Mckinnon Heating Cooling

Summary: McKinnon repaired our AC, but it stopped working again after 2 months of use. McKinnon said they will NOT look into this without charging as a new service call. After some back and forth with customer service, she said she will look into it and let us know. We never heard from her again.

Details: Our 6 year old AC froze and stopped cooling at the end of Sept last year. McKinnon technician said our refrigerant was low and charged us $700 total to top it up. He reassured us that AC units sometimes lose refrigerant overtime, and that he didnt find a leak. But we would be covered if this freezing happens again, even if it happens next year (as it was the end of September, and we may only have a week or so left of hot weather to use AC).

Fast forward to the end of July this year (2 months of AC use), the same issue occurred (AC freezing, no cooling). We called McKinnon, but was told we now need to pay $575+ for a leak test, and then more $$$ money to fix the actual problem - even though this is for the same exact issued that was supposed to have been fixed. Customer service said they would not even cover a service call to see if issue was due to an inadequate repair job, but would find out for sure and get back to us. That was one week ago, no one called us back.

Upon talking to other HVAC companies, we learned that:
- Normal working AC's don't just lose refrigerant. Its most likely a leak. If its a leak, topping up refrigerant would only fix it temporarily.
- We would have like to have the option to choose between a cheap temporary fix (refilling refrigerant), vs a more expensive permanent fix. For example, leak test to find source of leak, and then replacing or repairing problem area/part. We understand a permanent fix would be more expensive, but we might have still picked it, rather than wasting $700 every year to refill the coolant.
- We also found out most companies cover their labour for at least a year.

The labour/repair was not done to our satisfaction. However, whats worst was how it was handled. After calling about the problem, we got no call back. We should not have to chase a HVAC company around to finish what theyve started.