I hired Yestramski Service to perform routine annual maintenance on my stand by generator at a cost of over $400.00 (including a new battery). Within a couple of days after the service, we lost power. The generator motor started, but the generator did not transfer power into the house. Because the outage was of short duration, I did not pay that much attention to this. A couple of weeks later, we lost power again, this time for a longer period of time. Once again, the motor started but no power was transferred into the house. I called Yestramski letting them know of the situattion. Shortly ater I received a call back from the owner, I believe his name is Tom, telling me, amid complaints about his help's lack of availability, that the breaker under the hood was probably in the "off" position. I checked this and found that the breaker was actually in the "on" position. I called back and was told that the service technicians were out straight helping other customers, however I would be put on the schedule for a follow up visit. After several follow up phone calls from me, Tom called and told me was in the area and would stop by to see what the issue was. When he got here, after running several checks, he told me that the power was not being transferred into the house (no kidding) and that he would have a technician come by to run further test to see if it was a simple fix or a bad generator, in need of replacement.
Once again, I received no follow up calls scheduling me for this service. This is when we had the pre-Christmas storm. On that Friday morning, we lost power early. I called Yestramski and was told that they would not be able to get to me because, once again, his technicians were all busy with other customers. I responded that I had paid to have the generator serviced so that it would be in working condition, and also, I had been very patient with this company, and expected to have someone out to my house that day to find out why it wasn't working. The rep told me that she was going to get a hold of Tom and get back to me. She called me back, told me that she spoke to Tom, and that he was going to "jump through hoops " (her words) to get someone out to my house. As it turns out, the generator was toast.
After thinking about this situation, I called Yestramski and asked why I was charged over $400.00 to service a generator that wasn't working. Once again, I pointed out that the generator worked fine before that initial service call. The rep told me that the original service tech could not tell that it wasn;t working properly because we not in an outage situation. When I pointed out that both Tom, and the follow up tech could determine the status of the generator right at the generator, she had no response. At that point she told me that she would have Tom call me.
When he called, he acted as if he had no idea of what I called about. When I questioned him about my paying for service on an inoperable generator, he told me that he had the pre inspection notes on front of him (strange, if he didn't know why I was calling) and everything was operating properly before the service, and that his tech would have never performed the service if the generator was no good. I asked him if I was to believe that this was totally coincidental, and he said, in effect, yes. I know how I feel about this but will let the reader reach their own conclusions.
I want to end by saying that even if this is a case of coincidence, my rating goes beyond the fact that the generator no longer worked after the service was performed. It is also based on my having to make numerous phone calls for follow up action on a service that I paid for, was told on numerous occasions that a service call would be scheduled when, apparently this was not the case, and told on multiple occasions that they could not send someone out because they were too busy servicing other customers. To me, this is unacceptable. read more
