You may have heard of the big storm that hit the Northeast US last week?
Our house is about 100 feet from the ocean on the North Shore of Boston, and after four or five days of heavy winds and rain, the “main” storm hit us on Saturday.
We have mini-split heat pump AC/heating units, with two compressors, one on each side of the house. The one on the west side is mounted on the exterior wall, and weighs over 100 lbs. It looks something like this:
Early on Saturday afternoon, with the storm raging, I happened to notice that the compressor was dangling off the wall at an angle, hanging on by the electrical cable, which unlike the picture, was connected from above. I went down to examine it, and the mounting bracket had completely rusted away. It was only being held to the wall by the stubs of the bracket. I dashed to get a couple of boards to prop it up vertically and flipped off the breaker powering it.
I called the company that installed the system about five years ago, and the emergency contact said they’d have someone call me back about coming out on Monday to look at it. I explained it was likely to fall off the wall any time, and could they get someone out sooner?
I didn’t hear anything from them all day Saturday or Sunday. A few hours after I called, it fell off the wall, despite my props. I texted the emergency contact a picture of it lying on the ground. (click to see the entire image)
Monday morning at about 10:30 they texted me to ask if they could send someone out, and I said of course, and explained that it had fallen off the wall and they’d need at least two people to put it back up and a new stainless steel bracket.
You can see how badly rusted the bracket was, and it was our position that they should never have installed that one, we should obviously have gotten a stainless steel one from the beginning. Therefore, the repairs shouldn’t cost us anything, even though it was installed five years ago.
Although the technician who came out was sympathetic, he said the owner of the company said that their warranty was for one year and that they had installed the same brackets in the area many times and they had never failed.
They are charging us $350 for to remount the unit with a new stainless bracket, plus a couple hundred bucks more for a “maintenance call” to address any repairs related to its fall off the wall.
For me, this is just another example of US companies enshittifying our lives because they can. If the owner were a decent human being he would look at this and say, This is definitely our responsibility, no charge. But he doesn’t have to be a decent human being. He can charge us because we have no alternative. We can’t go to one of his competitors and get a free repair.
Also, their customer service sucked. The emergency contact said that two people would be in touch, and no one was until Monday. If they had called to say that all their techs were out on other calls, or give some other reason why they couldn’t come out immediately, we would have felt better.
