Northern Comfort Heating & Cooling

As a business owner, nothing is a fair price. It's an opportunity for businesses like these to fairly ADD to the bill to maximize their time for commercial repair. I have a gas furnace on a 20-foot roof and it stopped working one day. My thermostat read 60 degrees when it was supposed to be 70 degrees. I reached out to this business due to the "raving" reviews but if you are a business owner with a commercial property, their process is actually: 1. Have someone come out to the business ($99) 2. Run a basic diagnostic by walking around the furnace ($91) 3. Dall 1-800 the furnace's tech support to actually look inside the furnace ($250) 4. Identify the root cause was a 2-inch filter replacement ($198 in additional labor) 5. And then return the next day with QTY 2 2-inch filters that are $17 each (so $34+$99) So the bill for QTY 2 replacement filters is $832! The tech asked for my credit card after he explained the situation and removed my filters to keep the HVAC running. I asked him if I can see what I was paying, and he said the invoice will be emailed to me. Then I asked if I can see on his phone and challenged the charges, but he ignored me and took my credit card information down. So, I was pre-paying for the work to be done but did not happen yet. I felt blackmailed since he already removed my filters to keep the HVAC running. I have a mutual friend who is a retired HVAC professional and shared the invoice. All he did was laugh and shake his head. He called it the classic commercial business invoice. As the 1st two charges should've been valid and paid, the rest should NOT be prepaid because their terms were COD - All balances are due upon completion. They also should've expressed the upcoming charges if the filters needed to be replaced by them, but not remove them from the furnace by any means and not make the decision maker pre-pay a returned trip until the job was done. Overall, I should've just bought myself an extension ladder for $300 and called the furnace manufacturer's tech support. This experience just validates that.

I ordered a couple hours of plumbing work from Angie's list and ultimately learned I needed to replace the expansion tank for my underfloor heater. They were prompt and courteous.

He came within a few days of my calling. The owner himself showed up to do the work. (He supervised a few others by phone while he was at our house.) It took a few hours, but everything was fine with my system for the rest of the summer. He seemed intimately familiar with my equipment. With what I know now I'd have chosen him to install the original heater.

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