Any HVAC experts? Am I being scammed?

We belonged to the BBB for many years before finally leaving when we decided our commercial customers didn’t care about it. But I know if you get bad reviews you could challenge them, but I never heard of anyone buying their way out of one.

I’m so stoked about replacing my HVAC/heat pump. Talk about an out of pocket hit.

Got three different businesses showing up do bids this week. So not looking forward to any part of this process.

Better Buyoff Bureau, eh?

I actually filed a complaint with the BBB over the warranty on my Carrier furnace. It is about 8 years old, and the fan failed and had to be replaced. The HVAC company said it was under warranty and would be covered, as Carrier have 10 year warranty.

They contacted me that my unit was actually not under warranty, because I hadn’t registered the unit with them.

Turns out, if you buy a house with a “new” furnace (it was 4 years old when we bought the house) you have 90 days post home purchase to contact carrier to move the warranty to your name. If you don’t do this, the warranty expires, despite the unit still being within the original warranty period advertised.

Unless you are in the State of California, which has made this practice illegal, and the warranty must cover anyone that owns the home it is installed in for the full 10 years.

So, it is fucking bullshit, and I filed a complaint with the BBB in hopes that maybe they could allow me to transfer the warranty to my name, as nobody notified us this during the sale/purchase. There was a bunch of back and forth with their representatives and they declined to help me. That negative comment will go against their record on BBB. If they had resolved my issue, it wouldn’t.

I guess the 900 bucks I had to spend repairing my furnace that was within the warranty time period was enough to make them not care to help me.

It is kind of shitty, and I am never buying another Carrier product again, and I will continue to vocally let people know that they have a scummy warranty program.

Boy does that suck. That’s one of those things I am sure you only find out about if you have a failure, as happened to you.

Too bad the BBB is pretty much useless. It’d be nice to have a consumer watchdog agency that had some teeth.

Contact you state rep or senator about it. It’s possible they can help you. It’s also possible to get them to sponsor a bill to get those things automatically transferred with the sale of the home.

Do you have a local news troubleshooter person? They are always looking for a public interest story.

Lol, I tried that, nobody ever responded to me.

I felt bad not paying the HVAC company, waited until the bill was almost overdue and paid. I’ll just chalk it up to life experience, and that 900$ has bought Carrier my lifetime of telling this story to anyone who will listen.

(This warranty policy is actually pretty standard for most companies, just… Carrier is the one that screwed me, and they definitely have the most strict policy.)

https://www.angi.com/articles/do-hvac-warranties-transfer-homeowners.htm

Looks like “Trane” is the least awful of the major brands.