HVAC Inspection’s are Needed

I truly feel that HVAC inspections are needed and very necessary in the world today.  I in my humble experience inspections are not only needed but they are needed not only for the insurance company but the insured as well.  I have seen time and time again inspecting equipment that the homeowner or business owner was told one thing and the truth was far from what they were told.  I have had many lightning damages that were not only not lightning damage but the only thing wrong with the unit was a shorted capacitor.  This happens most times when the unit is not maintained properly and the unit has a very dirty coil.  Then it rains and the unit being outside and exposed to the water the dirty coil gets wet and the unit is literally water board tortured causing said failure.  This can in sever cases also cause the compressor to fail.  Well since it happens during the “Storm” the home owner is under the assumption it must have been lightning.  This is even when 70% of the time there was not even lightning it was just a rain storm.

Now we come to the “Public Adjuster” like most things it sounds good in theory but in practice it is ripe with dishonesty and abuse.  I cannot tell you just how many times I met a public adjuster that was claiming the entire unit needed to be replaced due to hail damage when the unit can easily be combed.  The public adjuster who states that the few dents on the top of the unit are from hail and not the real reason someone (most likely a service technician) placed a pump, tool bag, or tank on the unit causing the dent.  Our job really is more about observation then testing which is something a Manager at HVACI still hasn’t seemed to figure out.  If I test a whole unit and submit the reading with some very bad pictures for reference then the true reason for the loss can be missed.  To be a really good inspector you have to have the experience as well as the observational ability to see the root cause.

This brings me to a pet peeve in most technicians I have trained or hired they seem to look for what’s broken and fix what’s broken but never look for what caused the breaking to happen.  Considering that a conservative estimate that 90% of all HVAC equipment is installing improperly in some form or another you would think service technicians would be able to determine the root issue better.  If a 4 years old furnace has a failed draft inducer, bad igniter, grounded motor, bad gas valve the chances of this being a defective part is slim at best.  There is 99.999999% chance that this issue is due to some underlined problem from installation, lack of maintenance, changes to the building sense installation or all the above.  However technicians routinely replace parts without fixing the root cause of the failure.  I used to think it was because they were trying to cheat the customer knowing that the new part would fail in a few years so steady work.  In my experience this is not the cast it is simply the technician not being thorough or just not caring and/or worse not being a true troubleshooter.  No amount of testing will replace the ability to see the obvious signs of issues that caused the failure instead of just seeing the failure itself.  

Glen