Frustrating Service
Our experience with Direct Heat has not been a good one. We have dealt with them in the past and found their service to be decent. However, since the beginning of trying to have our failing furnace accessed we ran into nothing but issues. Firstly, trying to book an appointment, we contacted them and did not receive calls back. When we finally got an appointment, the service tech wanted to change the time (this did not work for us) and then he never showed or phoned to say that he was not coming. The next time we had an appointment the service tech phoned at the end of the appointment time to say he was on his way back from Surrey and would be late. Unfortunately we had previous commitments and had to cancel. He said he would let the office know and have them call to reschedule. Needless to say this did not happen and we ended up calling again to set another appointment time. (In frustration we even had another furnace company come who told us our furnace heat exchanger was done but they were not a Carrier company so could not help us with Carrier products.) We then had to go back to Direct Heat as they are the Carrier Company in the area (also having learned our furnace had warranty options from Carrier). Direct Heat finally came and they diagnosed that our heat exchanger had failed. We ended up paying for two assessments simply because we had so many issues with scheduling an appointment with Direct Heat. Their technician explained our two choices and we opted for replacing the furnace as Carrier was giving a good deal on the replacement. We understood it would take almost two months to get one but we were okay with that. On the date of install Direct Heat installed the furnace and they did it in less than 6 hours. When the technician was here the furnace was working. However, the next morning we discovered the furnace wasn't working. We phoned the technician and he told us to video the error light and send it to him so he could know what to do to fix it. We sent it to him Friday morning. We never heard back from him. I phoned him Saturday and still heard nothing and followed up with an email to Tammy on Saturday. We did get an email from Tammy on Monday getting our only apology for poor service through out this entire endeavour. She said we should have phoned the office but Travis had been clear to us to contact him if there were any issues which we later explained to her with a phone call. Obviously phoning direct to the technician is not good advice with Direct Heat. Finally, Friday we had another appointment for them to look at why the furnace wasn't working. The technician soon found the issue and thought Travis did a good install. However, after hearing of the issues we went through he never made an apology from the company for the issues we had or for the fact we went without a working furnace for over five days without any help from their company. He obviously doesn't see customer satisfaction as that big an issue. One final concern we have with this company is that they charge $2700 to install a furnace even though it only took 6 hours. This seems to be us to over charging as there is little in extra costs beyond labour. The furnace is now working fine and Travis did a good job on his install. We really feel that Direct Heat could have handled this much better as a Carrier representative by reaching out more to its customers when there are issues.