Complaint Rating:

At about 1:30 PM, 11/13/07, a Centerpoint Energy contractor by the name of Jeff arrived to do the 'six point check' on our furnace. In past years I had gone through our local heating and cooling company, but this year decided to go with Centerpoint to save money and spread out the payments on my monthly gas bill.
This man was not in the house more than 15 minutes and discovered a crack in the heat exchanger which followed with the unit being red- tagging and turned off our gas. I called my husband who, in turn, called a contractor he knew from his years in home building. My husband simply began the conversation, 'Centerpoint is at my home' and the man on the other end of the phone interjected , 'and they red-tagged you'. Apparently, Centerpoint has a reputation of red-tagging for reasons unknown to me.
What angers me is that I will still be charged $98.50 for the six-point check and cleaning which wasn't done at all. He looked for a crack, found it and this is what I am being charged for. Seems a bit scammish to me. Seems to me I would be given a break since the unit was not cleaned, etc. By the way, none of us have been waking up or suffering with headaches and the furnace has been running for at least a month. We also have a lovebird right outside the room which contains the furnace and it hasn't dropped dead.
I called our local heating and cooling company and they remarked by stating that Centerpoint is a bit over cautious. At one of their other customers home whose furnace was cleaned and checked, noticed fingerprints on the mans furnace. The contractor asked if someone had been out to see the unit, the man said yes and that it was Centerpoint Energy one week earlier. Well, apparently his furnace was not cleaned as Centerpoint said they would do and they were only in the man's home for about 15 minutes. My local company will spend about 1 and1/2 hours on the furnace. Wish I would have spent the extra $30 and gone with my local company. Live and learn.