Rite Way Heating & Air Conditioning Inc

I hired Rite Way after receiving a recomendation from a trusted friend. Unfortunately, my experience didn't match up. After the initial repair was completed (replaced board and inducer) the tenant indicated the fan wasn't operating. I called Rite Way to request a follow-up and after repeated attempts to get someone to come out, I finally resorted to hiring another HVAC company (Able Heating and Cooling) to diagnose and repair. They found the fan wire on the control board had been miswired. I requested reimbursement from Rite Way and have had no response.

They did an excellent service , always on time, they are friendly and they offer reasonable pricing. I will definitely be using them again if needed and will recommend to others.

We have a ground-sourced heat pump system at our house installed by RiteWay about 10 years ago. Recently it had a failure that was incorrectly diagnosed by RiteWay leading to an expensive “fix” that didn’t fix the problem. This note documents the symptoms, cause, and fix so that future customers can hopefully deal with this problem easily and cheaply if it happens to them. Symptoms: The heat pump was supposed to be heating but was blowing only room-temperature air from the registers. The pumps that are supposed to circulate water/antifreeze fluid through the ground loop were too hot to touch but the ground-loop pipes were cold to the touch a few feet away from the pumps. Clearly there was no circulation in the ground loop. I powered the system off at the breaker panel for a couple hours and tried again. It ran fine for a day or so and then failed again the same way, so the problem was intermittent. I powered the system off again to avoid damage from overheating. I called RiteWay and they sent out a technician the next day. Due to the intermittent nature of the symptom, the system was running ok. The technician measured electrical current draw to the ground loop circulation pumps and decided that they both must be intermittently seizing up. He ordered new pumps and we had a cold house for a week and a half until they arrived. When the pumps arrived, a crew came out and installed them the next day. The system worked fine for 2 hours and 7 minutes and then failed the same way. I reported this to RiteWay. They couldn’t come out right away, so I turned the system off and on a number of times until it was working (intermittent, remember). Since it was intermittent, I told RiteWay not to bother coming out until it failed again and I could hopefully gather better information. After a couple of days it failed again. Same symptoms. It was in the middle of the night on a weekend so no point in calling RiteWay. I took the access covers off to take a look. This kind of heat pump compresses a refrigerant, making it very hot. The hot refrigerant goes through a house-air heat exchanger dumping its heat to the house air. The somewhat cooler refrigerant then expands through a jet becoming very cold. It then goes through a heat-exchanger with the ground-loop which warms the refrigerant up a bit. Then the refrigerant goes back in to the compressor and the cycle repeats. In this case, the “hot” portion of the refrigerant loop was at room temperature and the “cold” portion was extremely cold. Way below zero. The exposed parts of the ground loop heat exchanger had a half inch thick layer of frost on them. The brand-new ground loop circulation pumps were overheating but ground loop pipes were cold a few feet away. Once again, no ground loop circulation. I took a simple visual look at the wires driving the ground loop circulation pumps. They go to a terminal on a big relay block that turns them on and off as the thermostat turns the heat on and off. The little tab on the relay block where the ground loop circulation pumps attach was broken off. Sometimes it was touching the terminal (and getting power to the pumps) and sometimes not. What was apparently happening was that it would lose contact and the pumps would get no power so they would not circulate water/antifreeze in the ground loop. The compressor kept running pulling more and more heat from the ground-loop heat exchanger. Since there was no circulation in the ground loop the heat exchanger got colder and colder until it overcame the antifreeze and the whole thing froze solid. Then even when the broken wiring happened to make contact the ground loop circulation pumps could just spin but not move any fluid through the frozen heat exchanger. The pumps heated up since there was no fluid moving through them to carry their heat away. Knowing this the fix was trivial. I crimped a few pennies worth of screw-terminal connectors onto the broken wires and reattached them to the relay block and everything has been working fine since. I don’t dispute the RiteWay bill since they did indeed come out and install new pumps. Obviously that costs money. However, they should have diagnosed this properly on the first visit and fixed it immediately for a few cents rather than taking a week and a half with a bill of over $1000 for a change that didn’t fix the problem. The moral of this story: when you have intermittent problems, always do a visual inspection of the wiring. And don’t assume that the seasoned professionals know what they are doing. Understand how your heat pump system works and make sure that the “professional” diagnosis really explains the observed symptoms.

Workmanship was good. Trying to coordinate schedule and follow up items that needed to be completed took more time than I thought it needed to.

unknown

It was just a bid, but thorough and prompt - which I appreciated.