convextech
Junior Member
Summoned to court over a job estimate
My husband owns a small HVACR company in Georgia, just him and two other guys, plus our daughter as
the office manager. We mostly do commercial work.
A couple months ago, we got a service call to check a local restaurant, one of their units was down.
One of our guys checked it out and thought the main board was bad. My husband came over to
look at it to make sure that's what it was, because they are fairly expensive. Power was going into
the board but not coming back out. They checked all the plugs, etc. Since the restaurant had six
units, they took the board off one of the other working units, and switched it with the suspected bad
board, and sure enough, looks like main board is bad.
That afternoon we quoted him a price for the new main board and labor, but he thought it was too
high for a unit that old. We then offered to sell him an older board from a unit we were about to
scrap, but then the guy just wanted to buy it from us and do the installation himself. We told him
no (We don't do that because if it's done wrong, they could blame us, they could ruin the part, etc.).
So he said fine, he was going to call a rival HVACR company and we left it at that. We never heard
back from the guy.
Well, we just got served with a summons!
This clown is saying that we were trying to defraud him by charging him for a main board when
the board wasn't bad to begin with. We read through his statement and he claims he called the
competitor and when they came out they said the board wasn't bad at all, that one plug wasn't
connected and the power was off to that unit and that was all.
Here's the kicker: The owner waited TWELVE DAYS to bring in the other company to fix it, but
now he is claiming he lost revenue from customers being too hot to stay in the restaurant, so he is
suing us for that!
What?! How is that our fault that he waited that damn long to get it fixed!
We are now thinking it took him that long to find a cheap main board somewhere, and that he
tried to do it himself, and when it didn't work, he had to call in a professional.
I wasn't worried about this at first; I felt that the judge will just throw the case out, but you never
know how this kind of thing will turn out, and he owns several restaurants in the area. I don't know
if he serves on any boards in town or "knows people" or what.
Has anybody else had an experience like this? What did you do? What was the outcome?
My husband owns a small HVACR company in Georgia, just him and two other guys, plus our daughter as
the office manager. We mostly do commercial work.
A couple months ago, we got a service call to check a local restaurant, one of their units was down.
One of our guys checked it out and thought the main board was bad. My husband came over to
look at it to make sure that's what it was, because they are fairly expensive. Power was going into
the board but not coming back out. They checked all the plugs, etc. Since the restaurant had six
units, they took the board off one of the other working units, and switched it with the suspected bad
board, and sure enough, looks like main board is bad.
That afternoon we quoted him a price for the new main board and labor, but he thought it was too
high for a unit that old. We then offered to sell him an older board from a unit we were about to
scrap, but then the guy just wanted to buy it from us and do the installation himself. We told him
no (We don't do that because if it's done wrong, they could blame us, they could ruin the part, etc.).
So he said fine, he was going to call a rival HVACR company and we left it at that. We never heard
back from the guy.
Well, we just got served with a summons!
This clown is saying that we were trying to defraud him by charging him for a main board when
the board wasn't bad to begin with. We read through his statement and he claims he called the
competitor and when they came out they said the board wasn't bad at all, that one plug wasn't
connected and the power was off to that unit and that was all.
Here's the kicker: The owner waited TWELVE DAYS to bring in the other company to fix it, but
now he is claiming he lost revenue from customers being too hot to stay in the restaurant, so he is
suing us for that!
What?! How is that our fault that he waited that damn long to get it fixed!
We are now thinking it took him that long to find a cheap main board somewhere, and that he
tried to do it himself, and when it didn't work, he had to call in a professional.
I wasn't worried about this at first; I felt that the judge will just throw the case out, but you never
know how this kind of thing will turn out, and he owns several restaurants in the area. I don't know
if he serves on any boards in town or "knows people" or what.
Has anybody else had an experience like this? What did you do? What was the outcome?
