My experience of getting a high efficiency furnace installed by Doug Mapstone Inc. was very up and down.
The process of getting an estimate from them was great. In-person, Debbie was very professional when she came to the house to take the measurements and give an estimate. She priced out multiple options for us, giving us a lot of choice about what we wanted vs. what we could afford. The estimate she sent was in Excel format and included all of the relevant prices, rebates, and information. It was all very straightforward, and made it easy to know exactly what we would be paying for each option. Debbie was also available by phone to clarify the available options and make recommendations.
Once I finally decided on what heater I wanted, though, things started to go downhill. (I kept a file on my computer of how things went, so I'll be referring to it in this review.) I confirmed the heater that I wanted, and sent payment out on October 6th, and agreed to have it installed on October 16th. On October 7th, though, they contacted me to say that the 16th wouldn't work and that the 23rd would be better, so I confirmed that date instead. On the morning of the 23rd, half an hour before the installation was supposed to start, I got a call saying they had a last-minute emergency with a business that had no heat and they had to reschedule, and they said they'd contact me about rescheduling. By October 25th I'd heard nothing so I contacted them to ask about rescheduling. On October 29th they replied to me with some possible dates, and I confirmed for an installation on November 6th, which is when the installation actually occurred. (This kind of wait time was pretty common throughout - two to four days between my sending a reply and then hearing back from them. However, sometimes I would hear back from them the same day. It was just a bit inconsistent.)
The heater was installed on Nov. 6th and even during the installation I could tell things weren't going well. I was in the house all day and I could hear the technician repeatedly calling someone on his cell phone and relaying information about the job, asking questions, and getting replies. (Also, a second technician showed up at some point during the day, which suggested that he needed help with what he was doing.) At the end of the day when the job was complete I came downstairs to look at the heater and I could tell that things weren't right. The previous furnace setup had been air-tight, but the way this guy installed the new one there were small gaps between the heater and the ducting connecting the heater to the rest of the house and I could feel hot air rushing out from these holes. Also, the technician had pulled some of the other ducting out of alignment, he didn't properly secure the electrical cord to the heater, and he didn't replace some insulation that he had taken down, nor fully sweep up the scraps of metal he left on the floor.
So, I contacted the company on Nov. 7th to request that the problems be fixed. On November 9th I got a phone call saying that they would fix the problems. On November 10th I e-mailed them asking them to set a date when they could come back to fix everything. On November 11th I received an e-mail saying they could fix the problem as soon as Nov. 12th or 13th. I heard nothing back from them for several days, though, so I e-mailed on November 18th asking again when they could come fix the problems. Finally, on Nov. 21st they contacted me to say they are the busiest they've ever been and asking to schedule something during Thanksgiving week. I told them we would be away during Thanksgiving and so we scheduled it for Dec. 4th. On Dec. 4th, I was home all day and nobody showed up, so I called them on Dec. 5th to ask what happened. I got an immediate callback saying that there had been a problem the day before and I was supposed to get a call telling me that nobody was coming, but someone had forgotten to call me. However, they said they'd send someone out later that day to fix the problems.
So, on December 5th, they sent an installer (Gary) out to look at the problems. He looked it over and asserted that everything was working correctly, and that he would just be making cosmetic fixes so that it would look nicer than it did now. When asked about the air rushing out of the holes, he said, "oh yeah, we need to fix that." He then explained that the person who had installed my furnace initially was someone who typically does only heater maintenance and not installations. Anyway, he went about fixing the heater and when he was done it did look much better than before, and - despite the assertion that the fixes were just cosmetic - the house felt warmer at the same thermostat setting than it had before the fixes.
As he was leaving, Gary said something about how the exhaust and intake pipes they installed at the back of the house needed to be in a particular configuration, with one pointing up and one pointing to the side. I figured he would check them before he left, but he simply left, so I went out to check them myself. I then went online and compared the current pipe configuration to government recommendations for these kinds of heaters and found that they looked different from what they were supposed to. So, I e-mailed the company on December 6th to ask if the pipes needed to be fixed, but didn't hear back from them. Then, on December 16th I went down into my basement to get out the Christmas decorations and I found that one of the pipes installed inside the house had a slow drip. So I called the company to ask for a repair and they made an appointment to come on December 17th.
Gary was the installer who showed up on Dec. 17th and he discovered that the person who installed the system the first time hadn't properly glued the pipes together, which allowed them to leak condensation. So he glued the pipes together and then said he would also fix the configuration of the outside pipes while he was at the house. So, he did these things and showed me the work he'd done, and it all seemed to have been done correctly. As we were walking back to the front of the house, he told me that this job was atypical because they usually only have to install the heater and then never have to do followup appointments to fix anything because the job is normally done right the first time. Then he said that his boss was upset that he keeps having to come all the way out to Cicero to fix this system. (My feelings on this were: A) if my house was too far away, then the company shouldn't have accepted the job in the first place, and B) the company wouldn't have to keep coming out if they had sent the right person to install the system in the first place!)
Currently the heater seems to be working well, but it hasn't been long enough yet to tell if there has been a reduction in the cost of operating the furnace. So, it seems like they CAN do quality work, it's just that they sent the wrong person the first time and had to do a bunch of followup visits to fix this person's mistakes. Also, it was sometimes frustrating to try to get in touch with them and have 1-4+ day gaps between when I would e-mail/call them and when they would reply. I certainly understand that they were busy, and it's not their fault when emergency situations arise, but having such long stretches without contact from them stretched the whole process out much longer than if they had replied quickly. (For example: it took a month from my payment to the installation, and then a month from letting them know that there were problems in order for them to come fix those problems.)
Long story short, there probably isn't any systematic problem with the quality of their work, but I don't see myself going with them in the future for my heating/cooling needs (unless it was another issue with the installation that I had to call them back to fix).