Alama Service, Inc.

Review: We had a fully functional Central AC Unit and called ALMA services for a simple annual maintenance. after the serviceman left our AC mysteriously stopped working. when we called they wouldn't give us an appointment for 3 days. As we have small children in the house we were forced to call another company to fix ALMAs mess. in addition they wouldnt even refund the money we paid for the first service.Desired Settlement: refund cash for initial services

Business

Response:

Our technicians performed seasonal maintenance on Friday, July **, 2013 on [redacted] & [redacted]'s air-conditioning system. Our technicians found no physical problems with either the condenser or the air-handler. They were charged $135.78 for the services performed. We agreed to let [redacted] pay $125.00 cash and adjusted the invoice with tax to reflect this payment. (Please see attached invoice for reference.)

On Monday morning, July **, 2013 we received a call from [redacted] requesting that we return that day because the machine was not cooling well. [redacted] assumed that our technicians were at fault for the minimal cooling and we agreed to come back to inspect the machine. However, [redacted] called during the beginning of a heat wave; we informed her that we would not be able to return Monday, but that we could schedule an appointment for Tuesday afternoon. She agreed to this appointment. [redacted] called back a while later to state that this appointment was unacceptable and demanded we appear immediately on Monday. Again, we informed him that the earliest appointment available was for the following day. He refused to accept this appointment and claimed he would call another service.

[redacted] called us a day later demanding that we cover the repairs (in the amount of $293.29) that were made by another company they had called. We asked her to please fax this bill to us so that we could review it and that if we found that we were at fault, we would gladly compensate them. Upon reading the invoice, we found that the part replaced was a capacitor and was not related to anything our technicians did during the seasonal maintenance. A capacitor failure can occur at any moment while a condenser is operational. A capacitor is a sealed electrical component that can especially fail during a heat wave. It was coincidental for the capacitor to fail shortly after performing the maintenance and the technicians would not have known that it would fail while performing the maintenance.

It was also stated on the invoice that the service port caps were sitting on the condenser pad. We checked with our technicians and he admitted that he could have forgotten to put the caps back on the condenser, but this would not have caused the capacitor to fail nor would that damage the system in any way.

I, [redacted], as the [redacted] of Alama Service, Inc called [redacted] to state the above information, that we would not be covering the bill from the second company and that we would not reimburse him for the maintenance. [redacted] stated he would no longer be using our company.

It is quite unfortunate that the [redacted]'s made the assumption that we are responsible for this electrical failure, two days after we performed a routine seasonal maintenance. Our business is not run in this manner as our 37 year history will attest to.

We have attached our invoice and the correspondence from [redacted].

Consumer

Response:

I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID# [redacted], and have determined that my complaint has NOT been resolved because:

The response from [redacted] of Alama Services is not only very disappointing but also factually untrue. [redacted] states, "On Monday morning, July **, 2013 we received a call from [redacted] requesting that we return that day because the machine was not cooling well". In fact, our AC was not functioning properly as soon as the technician left our home and my wife called the SAME day complaining something was wrong. The response from Alama Services was, 'we can give you an appointment in a few days'. I would also like to know why it took about TEN days for [redacted] to finally call us back? Why did the annual maintenance not include a test of the AC Unit Capacitor as it is so vital to the AC units function & simple to perform (See link [redacted]) In addition, [redacted] writes in his response, "We checked with our technicians and he admitted that he could have forgotten to put the caps back on the condenser". What else did he "forget" to do? Is it possible he "forgot" to tell us something else that could have led to the failure of our AC the SAME day he worked on it? Was the technician planning on letting us know he "may have forgotten something" the day my wife called explaining that we have 3 small children at home and one of the worst heat waves we have seen in a long time. I am not an AC technician and therefore depended on Alamas professional knowledge, skill and honesty. We feel that Alama services did not have any of these qualities and therefore are requesting a full refund of the moneys paid.

Sincerely,

Business

Response: