|
 |
A lie told
often enough...
It was over
twelve years ago that I heard my first (and last) "Tech Talk
Tape". The tapes were the brainchild of Contractor Success
Group, one of the
trailblazers in turning this trade towards corruption.
In those tapes repairmen were taught to sell new furnaces
and air conditioners when a homeowner's existing equipment
was as little as ten years old. It was for the
customer's benefit that we do so.
|
My then coworkers and I didn't
believe it for a second, but the propagandists persisted.
And if you're to believe
The News, it appears that the propagandists have won the
argument. Apparently even equipment manufacturers are
now admitting they make such lousy products that you should
replace it all after just ten years:
"...many (contractors) have typically followed
manufacturer recommendations to replace equipment that
is over 10 years old."
(emphasis added)
First, I find it interesting that the article writer seems
to think it's the contractor that gets to decide what to do
with your money. Second, there is no such recommendation
from manufacturers, only corrupt contractors. No
manufacturer is dumb enough to sell you on the quality of
their equipment and then turn right around and tell you to
replace it a short ten years later. This is just another
case of a
lie told often enough.
No... Michael Moore has no direct connection to any of this,
but he is a kindred spirit. Like Mike, I sometimes wonder if
the propagandists that promote this drivel actually believe
their own press. Or are they self-aware enough to know that
they're doing it for the coin? Or are they just nuts? ;^)
The answer is probably a little bit of all three. :-) |
|
|
|
|
 |
An F5
tornado on wheels?
At about the
1:40 mark Greg from McAfee Heating & Air Conditioning
informs us that their truck mounted duct cleaning vacuum
creates wind in excess of 300 miles per hour inside the duct
work. Any long time resident of
tornado alley will tell you that 300 mile per hour winds
cause involuntary
relocation of car and home.
|
|
Of course it never occurs to the
talking heads at
WDTN to
question such outlandish claims. If they'd put the hair
spray down long enough to do some real journalism, they'd
find out that the vacuum needed to create a 300 MPH wind would
collapse the
flex duct found in many homes. They'd also realize that
the "blizzard of dust" at the 2:00 mark is a sales gimmick.
And more importantly, they might even learn that duct
cleaning is a scam
no matter who does it. |
 |
|
|
|
 |
Three Kinds
of Liars
There are liars,
damned liars and duct cleaners claiming to be technicians.
There's nothing
unusual about duct cleaners telling
tall
tales. What caught my eye about these duct cleaners was
their uniquely deceptive
web page on burner rollout. According to the folks at
Lucky Duct LLC, burner
rollout kills more people with carbon monoxide poisoning
than does cracked heat exchangers. As you might have
guessed, that statistic has no credible source. It's not
even loosely plausible. |
The burner rollout in their video is more appropriately
called delayed ignition. The pilot sits between two of the
burners. One is lit directly. The other five are lit by
crossover burners. When one of the crossovers has a problem
the burners beyond that point won't light right away. As a
result gas builds up and finally ignites, creating a split
second rollout of flame. It certainly looks
dangerous, but it's literally impossible for the flame
rollout they show you to cause carbon monoxide poisoning. In
fact, at the end of the video it looks like all six burners
are operating normally.
What's worse is the follow-up
video of their so called solution. Delayed ignition is
usually caused by dirty burners. Sometimes it's caused by
worn or damaged burners. Whatever the cause, you don't fix
it with a duct cleaner's vacuum. That could actually make it
worse. You pull the burners out and perform real
service, something most duct cleaners know little about.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
It's
Hard To Stop A Trane®
wholesaler from reaming you.
Making fun
of Trane's slogan is neither creative nor original, but
it is appropriate. They sell some of the highest priced
equipment and parts out there. What do you get for all
that extra dough? Lots of commercials, a nice
paint job and lousy customer service. In the case
of the part pictured to the left, I got only the latter. |
If you can't quite make
it out, that's $68.77 I paid for a little bit of metal and
overnight shipping. I wasn't supposed to need the part
pictured for the compressor I replaced. Two different parts
specialists said as
much. However, once the compressor arrived I found out
otherwise.
It was hot and my customer had already waited two weeks for
the compressor, four days of which were due to unexpected delays on
Trane's part. Waiting on that part gave my customer yet another night of difficult sleep. You'd think
the wholesaler would be a little apologetic, but no. There was no offer of
free overnight shipping, no concern, nothing.
Poor customer service is par for the course in the wholesale
end of this trade. What galls me about Trane is how they
charge so much more and give so much of the same as everyone
else. Well... except for the attitude. Their air of
superiority is head and shoulders above the competition.
It's definitely hard to stop that.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
With
interrupt this infomercial
with... an infomercial.
After enduring
the
latest edition of thinly veiled press releases
reformatted into "news", I finally stumbled upon
something substantive - or so I thought. But alas, it
was not to be.
An article
titled "Investigating Furnace Failures, The Know-How to
Inspect Heat Exchangers Can Save Lives" certainly sounds
promising. But after reading what is ostensibly an
educational article for the service and maintenance section
of |
|
the magazine I
learned 1) furnaces can be dangerous and 2) I need to pay
the author big money to take his class. That's ten
minutes of my life I'll never get back.
There's nothing
wrong with selling your wares. I'm sure Ellis puts on a fine
class. But to present over 1,800 words of useless fear
mongering as anything other than an unpaid commercial is
beyond me. It's also business as usual for the so called
news.
Tony up above
has nothing to do with this of course, other than to say he has more
class. At least he paid for his commercials and gave
us something mildly
entertaining in the process.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Big brother
invades your thermostat.
Due to public
outcry they've
backed off requiring mandatory
control, but don't
think for a moment that the CEC has given up. Thousands of
PG&E customers have voluntarily given PG&E the
ability to adjust their thermostats during peak usage. I
have no doubt that the day is coming when optional will
indeed be mandatory. |
This is our government at work. They create a crisis and then
demand more control of our lives so that they can supposedly fix it. For decades the state has allowed special
interest groups to stifle the building of new power plants.
Now they want to remotely control your thermostat in an
effort to address the shortage that they created in
the first place.
|
|
Update: PG&E has upped
the ante. Not content with giving away run-of-the-mill
thermostats like the one above, now they're taking our
money (owner, renter and those without central air alike)
and giving select homeowners state-of-the-art touch
screen thermostats. Like most PG&E incentives, this one
takes from those with less and gives to those with more. |
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
Two so
called insiders get taken
to the cleaners and like it.
The press may be
free, but it's not necessarily smart. In his
8/1/06 column
titled "Breakdown: Good service saves the day."
Michael Weil, editor-in-chief of
Contracting Business, recounts a friend's story of so
called good service saving the day. His friend is a
supposedly knowledgeable fellow who works in this industry.
And they both applaud a typically sad story of
contractor incompetence and corruption. |
Every summer thousands of air
conditioners breakdown because of bad capacitors. The
capacitor (pictured right) helps the air conditioner's
motors to run. Replacing a bad capacitor is usually a
simple repair that takes less than an hour. But since the
failed capacitor causes the motor to stop working, it's not
hard to convince a customer that the motor itself is to
blame. If that motor happens to be the compressor then the
customer is often persuaded to buy a whole new air
conditioner. That's thousands of dollars flushed down the
drain for a part that costs $10 or $20 wholesale.
|
 |
|
That's the exact scenario
played out in Weil's column. His friend was having a summer
party when the air conditioner broke down. As with all big
time contractors who know how to put on a good show, their
contractor showed up lightening quick and impressed by
putting on shoe covers to protect the customer's carpet.
Then this same technician took three hours to
diagnose a bad capacitor! What's worse is that their
technician claimed that the part would have to be ordered
and would take a long time to arrive!
You need just a little knowledge
to appreciate my exclamation. Capacitors are as common to
this trade as beer is to a bar. I have a couple dozen of
them on my van right now. There is no OEM run capacitor
whose function I can not replicate on the fly. And they're
virtually always a snap to diagnose. In other words, I would
have had Weil's friend's air conditioner running long before
the party was over. Instead his friend had a salesman at his
home the next day. The salesman wore shoe covers too. So did
the installers that showed up a week later to install a
completely new system. Three cheers for shoe covers.
The only thing Weil's friend
had going for him was that the system was ancient and he
would have likely replaced it soon anyway. However, such big
purchases should decided upon by the customer and not
forced by an incompetent and/or crooked boob
masquerading as a service technician. Such scenarios are
sadly typical. That Weil actually published an article
praising it is at once astounding and to be expected.
|
|
 |
Forbes
ranks S.F. as the 15th most expensive place to heat a home.
Even with
relatively mild winters compared to the Midwest, I'm sure
you have no problem believing SF ranks in the top 20. What
you may not believe is their estimated average
heating cost for a typical home of just
$500 annually. Many of you pay two and three times that
much. I certainly do. |
The lesson to take from this is that projections, averages
and estimates are generally suspect and often worthless to
any one individual's situation. Its those same worthless
averages, though decidedly more inflated, that many HVAC salesmen use to convince you how much
a new high end system
will save you. Web pages like
this
one are highly inaccurate at best. They're willfully misleading
sales tools at worst. When an honest salesman looks at
your specific usage and crunches real numbers he
often finds that even with a $1,500
yearly heating bill, that brand new furnace may only save
you two or three hundred a year. That's nice, but in
and of itself it's not a compelling reason to buy a new
system.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
A Special
Breed
That's the
rather euphemistic term that Mark Skaer, senior editor of
the so called news,
gives
duct cleaners. He manages to
admit the truth that the
alleged benefits of duct
cleaning are completely
unproven.
But rather than question their ethics, he marvels
at the industry's attempt to legitimize the hollow practice.
Such thinking is as mixed up, or "special", as our friend to
the left. |
|
|
|
|
Fully stocked
vans?
This picture
illustrates nicely something I've noticed for years.
Some of the most sparsely outfitted vans come from some of
the biggest companies. There's a lot of room in there for that new
furnace you'll be pressured in to. But the parts and tools
needed to provide good service often goes missing, that is...
unless they get a flat. |
To be fair, we don't know what
this van is used for. The point here is not to
lampoon this particular company or van. We just don't
know the facts behind the
picture. However, believe me when
I say that a lot of "fully stocked" service vans from
multi-million dollar companies look as empty as this one.
|
 |
"A free press
(release) is the unsleeping guardian of every other
right
(ful sale) that
free (sales)men prize."
If you think my adulteration
of Churchill's quote is offensive, it's nothing compared to
what BNP Media has done to the word "news". It seems like
there's no worthless product, sham service or corrupt
business practice that they won't rubber stamp. Late night
infomercial king Billy Mays is a paragon of virtue in
comparison.
I'm not a fan of unsupported
accusations. But no worries, the support will follow on this
page soon enough. If you're impatient, just pick up a
copy
and see for yourself. It's enough to make you think
Mays has
gone into publishing. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
