Our AC unit went out towards the end of May, and I had a friend refer A1 to me. So I went online…read moreand did the whole "Contact Me" selection, saw that they did free consultations. Great.
Jerome comes out that Saturday (30th), I give him as much info as I have, we'd only been in the house for a year, and not really had to use the AC, so weren't sure about the history, but it didn't seem to have issues, until it stopped working.
I left him to diagnose, and half hour ish, he comes in and tells me it was just completely out of coolant. Easy fix, he'd already filled it, I paid him, problem done. I asked if there were any other issues, he said no it's just an older unit, and I asked him if it'd still be good for the next 2-3 years, so we could save for a replacement, he said it should.
About 3 weeks go by, and it stops working again, no idea why. So I ask my husband (who is home during the days) to get ahold of Jerome, and see if he has time to come out to look at it again. He calls, the first number on the business card is not Jerome, but someone who used to work for him. So he calls the other number, and leaves a message. Jerome calls back, and says he's out of town... that was pretty much the end of conversation.
We ended up calling Milwaukie Heating, who comes out and looks at the unit, gives us a very thorough quote. Come to find out that there is a whole (puncture) in the liner of the unit. (I don't know if this is the technical jargon, this is just what I got from my husband). The hole was big enough that it should have been noticed prior to having the coolant filled (which is all A1 did), and the tech from Milwaukie said that it should have been communicated to me before the unit was filled.
So we have the repair quote, and the quote for a replacement unit, and I called back A1, thinking it's been long enough, maybe Jerome is back in town and can come give us a price quote on a repair, since he initially filled the unit, and I feel like it was something he should have caught, so I wanted to give him a chance to work with us on resolving the issue.
Spoke with Jerome tonight, he is still out of state. When I told him I felt like we were taken advantage of, by him not informing us of an issue and just filling the coolant (I'll be honest, I said it felt like we got screwed), his response was "I'm sorry". And then there was a statement to the effect of, "It's possible if there was a leak, something was blocking it, and it was holding pressure, so it the blockage may have been dissolved, and the leak came back".
We will not be using this company again, and I'm super disappointed with the service. I feel like he did take advantage of us not knowing much about our AC unit, and was happy enough to make $$$ off of something that was never going to fix the problem. Had we not gone somewhere else, we might have just kept having the unit filled, before realizing there was a larger problem.