Bought home new, 4 yrs ago.

Upstairs central air stopped working. Company came out and told me that most likely the compressor needs to be restarted. (?!?)

They said if that doesn't work a new compressor will have to be installed. For some reason they didn't have equipment to restart the compressor. (I never get these companies)

Does anyone with experience with central air know if what they are telling me makes sense. I found it hard to believe that restarting a part would make problems go away but what do I know.

Call another company. Compressors don't get restarted. If the compressor isn't running, it can be as simple as a bad capacitor, which is a very common failure and repair. Any service technician should have these on his truck. Or it may need a hard start kit. Again, another common part that should be on hand. Or at least able to get one same day.

Have somebody else come out and take a look. Don't mention anything about the first company or what they said.

Check the capacitor. If you go on YouTube there are videos that show you how to do it safely and it is about as easy as changing a battery. Just make sure you know how to turn the power off and also be aware that the capacitor holds a charge and need to be handled with care for that reason, but it was one of the easiest home repairs I ever made myself.

I also bought the part for under $30 and the service appointment to even come and check it out was minimum $85 before they replaced anything. If they would have been able to get there that day I would have gone with them, but the idle time gave me the opportunity to figure it out myself.

Thanks guys

I have a contractor doing some work for me now. It's a 3-4 day job. He knows I work from home and am cancelling work and not getting paid the days he's going to be here. He's been here the past 2.5 days. All that's left is to reinstall ~30 bricks and put flashing on a window.

He was supposed to come today at 9am to finish up. He didn't show. At 10 I called him to see if he was coming. At 11 he txts back, "oops, sorry, no not today." I call him back to ask WTF, and he responds "Emergency job. didn't have time to let you know I wasn't coming," which is 99% a lie, and there's no way he didn't have 5 seconds to txt me to cancel.

He says he'll be here tomorrow. If he doesn't come tomorrow, I want to tell him to **** off, and find someone else to finish the job, but I'm not sure if that's just going to cause me more headaches in the long run. Is this just what contractors do and I should expect it? We've got no contract and he's just charging me hourly since it wasn't possible to really assess the scope of the job in advance. What's my play?

the fatal flaw...there is no contract. i'm guessing he also didn't submit to you a schedule. i'm not an attorney, but at first glance it seems your hourly arrangement with him would suggest he can work whichever hours he wants. i also agree with your point that hiring another contractor to finish the job may in fact be more trouble than it's worth.
hoping there isn't too much pain to see this to completion.

You shouldn't expect it in the sense that it's acceptable behavior, but it is unfortunately far too common. Most likely charitable explanation is he overbooked himself and has somebody else screaming at him because he wasn't on their job. The less charitable explanations involve booze and drugs.

Your play depends on how vindictive you want to be and your tolerance to escalation. It's going to take a lot of time and effort to find somebody to finish the job if you fire him. If you just want the job done, your best bet is to politely nag the ever living **** out of him. There's a very fine line between being just enough of a pain in the ass that he finishes the job to get you out of his hair and being so much of a pain in the ass that he disappears and doesn't take your calls.

You can file a complaint with whatever licensing or regulatory board seems appropriate afterwards, but it's not going to do any good. Trash talking him to all of your family, friends and coworkers is more effective.

What would a contract for something like this look like? The job was basically remove a bunch of bricks and some concrete blocks to see what was going on and then fix the problem. It looked like it would be a max 2 day job. I went with a guy who's done good work for my parents. He came out, had a look, and said "Can't tell what needs to be done until we get those bricks off. This is an hourly job." What should I have done at that point to get something in writing? More than half the work that I ended up needing wasn't evident until the bricks were out.

I had a few people try to get me to sign contracts, but they were sketchy--one kept telling me he'd email me a quote tomorrow but never did; a couple gave me quotes over email based on pictures and wanted to send over contracts for me to sign without ever coming to look at the job in person.

It's really hard to get contractors to take on small jobs here because the market is so hot everyone's remodelling instead of buying, and nobody wants to do gregorio's little job when they can do someone else's kitchen. I never realized how hard it would be to find someone to take my money.

Well that's the problem. I want to tell him to **** off and dump all his tools out in my driveway and let him know he should come pick them up before someone else does. But I assume he just shrugs and goes on to his next job and I wait a few weeks to find someone else. I mean, if he says, I got another job I have to work on tomorrow but I'll be back Wednesday, then no problem. But to not even let me know he's not coming. **** him.

From my time in the hvac parts world, Nordyne was pretty lowend stuff. Would go with the Trane

Well, in the time-honored tradition of ignoring 2+2 advice, I'm going with the Maytag. This was the recommendation of the HVAC company's owner (who we've had a long relationship with), with a good weight placed on the better warranty.

I look forward to making periodic updates over the next 20 years. But for now, I'm just looking forward to having A/C again - we'll be without it until next Tuesday.

Well it sounds like you have a good contractor that you trust who's willing to stand behind his work and equipment he sells, so that's good. If it's installed correctly and not hacked in, I wouldn't anticipate any problems in the near future.

Yeah, that's the mindset - we're going to continue to have this guy service the HVAC system on an ongoing basis, and he'll be the one having to deal with any subsequent warranty work. So, fingers crossed.

Thanks for all the input.

Sorry in advance for what is probably obvious... Anyone know what this is?





friend bought a house with this thing on the patio, and there's been a little debate as to what exactly it is. The inspection report didn't clearly identify what it was used for. Obviously fire is involved, but is it decorative, meant to be used as a grill for cooking, or something else?

It's a grill. Set the grates across the layer of bricks that extends to the back of the chimney. Charcoal underneath.

Totally old-school and probably won't be a great grill.

My parents had one at their 1950's house in the backyard, but it wasn't as elaborate as that one. It was the scene for a lot of memorable cookouts for the neighborhood kids during the summers.

Contractor showed up at 9 this morning and we hugged it out. The work is re something I asked about itt in November. Way TLDR update

Nice lintels! Building inspectors around here would never let me do that without an engineer's stamp. Buncha uptight bastards.

Yeah. I used to do residential appraisal in SoCal in the late 80's and early 90's and those were pretty common. I visit a lot of houses now as well and haven't noticed one for a while. I guess a combo of aging, changing tastes and the 1994 Northridge earthquake has done them in.

Thank you. Although I may not share this info for a while. I thought It was decorative.

It's yours. It can be whatever you want it to be!

Edit: In fact, my folks called ours "the barbecue pit," which it obviously wasn't. I had forgotten all about that until after I wrote the above..

Gregorio,

Nice play on hugging it out with your contractor; looks like he does quality work.

I noticed the guy working has a numbers tattoo. It's not this, but this might be good for him.

We built our dream home on a wooded lot 3.5 acres and moved in exactly one year ago last week. 2 weeks ago my neighbor is outside cutting her yard and gets stuck in the yard. This was after rain for 2-3 days. I go over and she's crying saying I'm putting water onto to her yard. BALLING HER EYES OUT. Saying she can't do this shes a WOMAN with her mom by her self.

My house and d o w n s p o u t s are over 165 feet away from the property line.

She then proceeds to have both neighbors, on both sides of her to see there ideas, yada yada yada. The one neighbor wants me to dig a ditch and install pipe on both of there properties.. LMAO LIKE THAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN. I tell her i'll try and divert a NATURAL Valley that goes to her house down the other NATURAL Valley that goes to her property, but up the hill more to see if that helps. She agrees, and I do it the next day.

I call the township the next day and talk to the zoning officer who's been out there before who approved my house and what not. He agrees that water flows downhill as it did before I bought this property and built this house and diverted no more water then originally.

Just 1 hour ago, she calls me as I gave her my number last year. She claims now her yard is even more wet then before. I'm with my wife and son in the car taking this call, literally shaking because this person is very emotional and I'm not a bad neighbor at all and don't like confrontation. I tell her that I talked to the township and they agree with me. She asks me WHO WAS IT, I tell her and then she hangs up.

If you ask me, her s e p t i c field is bad and leaking up threw the ground. The next door neighbor's is as well. Both houses have s e p t i c field's that are 40 years old.

My bottom half of the property is a swamp, and always was where one of the ditches go to and then on to her property.

Please ask any more questions, if i wasn't clear on my story.

I'm just venting of some sort, she claims she's going to build a retaining wall. which I don't care.

Ignore her. You'll never be able to make her happy, so don't make yourself miserable trying. Make sure you keep any and all documentation of everything you have done, including all communications with the township, permits, inspections, etc. iirc you took a lot of pictures of everything you did, too. Don't lose them.

I have all documentation and pictures from before and after. like general pictures of the land while working and what not.

Any moron can come and see I haven't changed the water flow. In fact more water goes out front of my house which slopes the other way then the back from when I built.

MY favorite quote from our first talk in her backyard, Didn't the owner tell you all the water comes into our yard? I'm like, uh just look up the damn hill, where do you want it to go? You built here 40 years ago knowing what was behind you.