Gary's Repair & Burner Service

We are sorry that the customer didn’t contact us directly to discuss this matter. Like most companies and shops, we have a policy for a minimum of one service call per job, which helps cover the travel time and vehicle costs, among other many other business costs. On this particular
call, the technician got out a specialized piece of equipment, which was a thermal imaging camera that attached onto his smartphone, to be able to track down exactly where the “extra” heat in the small one-car garage was coming from. Unfortunately, it was immediately apparent that the “extra” heat was coming from only the boiler, and there was nothing that the technician could do to stop this, barring shutting the boiler off, which would cause the house to not have hot water. The reason that the technician used the thermal imaging camera first is because when the customer called in to schedule to have us come out, she mentioned that the other side of the duplex often left their garage door ajar and probably was having the same problem. Without the expensive, specialized camera, which we don’t charge an extra fee to use, the technician could have spent several hours troubleshooting to check and see if heat was bleeding out through the lines; it can be labor intensive to go through each heat line separately. An unscrupulous company would have started unnecessarily replacing parts, taking up extra time, which would have cost a lot more money, and it still would not have stopped the excess heat. Newer boilers have better insulation and a better design, so the standby heat loss is much lower, and more heat is kept in the boiler, but the thousands of dollars necessary to replace a boiler are probably a bit prohibitive. This boiler is 80-year old technology, and this is a reflection of that. We feel that we are being attacked unjustly because we had been there six months before for a lack of heat in the house, and the solution cost more than expected due to specialized parts being necessary. If this had been a warranty call, there would have been no charge for the labor or defective parts that we had installed, but it was not warranty. We pride ourselves and work hard on our customer service and having good customer relations. However, this also requires that the customer contact us so we have the option to try and resolve it, but in this instance, we were never contacted and the first time we knew the customer was unhappy was when the Revdex.com contacted us. It was quite a surprise to get this complaint, since we have never had a complaint filed previously