Tampa Bay Geothermal Heating Installation

It was a wonderful experience, Mark was very pleasant and was great to deal with. He did something unusual today, he did what he said he would do when he said he would for the price he said he would do it for. I highly recommend them for any A/C repairs, install or replacements. I understand he is also getting into Geothermal units, I will probably have him come back and give me a proposal to install geothermal in my house when my units are ready to be replaced.

An Engineer and a Sales person drove to my new home in St Augustine, Fl. The company is located in Port Richey, Fl. They had a good sales line and the Engineer assured me they could handle the Geothermal unit for my home. In April of 2011 I gave them a deposit of $8,500.00 to get the process started. When the home was ready for the Geothermal unit in June 2011 I had the local well drilling company assess the land for a well site. They told me my existing well would not be capable of handling the demand of the Geothermal unit and that I would need Two Deep artesian wells to run it. During the initial interview the Engineer from Egg Geothermal was physically at my house in St. Augustine, Fl, within 20 feet of my existing well and never looked at it or assessed its capability. I was told by the Local Well Drilling Company that each new well would cost $5,500.00 and the pump would cost another $2,500.00. This would add up to $13,500.00 before I even started with the Geothermal unit. I called Egg Geothermal and spoke with the General Manager (Jason Hodges) and told him this was way over my budget for heating and cooling and that I would not be able to afford their system if these new wells were necessary. He told me he understood and would refund me the deposit within one week. They have evaded my telephone calls, e-mails, certified letters and inquiries from the Better Buisness Bureau since then and have never returned my deposit yet. My experience with them has been a nightmare. I feel as if I have been completely Conned by these people. I will probably have to pursue them in Court to get my money back.

Service prior to fall out: All contractors were courteous and professional. Everything was installed in a timely manner. Even during the dispute they have been very professional. But after finally getting many months of direct energy-usage comparables to the previous year, the product they sold me is not nearly as efficient as I was lead to believe. This system which was billed as the most efficient heating cooling system (31 SEER) is only 11% more efficient (as measured by CEEBEE) than the 12 SEER system I had on the house to begin with. Trying to do a direct comparable between geothermal and in-air appears to be very difficult even though that is what was done in the initial sales discussions. When CEEBEE sells Air-to-air products they advertise significant savings when upgrading to more efficient products with higher SEER. In my previous house I had a 4 ton 21 SEER IQ system which saved me about $100/mo during the summer (original was a 10 SEER). CEEBEE sales person told me at the time of trying to decide between and IQ drive and geothermal that the IQ drive did not come in 5 ton...Westinghouse was advertising a 5 ton Westinghouse (FT4BG iQ Drive) at the time but a CEEBEE representative showed me an official listing and it is not on their but Westinghouse still advertises a 5 ton (Westinghouse did not response to inquiries). My biggest fault with the company is the contractors they use and I feel they totally oversold the product for the geological environment my house sits atop. I still need to ground truth this but conversations with another geothermal company with geology background indicate that the soil type (clay) may be preventing water flow across the loop causing poor efficiency. We also had a big issue with the company which transported the heavy equipment damaged the entrance of the community while entering and did not repair the damage. CEEBEE was not directly responsible for that but it just compounded the bad experience with geothermal. If I had to do it all over again, definitely would not go this route but now I am stuck with a very expensive product that is performing very poorly.