Sears Home Heating and Cooling - SHHC - Landmark Sears, Alexandria, VA - poor service experience

# 21 for September 25, 2003

Complaints.com received the following on September 24, 2003:

From:

RE: Sears Home Heating and Cooling - SHHC - Landmark Sears, Alexandria, VA - poor service experience

To Whom It May Concern:

I wish to inform you of a most disconcerting series of events which are still unfolding regarding my experience with Sears Home Heating and Cooling (SHHC) and the replacement of the furnace which heats the upper floors of the house. The basement one bedroom apartment is heated by a separate heat pump system which became involved because the refridgerant lines to it had to be cut in order to remove the old furnace. In late October, 2002 I signed a contract to have SHHC replace the furnace at my home in Washington, DC. Mr. Roop Kapour from the Landmark Sears in Alexandria, Virginia is the agent. I wanted to re-orient the furnace so that the routine maintenance of air filters could be handled inside of the house. He explained that they would not be able to do this because of the tight fit of the supply and return airducts. He refused to consider reorienting the furnace for indoor access saying, “If you want to have heat this winter there isn’t any way we can accomplish what you are propsing.” In order to accommodate this diagnosis I had to demolish a load-bearing masonary wall and support it structurally with I beams and Lolly columes. I was disappointed but resigned to this outcome. The contract clearly stated the scope of the work and that the proposed work would be completed within the following week, (I have attached a photocopy.) This meant I had demolished this wall for nothing and and it would have to be rebuilt without effective access to the furance compartment from inside the house. The the removal of the aforementioned wall made it easier to position the new furnace and replace the heat exchange unit for the central air conditioning and reattach it to the ductworks. Davinder of Mahya Heating and Plumbing of Manassas, Virginia was the subcontractor. Davinder was going to start the job the following week. He brought the furnace over to the house. In order to remove the old furnace and the ductwork it was necessary to sever the refridgerant lines of the basement apartment’s heat pump system which became in-operable until the new furance was installed and the lines restored and refilled. The new furnace was not placed in service until the first week of February, 3 months after the contracted stipulated completion date. Davinder would call, set up a time to come and finish the job, wouldn’t come as scheduled, nor would he call to cancel. At least three times.this occurred. In each instance a ‘no call no show’ performance occurred. It took threats from me of a law suit to persuade him to complete the job. And then this too had to be rescheduled. The result of this breached contract was no central heating in the house during the months of November, December and January. I am a disabled person living with HIV/AIDS. There are four other residents living here. We were without central heat through one of the coldest and snowiest Washington winters in many years. In order to stay warm I procured a commercial heater which would produce maybe 10 hours of warmth per $18.33 LPG refills. I have electric space heaters so the electricity bill skyrocketed. Thank goodness this old house has fireplaces but none of us is really capable of packing firewood up the stairs to keep a fire going. If this wasn’t bad enough, what forced my hand was the cash flow crisis brought about by the lost rental income of the basement apartment. I rely on rental income from the other residents of the house and the rent from this one bedroom basement apartment to make the mortgage payments. I basically lost the $1,500 rental income per month from the basement apartment for those 3 months. because there was no heat. The apartment was vacated in the middle of October and I would have had it rented by the first of November except for the heat situation. Tennants around here require central heat in the winter. I found a new tennant who wanted to take the place February 1st, but only if I could get the heat situation handled. Davinder and his father came and got the basement heat pump system running again the first weekend in February. In March I refinanced the house and paid off the contract. So the Heating was not functional all winter and now we come to the cooling season and the system when it was switched on to cool didn’t work in either the upstairs or downstairs systems. In June the SHHC service center in Silver Spring, MD came and diagnosed the problem in both systems as being low levels of refridgerant. The technician who responded to the service call explained that it was up to the subcontractor who did the work to completely refill each cooling system. He said he would get this information to the appropriate person/s to handle. In order to keep my tenannts I procured a small window a/c unit as an emergency measure. I received one call from Mr Kapour and one call from Davinder but no action. About a week ago we had some very nasty weather which flooded a subterranian transformer bay up the street knocking out the power in the neighborhood for about 3 hours on a Friday night. This the fifth time in as many years I have lived here that the power has gone out. No one was home in the basement apartment at the time. While the power was off we had another deluge of rain. The basement apartment’ gravity sewer is about 6 feet above the floor level and must be pumped up the 6 feet to drain. Since there was no power there was no pump action and the water backed up the sewer drains doing extensive damage to the floors and the tennant’s belongings. When water didn’t cease oozing out from under the wall in the foyer further investigation revealed that the portable air conditioner wasn’t draining to the outside of the buidling but was rather filling the wall beneath it. The mildew mold and stench of the carpet has made replacement necessary. The small window unit has completely soaked the interior wall under the window and has now flooded the apartment destroying much of the tennant’s property stored nearby. Clearly the errant a/c unit must be made useable and effective. I called SHHC and requested another tech be dispatched with a supply of refrigerant so that the two systems might be functional. The man who came in June made no mention whatsoever of the heat pump system’s age. The fellow who came out this time in September filled the upstairs system so that it is now functional presenting me with a bill for $253 and informed me that the compressor on the basement system had frozen up and Sears no longer worked on equipment that old. I now have a very disgruntled tennant and though the end of the cooling system is almost here may need it a while longer. I called Sears National Customer Realtions earlier today and was again returned to the computer cue to again be placed on hold. Perhaps one of the local newspaper’s ‘Letters To the Editor’ would be a better source of redress or maybe the Better Business Bureau. What do I want you to do. I believe I have been inconvenienced all winter and most of the summer. I have a non-functioning heat pump system in my basement apartment with the additional information that it is no longer repairable (by Sears). I believe that sears owes me a functional heat pump compressor for that system. It was working when the furnace project began it should be working now. Neither my tennants nor myself deserve this sort of discomfort. Since the new furnace has already been paid for, that’s water over the dam, however, this frozen heat pump, the freon for both systems ought to be completedat no additional charge to me and a credit for the freoncharge on my Sears Premier. If Sears wants the window order the windows and if your I believe I should also be entitled to a credit on the for the freon for the upstairs system and whatever it takes to have the dowstairs sytem work properly. I know I need replacement window sashes on all the windows on the north side of the house and perhaps a discount on the window job would do. I look forward to Sears living up to their advertised customer satisfaction warranties.

Regards, (The Rev.) David A Lounsbury

Washington, DC 20001-4606