Bob Baker Heating & Air Conditioning

100% satisfiedInstalled central air, heat pump, some new duct workVery courteous and saved me $

We hired Bob Baker to examine the HVAC system of a house we wanted to buy during the due diligence period of the home buying process. This is the period of time when the buyer has a chance to inspect the house to see if there are any costly changes or fixes that need to be made. If there are, the buyer can choose not to purchase the house with no penalty or they can ask the seller to reduce the price of the house to compensate for all or part of the cost of the fixes. He told us that the HVAC units worked fine but for the upstairs bedrooms to heat and cool properly we needed to enlarge the size of some ducts and enlarge the return air vents. He estimated the cost of fixing the ducts and vents to be fairly minor. His written report indicated no other possible issues that might be costly. With no other issues, we went ahead and purchased the house. Mr. Baker was not available to do the work on the ducts so we brought in another local HVAC contractor with an excellent reputation and asked him for an estimate of the cost to do the duct and vent changes. He immediately told us that he could change the ducts and enlarge the vents, but that wouldn't help the problem because the HVAC units were dramatically undersized for the house. The house has two 1.5 ton units and it needs two 2.5 ton units to adequately heat and cool the house. The cost to replace the units, with a discount, is nearly $12,000. If we had known this during the due diligence period, we would have asked the sellers to reduce the price of the house to compensate for this cost or we would not have bought the house. Just to be sure, we checked with another HVAC contractor and upon inspection, he also agreed that the units were dramatically undersized for the house and would not adequately heat or cool the house no matter what we did to the ducts and vents. I also found this same information with a quick internet search. I called Mr. Baker and asked him why he didn't mention in his written report that the units even MIGHT be undersized for the house and that they MIGHT represent a fairly significant cost to us if they were to be replaced with correctly sized units. He told me that we didn't ask him to do this. He admitted that he knew that they might be undersized and had no explanation as to why he didn't put this in his report or even inform us verbally that we MIGHT need to replace them with new, larger units at considerable cost. I asked him if he ran the HVAC units to see if they heated and cooled adequately and he said that would have taken as much as 24 hours and what did I expect him to do, sit around and wait to see if they worked? I suggested he could have set the temperatures and asked us to check them in 24 hours and let him know if they were working properly which we would have been happy to do. He had no reponse. I was extremely disappointed with the services we received from Mr. Baker, it has proved financially devastating for us, and when I spoke to him about it, he didn't even have the courtesy to apologize.