Karen Brewer

Baby I’m Amazed…Home repair and recession…..Darien real estate.

Let me start by saying that -I’m no kid. I’m 52 years old and have owned a home for 25 of those years.Every so often however, I am AMAZED by how easy it is to get ripped off by unscrupulous home repair companies.

Yesterday,at the beginning of the first real heatwave of  the summer, my central air conditioning stopped working .(you know, that Murphys’ Law thing). Anyway, I have been doing business with the same AC company for all of 25 years I’ve been in Darien,CT .They are  a Darien and Fairifeld County company, their trucks are all over the place and I’ve never had any reason to mistrust them.                                                    

They sent over the technician that day (so far ,so good) and I was told that a  valve needed to be replaced. (Okaaaaay, you do air conditioning,I do real estate,just fix it.) The cost to replace the valve  would be $500-800 because it would be a  2 1/2 hour job.

Later, I got a call from the supervisor who told me the air handler(whatever that is) was at the end of its life and replacing the valve would be a bad investment. New cost: $3000-$5000! In fact he refused to replace the valve unless he replaced the entire air handler.I called another firm who showed up the next morning.

In fifteen minutes, my home was cool.There was a pinhole sized leak in the freon line. Cost $140.I think this recession has placed huge burdens on local and regional firms of all kinds. This company risked its whole reputation to make a buck.First thing Monday, I will call the company, and tell them that I am no longer a customer.Furthermore, I will email  every agent in  my office  at William Pitt Sotheby’s never to recommend them! Lets see- that’s about 800 agents. (And hat doesn’t count the readers of the goldcoaststandard.com

The lesson? Things are tough out there and vendors are desperate for business. Always get more than one estimate.  Its the oldest advice in the book and I almost re-learned it -the hard way.AMAZING.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Insider Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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