Originally Posted by
uzzo2
Good Lord, if I had known this was going to turn into this big of an issue, I probably never would've registered here. If any of the mods are following, please feel free to go ahead and delete my account after this post. I just thought that this would be a good resource for me if I ran across something that I had never seen before, but I do have a few folks I can call for help if I need to. I've already said it but let me say it again, from what I can gather I don't need anything other than what I have as far as licensing goes to do what I want to do. If I decide later on that I want to get big time and start doing contract work, new installations, etc... Then I have to get a contractors license, I've already had this discussion with somebody I used to go to church with who believed the same as one of the other posters on this thread. Insinuating that anybody that doesn't have that license is a "hack", my question to him was this. Who decided that just because you have that big license assures that the job is being done right? I didn't get into any detail in one of my previous posts about having to go behind some of these guys with that big license. I'll give just one example here, but there's plenty more. One of my neighbors had 2 split systems installed in 2006, it's a 2 story house. One unit works the upstairs and the other the downstairs, keep in mind now, this company had that big license. The unit that was dedicated for the upstairs he told me worked about a week and quit. He called the company that installed it and they came out when he wasn't there and left him another bill, the unit still wasn't working. He tried calling the guy and could never get him back out there. He called 3 other companies, all licensed and insured between that period of time until about October of last year all charging him between $90 and $100 per hour. None of them could get it running, but still charged him for coming out there. He just so happened to stop by one day when I was working on the service truck that I bought and asked me what I was going to do with it. I told him that I was planning on getting into the HVACR business, that's when he started telling me about all the trouble with this unit. I had no idea because we don't see each other very often other than him passing by my place to get to his. He also told me that the unit that was heating and cooling the downstairs portion of the house wasn't working right. He said he couldn't afford to pay anybody else to come out, the ones that did had broke him, he's on disability. He was so upset that he told me that he wanted to take his shotgun and shoot both of the units. He never asked me, I volunteered, I said "Johnny, do you mind if I go and have a look at them"? I told him that I couldn't promise him anything, but I thought that it would be some good experience for me trying to troubleshoot it. I really had no expectations that I could do anything with them, but I wanted to try. This poor man had been without any A/C at all since the beginning of the summer. So I went down there and I decided that I wanted to check the unit that was working up until the spring for the downstairs. He turned it on, it started up but the condenser fan wasn't running. I pulled the disconnect and got my amp meter out, clipped it on the hot wire to the condenser fan motor. Stuck the disconnect back in, and turned the fan by hand. It started up and ran for about 2 minutes, amp draw went from 1.5 amps to almost 3 amps and it stopped again, I pulled the disconnect and told him to just go turn it off and leave it off until I could get him a new fan motor. It wasn't working right because the compressor was going out on thermal overload. I decided to go ahead and jump on the one for the upstairs portion that hadn't worked almost since day one. I had line voltage to the contactor, but that was about it, nothing on the low side. I went upstairs into his attic to the air handler and started there. I found a blown transformer. I had a new one on my truck, I put it in and wired up a 3 amp inline fuse on the low voltage side. I had him go cut it on at the T-Stat, it blew the fuse instantly so I knew something was wrong. I started tracing the wire which was buried under the insulation in his attic. To try and condense this, I wish I had taken pictures of it to post here. It was pieced and patched together, different color wires, basically a NIGHTMARE. I totally rewired the low voltage side of it, from the T-Stat to the air handler down to the condenser. I started on the both of them about 10AM, it was starting to get dark at this point. We turned it on and it started up, I put my gauges on it and it was very low on freon. I put a little over 5 pounds in it, normally I would automatically expect a leak somewhere. But I thought that no longer than what it actually ran, maybe the guy that installed it didn't get it full. I think they come charged for 25 feet of line set. This was a much longer run, about a week passed, I picked up his fan motor for the other unit. I went down there on my next 2 days off to install it. I asked him how the other unit was doing, there had been some cool mornings so he had it in the heat mode. He told me that it was blowing cold air, I put his fan motor in the other unit and got it going. I then put my gauges on the upstairs unit, low on freon again. I got my leak detector out and went all over the condenser, nothing there. I went back up into the attic and took the cover off the air handler and started there at the evaporator. Right where the discharge line goes into the metering device is a flare nut, it was leaking right there. I got my 2 adjustable wrenches out, tightened it up and as of last week, both units are still working just fine. Now, with all of this being said, I do NOT do any shoddy work. If the customer wants it done that way, I'll tell them to call someone else, I'm going to do it right the first time or I won't do it at all and that's just the way I do things, it's the way I was raised. As far as the contractors license goes, it costs a lot of money by the time you buy all the books and pay for the test. It's an OPEN BOOK TEST, how in the world does one expect to get satisfactory results from a licensed contractor when all he had to do was know where to look for the answers in the book? My thing is that I don't want the Government whether it be Federal, State or Local knowing what I'm doing. I just want to be left alone, the more the Government knows about you, the more they'll be meddling in your affairs. I am going to do what's required of me and that's all I am going to do, nothing more, nothing less. And no Klay, I don't know it all and I don't believe that I made that claim, did I? I like learning something new every day, that's what I love about this business. I am very mechanically inclined, so if it's not working properly, I want to find out why and fix it. That gives me great personal satisfaction. I would be happy to, with my neighbors permission of course, give his number to anybody that doubts the story I told through a PM. I don't think he would have a problem with telling anyone what I did for him. He's doing it already, I am getting calls from the church he goes to and some of the members as well. I just wasn't planning on getting started until Spring time. Sorry to be so long winded here, I just wanted to get a few things straight right off the bat. And like I said at the beginning, if it's going to be a problem here, I'd like to have my account deleted effective immediately.
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