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"Last fall as I prepared to deploy to the Middle East with the Minnesota National Guard, we decided to replace our boiler, so my wife wouldn’t have any added stress while I was gone. The opposite has occurred. After I left, the boiler and hot water system was installed in. That went fine though they left a big hole in the floor when they removed the old boiler. Shortly after the new boiler began having problems losing pressure and my wife smelled gas. When the pressure drops below a certain level the furnace shuts off, so the house gets cold and there is no hot water. McQuillan came out and looked at the system, determined that the expansion tank had failed and replaced it. They said the gas smell was just old pipes. Things worked for a bit, but then started losing pressure and shutting off again. McQuillan came out, added water and the system came back on. A week or so later, no pressure, no heat or hot water. McQuillan comes out and determines the expansion tank had failed again. It gets replaced, water added, the system is back on. They showed my wife how to add water to keep the pressure up In asking what was causing the problem, McQuillan kept telling us that its an old house, and you have leaky radiators. We looked. A couple of radiators had a little rust line from the valves, but no water and the pipes were dry when our carpenter touched them with a Kleenex to check for leaks or moisture. Through out the winter, this keeps happening with my wife having to regularly go down in the basement to add water. She keeps looking for any sign of water leaks around all the radiators and heating pipes. It is frustrating and stressful. In early March, after being gone for the weekend, she came home and the boiler was out and the house near freezing. McQuillan put in an automatic fill valve to add water whenever the pressure dropped. Still insisting that the pressure loss had to be leaky radiator valves. When I heard about this from my wife I asked if they had done a pressure test on the system to try to determine where the leak was occurring. McQuillan said no, that isn’t standard procedure. (Other boiler installers said it is the standard). We hadn’t been able to find any water leaks from any of the radiators or pipes we could see, so I didn’t want to keep pumping water in afraid that the leak might be hidden somewhere. So I had my wife turn it off unless she was going to be gone for more than a day. The pressure loss keeps happening. Also the gas smell is still there, so my wife called the gas company to come out and check. They found not one but two leaks in the gas connection creating a danger significant enough that the gas company immediately turned off our gas in the middle of the winter. At this point McQuillan had been out to the house 6-8 time and things were still not right. We tell them the systems isn’t working and they need to start over. McQuillan goes through the system again and fixes the gas leak. They determined that the expansion tank was actually too small for our system and replaced it with a bigger one. Soon again no pressure. Not being able to find any leaks throughout the house, but unable to account for the pressure loss, we start to consider replacing the valves that showed a little rust. But I wasn’t convinced that was the problem as we weren’t seeing any water. We continued to push to have them reinstall the system. After the tenth+ visit to the house, McQuillan arranged to have the local rep from the boiler manufacturer come out to look at the system. During this they finally decide to do a pressure test. When the boiler was isolated and a pressure test was done, it was discovered that there was a crack inside the boiler. This took no more than 45 minutes. The water leaking to create the pressure drop was running from the crack inside the boiler through the condensation hose to the laundry sink—which is why there was never any water on the floor. So at this point they replace the system and four radiator valves that showed some rust. We will see how this winter goes. Regardless of whether or not it is your standard protocol to pressure test at the time you install a boiler, about the second time you were called out because of a loss of pressure it would have been the prudent thing to do to determine what the actual problem was. Certainly it should have been done before installing the auto-fill device, which only masked the problem by adding more water whenever enough had leaked out somewhere. If there had been a hidden leak in the piping, all that continuous leaking could have led to significant damage. While they didn’t charge us to replace four radiator valves, because they didn’t pressure test the systems, we don’t know if the valves actually needed replacing. The value of replacing something that may or may not of needed replacing is speculative at best.  As a result of all this, my wife had to miss multiple days of work dealing with all these issues that we should never have had to deal with, and were exactly what we were trying to avoid with having McQuillian install a new boiler. Instead, a complete nightmare at a time when my family was under intense stress already. We still have a hole in the floor."

"Nick was waiting for me when I came back from an errand. He was very good at explaining what he was going to do, then did it, then explained what he found. Very professional! Aquarius should tweak their scheduling plan to incorporate windows of when the tech will arrive. The current method of announcing that the tech will be there without stating when is very inconvenient for the homeowner."

"Very helpful."

"Friendly and communicative."