House Depot Home Services

I contacted House Depot Home Services on basis of the reviews here as I was having issues with heating in the house.

While I spoke with the first person, they said Mark is the technician and I should speak with him. I called Mark and he said he will be able to come the same day in the evening to check up. Around the time, I messaged Mark to see if he is coming, I received a reply from another number confirming the visit. It turned out however that it was the other person who was visiting and not Mark. That should have given me some clue for what was about to come.

The person was very pleasant and said will look in to the issue. Upon checking he found that the heating was not working because heating and cooling were working on the same time due to some wiring issue in the thermostat. They said they will fix the issue and it should work fine as there were no issues detected with the furnace itself.

After an hour and half, they said, they have been able to identify the mismatched wires and have fixed the issue, while rewiring the thermostat with the correct combination of wires. Upon checking with them it looked like both heating and cooling were working fine. Upon asking the charges, I was asked to pay $320 (which included distance charges which I found weird) which while steep but I obviously still paid it off.

The next morning, I realized the cooling was not working and when I change the thermostat to cooling mode, AC unit was not switching on. I called them again and told of the issue and they said they will come and check the issue and if it's something that was my fault, I will have to pay. As I had not touched anything neither the AC nor the thermostat since the evening on previous day, I was confident it wasn't something that I did. The same person arrived and checked everything again and basically found that the thermostat wire which they had installed had come off. I am not sure how that was deemed my fault as they were the ones who had rewired and reinstalled the thermostat. I was asked to pay $100 for their visit which I paid while telling them that I did not appreciate their business practices and was not happy paying for it.

They had an interesting offer for me where if I were to write a positive review for them on HomeStars, I would get $50 discount! I declined and said it's just bribing in a form to get a positive review. While I paid the $100, they one more time confirmed that they will transfer back $50 back if I write a positive review. I do not appreciate or condone such business practices and said I will be writing an honest review.

While the person who visited was excellent and very pleasant, I would probably not use them again because of their business practices and the practice of providing discounts for positive reviews as it basically raises a question on all the positive reviews even though they may have been genuine.