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Reviews for Lake Forest hvac professionals on Thumbtack
From Meghan L.
Broadway Heating and Cooling LLC
We had an extremely negative and costly experience with this company. We brought Jeff in to retrofit a Unico System and Heat Pump into our historic home. We paid over $30,000 for this system which has major issues and will now cost us over 15k to repair:
1. Jeff removed our radiators in the entire second half of our home as he said the new heat pump he was installing would be more than enough heat to heat the home... The heat pump Jeff put in stops working below 45 degrees...we live in Illinois. Thus, we have no heat once the temperature drops below 45 degrees. When we called Jeff, after the system first stopped working when the temp dropped below 45 degrees, he acted surprised and later claimed we had wanted a heating system that didn't work below 45 degrees... To solve for the lack of heat in our home, Jeff said we could pay him more money to install underfloor heat that would be enough to heat the home...we paid him to do this...only to realize it is nowhere near enough heat to properly heat our home, in fact it barely heats the floor. We were informed later that Jeff only sold us this particular unusable heat pump because he received a rebate for it. We will have to spend another 10k to put a heat pump in that actually works in the Illinois climate.
2. The unico system Jeff put in did not pass inspection. It was missing a necessary return vent in a sealed wing of the house (per village codes). The inspector said we could either put the vent in or have our new iron and glass doors remade and shortened to leave a large gap between the door and floor ...in the primary bedroom where this was an issue. Instead of putting in the vent to bring the system up to code to pass inspection...Jeff told us the vent was a "want and not a need" and instead that we should pay money to have our new iron and glass doors remade and cut to leave a large gap between the door and floor to meet code airflow requirements...this would be costly for us, nearly 5k and reduce primary bedroom privacy, as these doors are the entrance to our primary bedroom. Jeff refused to put in the air vent, per village code, as a result we cannot pass HVAC inspection without hiring a new HVAC guy to bring Jeff's system up to code.
3. Jeff put in a drain for the HVAC system on an exterior wall (thus it freezes in the winter leading to pipe bursts) which did not pass code and thus, failed village inspection. Jeff refused to fix this as well...we had to bring in another HVAC guy to correct this which cost us additonal money.
4. Jeff had promised to come out to do final fit and finish. We paid Jeff over 30k only holding back $700 for final fit and finish. When we called Jeff to come back and finish he said "my business is going bankrupt" and he couldn't come it. This turned out not to be true...as he later said the $700 simply wasn't worth his time to come back out to do the work during his busy summer season.
Initially, we found Jeff to perhaps just lack experience. But, on reflection...realized, in our opinion and personal experience, that this seemed to all be a tactic to continue to get more and more money from us for a system that any HVAC guy should know wouldn't pass code or supply our home with proper heat. Jeff was very difficult to work with, very costly (over 30k before solving for all the issues described above), not honest with the products he sold us, extremely argumentative, and the quality of his work was not good-as it didn't pass village inspection and we will have to bring in another HVAC guy to fix what he did wrong. We would not recommend Broadway Heating and Cooling.
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