Nice people but a frustrating experience
Everyone who came to my house from Richards was nice, but there were aspects of the process that were disappointing. 1. The person who gave me the proposal was patient, came across as very knowledgeable, and generally explained everything clearly and well; however, he did not tell me that the lower cost air conditioner I decided to purchase would be significantly noisier than my mid range air conditioner that was 20 years old. Had I known that, I would not have purchased it. 2. My county requires going through an inspection and permitting process for new HVAC systems. Richards struggled to manage this even though many of their customers are in this county. I had to make several follow up calls to Richards and the county (not supposed to be my responsibility) to get it all resolved, and go through 2 different initial inspections because they were not both correctly grouped under one request + 1 additional because of a problem with the air conditioner (described below). Again, the person at Richards handling this was nice, but often hard to reach and it took over 2 months to work through all this and meant arranging my work schedule a few times to be able to be present. 3. There was a defect with the air conditioner fan blade, making it vibrate loudly and appear to be in danger of coming loose. The initial person who installed it just put in wedges in several places around the outer grill and said that was all it needed. But when summer came, we realized that was not the proper solution. There was clearly something wrong with the air conditioner. I asked Richards to check it, and the person who came said it was a defective fan blade and got it replaced. I definitely appreciated that and the replacement part has worked much better. But a replacement should have been ordered from the very beginning rather than trying to jimmy a fix on a new air conditioner. Even with the new fan blade, as noted above, the air conditioner is much louder than my previous one.