Concerning an existing home maintenance service contract, ECM will not respond to request to service the central air
conditioning unit. The unit involved is over ten years old and will need to be replaced someday but, it still works fine as intended. With the new contract, first assessment, ECM determined that the unit had a very small Freon leak from
the coil. (this was an existing condition, agreed with by myself, known issue). It was agreed between both parties that any future cooling issues concerning the coil or Freon leak would need to be addressed with the replacement of the
leaking coil or the entire unit. (the following occurred approximately October 1st) With my first requested service call concerning the A/C unit, I was informed that no Service Tech would be sent out unless I was ready to replace
the coil and or entire unit. I explained that the current issue was only a faulty capacitor that is required to start the exterior fan motor, which cools the exterior condenser. The Freon level was in a normal range of operation. A bad capacitor doesn't warrant the replacement of the entire unit.
After several phone calls with ECM Customer Service, they agreed to come out and "if" it was the suspect capacitor, they would service it. And they did respond, and it was the capacitor, and it was replaced restoring the A/C. So, a little aggravating but apparently settled, the air was working again. Now the problem that has just occurred and what brings me to this complaint. I called ECM for the second time on October 20th because the exterior fan motor was once again failing to start or run continuously as needed. (untrained diagnostics, fan motor has burned out, won't spin, extreme heat from motor). I
explained this to the ECM scheduler and was informed that they would not respond because of the previously noted Freon issue and a "over ride" would be required by Customer Service Dept. Before anyone would respond. The Customer Service Dept. Is not available on Saturdays and request for service was denied. This is not an acceptable business practice, ECM is failing to meet their contractual obligations.
On Saturday Oct. 20th I hired a private A/C repairman to investigate the problem with the unit. He found the following; 1.
The fan motor had failed and was replaced. 2. The Capacitor that ECM replaced previously was in fact the wrong size for the motor. ECM installed a 7.5 MFD where the required size needed is a 5.0 MFD. The end result of this would be the future motor failure. Of course, we will never know if the motor would have failed because of age or the incorrect capacitor installation. The issue is that ECM would not respond to the trouble call for a problem that they may have contributed to.
0 comments