Freedom Heating & Cooling

Not well. After the technician completed the cleaning the furnace would not stay on. The tech spent almost an hour trying to figure out what was causing the problem with no luck. He finally called his boss who told me that there was nothing else he could do unless I paid for another service call as well as $109 an hour for this tech to continue to try and figure out the problem. Since the kid had no idea as to what was the cause I decided to pay him for the cleaning and sent him on his way. The next day I got in touch with a different company to send someone out. This tech determined that the condensation trap was clogged which he cleared that fixed the problem. He told me that the tech that did the original cleaning should have cleaned the trap as part of the annual cleaning job. So, I ended up paying the original $69 for a cleaning that if done properly would not have resulted in a problem that I had to pay another company over $200 to get fixed.

We set up an appointment using a $49 service and diagnosis deal. The morning of the appointment we got a call from Nick at 7:45, asking if they could change our time to their first appointment instead of the afternoon. We agreed and changed our morning around to accommodate the change. Since they said they were about to leave, we figured it would take at most an hour for them to arrive. He and Pete finally got to our house around 10:30, about an hour and a half late. Nick came to the door without a mask. When I asked if he had one, he told me they only put them on when they go inside, and they would only be working outside, which we don’t have a problem with. The problem is that he knocked on the door several times and since he was maskless (We weren’t.), we were very uncomfortable opening the door. He finally put his mask on when he came into the house to have us sign the invoice. They began by spraying water from our hose into the AC condenser and then telling us several times how filthy it was. Could it have had some debris in it? Of course, but we had hosed it down in the spring. Nick even told us how filthy our other condenser was, which is unlikely because it is only a few months old. In discussing our filthy AC unit, Nick said they charge $69 for the cleaning, which we didn’t authorize and which consisted of about five minutes of spraying with our hose. I told him I was surprised to see that this was considered to be a cleaning because when we had AC cleaning before, the technician had taken the unit apart. He said that was a deep cleaning. The worst part was the recommendation for service. Nick told us that we needed refrigerant for $89 a pound (significantly more than other companies we have called), but they couldn’t tell us how much until they filled it and weighed the tank to see how much was used. We questioned this since he said it could be up to four pounds, which would be $366, and were perplexed about why they couldn’t tell us how much was needed since they seemed to have a gage attached to the unit. Pete then told us it was too cold to fill the refrigerant. It was 55 degrees, and it needed to be 65 degrees or higher. Then we were even more confused. How would they know how much refrigerant was actually going in? This is particularly concerning because overfilling the refrigerant can harm the AC unit. What’s more, why would they even schedule the appointment when it was too cold to properly assess or address the problem? In the end we paid the $49 for the service call, despite the fact that we really didn’t feel like we got a true assessment of the problem or a real solution, but were not charged the $69 for the five minute hose cleaning. It was pretty much a waste of time and money. They did have time to put a Freedom Heating and Cooling sticker on the other AC unit that they did not service or install, which fortunately we were able to remove. We never understand why companies think it is okay to do that. The customer doesn’t get anything out of the free advertising, and it is really akin to property defacement.

I called them at 11:30am to schedule an appointment. They said they would have someone out between 2 and 6. They quoated $89 plus costs of repair -- I mentioned the Angie's List $49 service offer and they said they WOULD NOT honor the offer because it was same day. There is NOTHING in the deal terms stating it cannot be same day. This feels like a bait and switch offer. Angie's List--please review the conduct of this contractor... fake offers like this should not be permitted.