American Indoor Environments L L C

Unlike most home-service providers (plumbers, electricians, HVAC, etc), their minimum service time is a shocking two hours and thus over $150. We called them about an air-conditioning issue and called them -- the representative took about 10 minutes to determine that the issue was just that our filter hadn't been cleaned, and then spent 20 minutes cleaning it himself. Half an hour after arriving, and after doing nothing more significant than washing our filters off in our laundry sink, he presented us a bill for two hours of service on the order of $160. This is of course not illegal. If their policy were prominently visible I would argue that it isn't even unethical. But there was no way to obtain information about the minimum service call time/charge or any other of their policies on their website. Further, we'd used them for other work in past years; they'd spent an hour fixing a leak in our air-conditioning system and billed us the reasonable amount for the time taken. Switching to this two-hour-minimum policy and not publicizing or at least disclosing it does not strike me as a good business practice. (For that matter, when we had a heating issue the previous winter, we had called a different local HVAC company -- and the representative took the time to inspect our heating system and walk through our house, instructing us on various things we could do to direct the heat to the rooms that were not getting enough of it. Since he didn't actually work on our heating system while he was there, he didn't charge us anything -- not even for the trip. That's the kind of customer service that inspires trust; if we have a major HVAC project in the near future, our business is probably theirs to lose at this point. American Indoor Environments could definitely take a lesson from this.)