I do not often write reviews, however in the case of Jon Wayne I feel that I must. We recently had them come out to inspect and charge our two Carrier units, the first of which has had a very slow leak for a couple of years. I get this unit charged about once a year and forget about it, until recently this has been an ideal solution as it was only about $150 to charge it. Apparently due to the EPA R-410A is now more than 2x the price so this charge was almost $400, so I'm going to fix the coil.

The second unit stopped cooling very quickly and we needed to figure out what was wrong. The technician charged the unit and climbed back into the attic where he discovered that a large leak had developed in the TXV line where it had been rubbing, you could visibly see the gas escaping. I knew that my hard earned money was quickly evaporating into thin air and he did not really seem bothered by this so I suggested that he pull the remaining charge down into the compressor so that I wouldn't loose all of my R-410A and be out another $400 bucks once the evaporator coil was replaced. The technician was more than happy to do this for me, but this leads me to my first concern, why did I have to suggest that to him? He is a service technician for, from what I can tell, one of the top HVAC companies in the city and it took a consumer to suggest that he pull the remaining refrigerant down into the compressor? I have family that was in the HVAC trade so I have some idea as to what is going on, but a typical consumer would have wasted $400 and Jon Wayne would have been just fine with that, not to mention the environmental impact of letting 5 or 6 pounds of this gas into the atmosphere, why do you think the EPA is inflating the cost so much? Would they approve of this?

Now, on to replacing the faulty coil. I had figured that Jon Wayne was expensive, but they also have extremely good reviews so I figured they were probably worth it. Boy was I wrong! From previous experience with the first unit I was thinking that this repair was going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500 - $2,000. The technician quoted me nearly $4,800 to replace the coil in this unit, that is just to replace the coil! Based on my research and some help from my family it looks like I will be able to get a replacement coil for about $500 shipped and we are going to do the dirty work ourselves and have a licensed technician come and do the startup so I am looking at probably $750 - $900 plus a couple of hours work to do it myself. I fully understand markup and realize that any HVAC company is probably going to double up on parts and get around a hundred buck an hour in labor, but this is nearly 10 times what the coil costs!!! 10 TIMES!!! Frankly, they should be ashamed of themselves and you should definitely get a second opinion before trusting their pricing.

I must say that the technician was very nice and courteous and I had absolutely no problem with him, other than the fact that he was willing to let all of that R-410A leak out. I think that all of my problems are more indicative of the company as a whole and not just this technician.