CA MECHANICAL

3/28/2011 We signed the contract. The work was scheduled to start on Monday 4/4/2011. The installation took place as scheduled. The workers did not have the paperwork with them for the $500 Federal Income Tax credit nor the $220 PG&E (our utility company) rebate as promised. The intake vent cover in the upstairs hallway was not replaced as promised. The exhaust vent in the garage was placed in such a way that it blocks some of my pre-existing shelving. Additionally, I feel that the distance that it is suspended from the ceiling is excessive and therefore could easily be hit while moving a ladder, etc. 4/8/2011 The system failed the City of Vacaville's building inspection. 4/9/2011 My husband faxed the list of corrections to CA Mechanical. Over the course of the next few weeks my husband called CA Mechanical numerous times with no response. 5/2/2011 The two installers who had performed the initial work finally returned to fix the problems on the city Inspector's list. They informed my husband a pressure test would be scheduled. My husband asked them how to operate the manual damper to adjust air flow to our upstairs and was informed that one had NOT been installed as promised. Though Mr. Barker swore on more than one occasion afterwards that it had been. Nothing more happened over the next two weeks in spite of the fact that my husband called Mr. Barker several times and left numerous messages with his office worker Cory. 5/16/2011 My husband called The Home Depot store directly and was referred to Cynthia Gary who is their HVAC Customer Care Rep out of Georgia. She called Mr. Barker and got an appointment to have the system pressure tested on Friday, May 20th. The system failed the pressure test. Corrective work was performed by North Bay Air Systems. The system passed the second pressure test on 5/24/2011. The entire process became too over whelming and I can no longer provide the specific dates that things occurred beyond that point. Cynthia Gary turned our complaint over to Rick Laughlin, the District Services Manager for The Home Depot store shortly after this. Also, at about this same time or shortly thereafter two different CA Mechanical employees came to the house to install the manual damper which had not been installed previously. When they entered our attic crawl space, they discovered a manual damper was still in place from the previous system. They left that damper in place but installed a new manual damper in the crawl space under our house. As far as we can tell, it served no purpose other than satisfying Mr. Barker's claim that they installed a manual damper as promised. We have never been instructed on it's use. The following is a couple of things which we feel very possibly was unethical behavior on the part of Mr. Barker verses just a misunderstanding on our part. In the initial meeting on 3/8/2011, Mr. Barker informed us that The Home Depot was offering a $1000 rebate that was due to expire. We later suspected that had been a ploy to get us to sign sooner. We could never confirm with The Home Depot if they had offered such a rebate. Also in the initial meeting for a price quote, I asked about the option of getting a dual sytem to help us balance the hot/cool air throughtout our two story home. Mr. Barker said that a dual system was not necessary. He claimed installing a manual damper would work just as well. And if they couldn't install a manual damper they could install one that was thermostatically controlled. He made it sound very simple. We later were quoted an additional $2,000 to install the thermostatically controlled damper. Mr. Barker generously offered to give us the reduced price of $1,700. Mr. Barker advised my husband that the reason the pressure test had taken so long to be scheduled was because there were only 4-5 companies in the northern part of California who were qualified to perform that test. We have found significantly more than that in our county alone. In summation: Our heater/ac unit works fine. But we still have the hot/cold imbalances in our home. Since we did not elect to have CA Mechanical install the thermostatically controlled damper, or to do any further work on our system, our compalint with The Home Depot has been closed. We are still deciding if we should learn to live with the problem, call in a different contractor, or just sell the house and be done with it entirely.