Complaint Review: Total Maintenance Inc. - Destrahan Louisiana

Total Maintenance sold me a Winter and Spring maintenance service for my a/c and heater for $120.  The drain in the attic for my a/c was supposed to be cleaned in March, but the technician failed to do the work properly.  The drip pan filled up in June due to a clogged drain, shut the entire system off, and I was charged $95 to clean out the drain again.  When I called to negotiate some kind of arrangement such as deducting the $95 charge from my next maintenance contract, Steve, the manager told me that the drains can get clogged with algae at any time, even days after they are cleaned.  In my opinion, this can happen when the drain is not properly cleaned in the first place.  Even though I am not an a/c technician, I have enough sense to know if you clean the drain out correctly, it will do its job through the next maintenence servicing.  This is the reason why people purchase such services. so that their a/c and heating units work when they need them in height of summer heat and cold of winter.  The Total Maintenence Manager, Steve, said their maintenance servicing does not necessarily do that. 

This problem of the drain backing up into the drip pan began for me when they installed the a/c heating unit a few years ago.  They did not install a drain to the sewer line in the attic, but instead rigged a rubber hose through the attic to constantly drip outside of the back of my house on to the ground.  This method failed twice and resulted in filling up the drain pan and it overflowing on to the attic floor and into my living room ceiling leaving obvious water stains.  They told me the only way to correct the problem of the drip pan filling up would be to drain it into the sewer line in the attic.  I asked them why they did not do it this way, correctly, in the first place.  They said that the did not have a plumber on staff to cut into the sewer line.  I responded that the could have told me this and I would have hired a plumber to do this work for them, rather than having them rig something up that was not going to work.  They told me that now they have a plumber on staff who could connect the drain to the sewer line in the attic but that I would have to pay for him to do so.  I told them that the way they rigged the drain hose had damaged my attic floor and the ceiling of my living room and I would not pay for it after the fact, but did agree to split the cost with them.  After they cut into the sewer line in the attic and drained the hose into it, they told me that I would not have a problem with the drip pan filling up again because the way the drain was hooked into the sewer line, it would continuously flow down into the sewer and would not back up into the drip pan.  This was obviously not true because when the drip pan fills up, the system automatically shuts off and this is what happened two days ago. 

When John was the Service Manager at TM, I believe the company was honest and tried to do a good job, even though they did make some errors due to a lack of critical thinking skills.  Now that John is gone, all they have given me is one excuse after another instead of taking responsibility for their incompetence.  In addition the technician who came to maintain my a/c and heating unit in March tried to upsell a capacitor to me when there was nothing wrong with the systems cooling ability.  He came to that conclusion because the air in the a/c vents was not cold at first.  He didnt think of the fact that the system was turned off for some time and had collected regular air temperature into the aluminum air shafts and so it had to push out the old air, which was not cold, before the system could push the cold air through. He did not realize his lack of clear and logical thinking, but only read his electronic meter like a robot, and came to the conclusion that I should get a new capacitor because the first air that came out of the shafts and vents was not cold.