Gene May Heating & Cooling

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It was awesome. First, in comparing estimates (we had 3), Gene May was in the middle. One contractor recommended down sizing from what we had to a smaller unit. The other recommended the same size unit but was higher priced. In all the research we could find on the web, we could not justify the smaller unit even if it would cost less to operate and in initial purchase. It seemed sized for a smaller house than ours (ours is 1700 sq ft while the smaller unit seemed sized to <1200 sq ft). However the calculations were complicated so I asked Rodney at Gene May when he came to give our estimate. He said that for most of the year and for MOST years, the smaller unit probably would work fine and would save us money, however, he could not recommend it simply because of the winter we had last year and the summer we had 2 years ago. He asked what our comfort level had been with the current system and we said very good. He said he could not recommend the smaller unit because it would have trouble handling the extremes of those two years when we had extraordinary weather. We liked his reasoning as well as the fact that he didn't make it sound like the other estimate was bad sales or crazy-just not something he would do. (We did not reveal the names of the other contractors, by the way). The higher priced estimate was for a brand with which we were not familiar and which did not have as good ratings/reviews (mainly for noise) as the American Standard version that Gene May quoted. Since the unit is on the wall of our master bedroom, we did not want anything noisier than what we had. All three contractors suggested mounting the compressor on the ground and removing the brackets that held it on the side of the house, the way our old unit was installed. They came out, did the job in a professional way and it looks great, and works great and sounds quieter than the old unit. Our electric bill per month has been almost 1/2 of the old unit but this summer has been much more moderate than the 2 previous, so we'll have to wait until more time has passed until we know for sure how much money we are saving, but we do know that we are saving money. We did have a bit of trouble getting the rebate from NICOR/ComEd because our serial number was not complete, but Rodney immediately took responsibility and hopped on that right away and we got that resolved and got our rebate, which brought down the price by almost $1000.00. Our son had used Gene May for his furnace replacement about 9 years ago and gave us the original recommendation. The rest of our estimates came from Angie's list contractors. We are so happy we chose them and wanted to make sure we got them into Angie's list so others could benefit from a great contractor as well.