Air conditioning repair isn’t the only industry that requires its practitioners to have a license. From television technicians to orthopedic surgeons, a slew of industries are regulated so that their professionals boast the requisite credentials and can promise to do a good job and do it right. And yet, according to Ricardo Ramos of Preferred Air Solutions, LLC, those seeking AC repair in Tampa run the risk of ending up with unlicensed—and unprofessional—contractors.
Ramos tells the story of a job his Tampa AC repair group was hired to do in the wake of AC repair malpractice committed by an unlicensed worker. This repairman advertised himself as an expert, but the fruits of his labor revealed the opposite. The homeowners—or unwitting victims—of this malpractice didn’t even really know they had hired an unlicensed AC repairman; all they knew was that something was very wrong with the work they had paid for. But to Ramos and his Tampa AC repair guys, it didn’t require much of an investigation to discover that an unlicensed contractor had severely bumbled the job.
In short, a component of the air conditioner that belongs inside the house was installed outside, and then an outdoor closet was built around the whole unit. Ramos says that, basically, whoever did this job did it backwards, and installed the AC components in such a way that prohibited them from functioning properly. To fix the problem, Ramos’s Tampa AC repair crew knew they had to first remove the AC unit’s air handler, but the closet had been built too tightly around it, so they had to demolish that first. Ultimately, they moved the air handler where it belongs—on the inside of the house—and then built a new closet around the unit inside. This is no epiphany, though; air handlers are supposed to go on the inside of the house in the first place. They aren’t built to handle the outside air conditions. The air handler pushes inside air around the rooms. If the air handler is located on the outside, then it’s pumping outside air into the rooms, and outside air isn’t as clean. Thus the industry standard of installing air handlers on the inside—but only a licensed AC repairman would know something like this.
Ramos says that before his Tampa AC repair team started their work, they took pictures of the terrible job performed by the unlicensed contractor, to always remember what really bad work looks like. “It was classic,” says Ramos, to have seen a job so horrendously and so blatantly botched.
“AC work should be done only by a licensed contractor,” says Ramos. One would think that goes without saying, but apparently, it’s a lesson some people need to learn.