I talked to the owner of Wiehler, John, on a construction site about AC units. I mentioned I have 2 furnaces, but did not want to buy 2 systems and thought one would not work. He said it could, came over, checked the furnace model, and assessed the top floor for air returns..etc to see if a single system on the upstairs would work. After looking everything over, John was adamant that it could work, and that the furnace was good enough to work, and there was plenty of return air. So I moved ahead with a system.
At first the system seemed to function ok (this was middle of summer), but I noticed it was running all the time, late into the night while we were sleeping..etc. I started to notice on a hot day that the unit would slow down the interior temperature rise, but could not stop it. It would still hit 28 degrees inside and the AC would need to run very late into the night (beyond when we had fallen asleep) to cool it down. One day I went outside to look at the unit and saw it was completely encased in white frost. I turned the system off, let it all melt, and turned it on again and kept an eye on it. Now that I was aware of this and looking, I saw that it froze up constantly. I was afraid of damage to the compressor so called Wiehler to come back and take a look at it. This started a ridiculous, long and drawn out chain of events.
It was then determined that there was not enough airflow for this unit to work right (even though John had looked at the furnace specs). They made an appointment to come back with a larger furnace motor to push more air. However, that motor was oversized for the furnace, and caused a loud resonant humm in the house. The installer acknowledged this to my wife when he left that this may happen. I gave it a couple days but we both realized we could not deal with that sound lest we go insane, and I swapped the old motor back in. One thing they had also done was cut a large gaping hole in the side of the air return duct by the furnace so the furnace could draw in more air. This greatly helped airflow, but it was drawing in cold air from the basement vs 100% of the hot air on second floor. However, if this would have worked I would have lived with it. But it did not. The compressor kept freezing and Wiehler was being less than responsive. So I went out myself, and paid hundreds of dollars to buy 12" ducting, flanges, a butterfly flap, to run the hole in the side of the return air they made, to the return air of the main floor. The butterfly flap would allow me to make the return air of both systems more or less original during winter when heat would come on both units. Summer I would switch it open when AC was started up. That way at least it would be drawing air from the warm level vs cold furnace room. This was a large undertaking. But again, this did not entirely work and although it got better, compressor still occasionally froze up. Eventually though, we were eating dinner which shares a wall with the AC unit, and it sounded like someone was running a jackhammer outside. I went out and the compressor was making a loud metal on metal rattle. I filmed the noise, and turned off the system. I emailed the movie to Wiehler who sent out a tech a few days later. They replaced the fan, when I said it was the compressor making this noise. I was never told this is what they had done (replace the fan).. I assumed they replaced the compressor. So we ran the system, and a few days later get the rattle back, call it back inagain... Wiehler comes out again. This time they check the compressor and determine it is defective (why this time all of a sudden and not the previous visit?) and replace it under warranty (this though seemed like they would not do this unless they could get refunded by manufacturer under warranty as I had to wait a long time on this with the system shut off). However, after replacing the system STILL freezes up (but rattle is gone).
At this point Wiehler says this will not work on the furnace that they were adamant it would work on, and im out hundreds of my own money and months of not being able to run the AC system. They offer to move it over to the main floor furnace. Since I don't have any other options, even though I never wanted this in the first place and would not have paid to put a unit on the main floor, I agree to this.
However, after this work, we are awakened one night by the same jackhammer rattling noise. I shut the system down again, and email wiehler asking why this is such a chronic issue and what is going on. At this point they are less than helpful. I film the noise happening, send it to them again. I cannot run this and again sit sweltering in the house.
At this point I go online, find a forum of professional HVAC people, and post my story and meet one of the forum moderators, an HVAC tech who has done commercial work for 40 years. He asks for the furnace info, the AC info..etc and is astonished they would put the size of condenser they did, on a furnace as small as I had. I stated their rationale may have been the huge amount of heat to get rid of due to a two story glass walled living room on the main floor that rises up, but he said that still the method for determining the tonnage of a compressor is airflow rating of the furnace.. PERIOD. Because if it is only mildly hot, the system still tries to cool but now needs to move a LOT of air with a smaller amount of heat in it, than on a really hot day where there is a huge amount of heat. Basically in the spring and fall when it is only a couple degrees over my setting, the unit would always freeze up and only work for the very hottest days.. maybe... and the unit had to be sized for this lower heat days based on airflow of the furnace. This is why it always froze up, and it would have 'never' worked in his opinion. He was baffled to any rationale.. It was however, properly sized for the main floor, the far bigger furnace it was now on.
But there was now a new issue starting.. in addition to the rattling it would occasionally make, the system wasn't functioning because now it would run for a bit, then cycle on/off/on/off repeatedly until it was shut down. So he walked me through checking the low pressure sensor, and high pressure sensor, with my multimeter to see what was doing this. I didnt want to give Wiehler an excuse to invalidate any warranty they may actually honor, so stuck to these easy non-intrusive checks.. I could see that the Low pressure sensor was tripping when the unit was turned on. This now indicated a low charge in the system. I forwarded that info to Wiehler and said it was obviously a leak in the system.
They finally after much badgering sent out a person who also checked the sensors first thing, and verified what I had seen. At this point though, they put on the gauges to verify that was in fact the case. But they should not have done this. If the LPS was showing low pressure, what the tech SHOULD HAVE DONE right away was a leak test on all the fittings on the exterior of the house.. easy and easily accessible things that would take 2 minutes to check. It may have been an extremely simple item like a Schrader valve on the compressor. But when he put on his gauges, a blast of R14 came out which made any sort of leak test for the next while an impossibility. It is my contention he came out there not to fix the issue properly, but to try and get me to pay for a bandaid to get rid of me even though none of this was my fault, and I had gone out of my way paying for materials and work hacking up my air returns to try and solve this as well.
What he offered was a leak stop fluid that would have cost $800. I declined for a few reasons. First, why should I pay to try and fix (might not work), their issue? Second, if the leak wouldn't fill in, we would need to replace a part such as the coil in the furnace to get this functioning again if that is where the leak was. Since this fluid reacts with air and coagulates, opening the system up would have contaminated the whole thing and plugged up other areas with the new parts and either ruined the system, or drastically lowered its efficiency. Every tech I was conversing with on the forum was VERY against this product. I told Wiehler I would decline that, and asked why they did not do a leak test as the FIRST thing upon seeing the sensor was tripping. They didn't reply, and to this date have not replied, refusing to fix their leaky system, which was now on a furnace I didn't want, 2 years into a fiasco of their making, and not being able to use the system because of their incompetence, facing the prospect of having to pay someone else to find a leak and replace the faulty part(s).
