Review for Air Wind & Solar LLC

10/01/2014
Anonymous

3.5 Kw with battery back up

I was installing a geothermal heat pump and contracted Air Wind & Solar to install a 3.5 Kw grid tie system with enough battery back up to power my heat pump for 12 hours. What a nightmare! Everything a representative of Air Wind & Solar said to me turned out to be a lie. Technical Qualifications: They appear to have none. Paul doesn't have that master electricians certificate that he claimed to have when my wife and I first visited the company headquarters in Stephenville, in fact the subcontractor that installed my equipment claimed that they didn't even have a licensed electrician on the payroll and were riding on his certificate. When Eric came to do the initial site survey he proved to be clueless. He didn't have the technical competence to follow the path of the electricity from my existing system through the critical load panel and to the service panel. He was shocked to find that the Rolls Surrette batteries in my existing system were 6 volt. Although there was a representative from the company installing the heat pump on hand he asked no pertinent questions like, what the total amp draw for the system was going to be. He didn't seem to be able to grasp that he was being asked to size the battery bank and inverter for what is essentially an air conditioning compressor and simply photographed my existing system and reproduced it by rote. Using the figures that I provided Eric estimated that the battery bank would provide me with two days of autonomy. Using the same figures technical support from the supplier estimated that the bank would be drawn to exhaustion in just over three hours. The installer didn't understand any of the software, and relied on a phone call to technical support at the supplier to walk him through activating the system. Everything else was left at the factory default setting. They are able to offer a fast install time because they refuse to use subcontractors and have a large professional crew: They completely missed the install date and blamed it on a computer error. It wasn't. The large professional crew turned out to be one overworked sub-contractor. The three to five day install time promised by Eric or the ‘about a week' stipulated in the contract stretched past three months and was never actually completed. The installer didn't consider site cleanup part of his job description and left me with a yard full of boxes and construction debris. While I was breaking the boxes down for recycling I found that he had also thrown all of my equipment manuals in the trash. I'm still picking up bits of wire, insulation and other construction debris. Most of the trenching was backfilled, quite a bit of it wasn't. The junction boxes for the solar panels were attached to the pole mounts with zip ties. The conduit was anchored to the pole mounts with duct tape. <br />Two weeks after the 3-5 day install time had expired the installer called me out for a final inspection on the installation. He was flicking a couple of circuit breakers in my service panel off and on and claiming that he was taking the heat pump off the grid and on to the battery backup system. Before I had time to question this, I looked at the Mate and noticed that the system wasn't grid interactive. I questioned that, and a call to technical support at Outback Solar revealed that the inverter was not grid interactive. They had installed the wrong equipment! After a week of giving evasive and ambiguous answers to when Air Wind & Solar was going to install the proper equipment Daryl quit answering my telephone calls. After a week of silence, he called at 5 Pm wanting to schedule installation of the proper equipment at 11 Am the next day. The installer arrived with new equipment. When he called me out for a final inspection on the install I told him to stay away from the service panel, and to use the grid disconnect switch that I had installed. He admitted that he had only hooked up the furnace fan and not the compressor, because the system he had installed would not handle the load. He left. After a week of silence I followed a course of action suggested by my attorney. I formally notified Air Wind & Solar that I would give them a month to make a good faith effort to correct the errors in the system. At the end of the month I contacted technical support at Outback Solar to find out what equipment that I needed to power the compressor on my geothermal heat pump, purchased it locally, hired an independent electrician to install it, deducted my expenses from the amount owed on the final payment for my system and sent Air Wind & Solar a check for the remaining amount.

Sales process
Price charged as quoted
On schedule
Installation quality
After sales support