asked for my service fee to be refunded and he smugly refused, stating that "his guy did find the leak and you are just mad because we are more expensive." No,. I'm mad because you're unethical, unprofessional and rude.
Evidently, the service manager doesn't mind that his guy wanted to unnecessarily replace a part instead of tightening a loose nut and triple charge me for the services rendered. I'm sure there are people who blindly pay and i feel sorry for them, because there are companies out there who aren't raping their customers. Unfortunately, Robert A/C isn't one of them. read more