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HVAC shops that deal in a myriad of
"industry exclusive guarantees" remind me of a corner street
hustler. You want it? His loaded trench coat has got it. Except
instead of dealing with a thug who's peddling hot merchandise,
you're dealing with an HVAC salesman who's peddling psychology. As
long as you'll sign the contract, he'll give you almost any
assurance you want. But in my experience those assurances are of little real
value to you. I'm reminded of the time when I spent several hours replacing a transmission mount. I was young and hardly knew what I was doing, but by golly I did it right and it worked... until a week later when the new mount busted. When I went back to the parts store I asked the counter guy if he had a better quality mount. He said no. But he assured me that the mount that just broke came with a lifetime guarantee. I thought to myself: Great! This piece of junk is going to cost me several hours a week, but at least it's "guaranteed"! Most industry exclusive guarantees you see from HVAC contractors are about as useful as the lifetime warranty on that lousy transmission mount. Yes, you might be able to take advantage of one of those guarantees some day. But you certainly won't be happy about it. My favorite is the "If you're not happy then we'll yank the new system out and refund your money!" guarantee. The theory is that just like the local Walmart, if you don't like your new HVAC system then you just give the word and they'll pull it out and refund your money. That could someday happen. But unlike the Walmart employee they don't just stare at you blankly and hand over the dough. The guarantee is riddled with provisions designed to make it utterly frustrating if not useless. The most important provisions involve time and specificity. You have to be specific about your complaints. Then they get a year, sometimes two, to address them one by one. By the time the two years is up you'll be so sick of the ordeal that the last thing you'll want to do is invoke the guarantee and have to install the system yet again. Most whiz bang guarantees in this trade are like that. The specifics of the guarantee may be different from my example. But no matter what the guarantee, the marketing departments that write them aren't concerned with whether or not they'll ever have to make good. They'll write the guarantee so that they'll almost never have to. Rather, they're concerned simply with creating a good hook. It's marketing at it's finest. The actual benefit to you is of little importance so long as they can get you to sign the contract. The answer of course is to get quality work in the first place. A guarantee that they'll fix a botched job is worthless compared to the assurance of quality work in the first place. To that end I've written this site to teach you as much as I can about my trade. I'm convinced that once you know what questions to ask you'll be better able to weed out the hacks and get quality work for your hard earned dollar.  Copyright ©
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