A.B. May Heating, A/C, Plumbing & Electrical

Byron S.

Just really disappointed in the response I got from these guys. Flooding in the basement on a Sunday afternoon so I call my home warranty only to be told that they could have a plumber out on Tuesday. Really!! I had to call another plumber who came out that evening and took care of the problem. Apparently the home warranty isn't work the paper it's written on. Guess who will not be renewing their home warranty with AB May?

Liu P.

Worst experience ever! Some one came twice still not able to fix my heater. I already spent hundreds bucks and still waiting for parts. I f you have children in the house and wants the heater to work quickly, do not contact this company.

Bob H.

I have had the gold plan with AB May for over 10 years. The quality of the service people has deteriorated significantly the past few years, while the pressure to upsell me on every visit has dramatically increased.

Let me provide a synopsis of the terrible service we've received just within the past year or so:

This summer, our kitchen faucet began leaking as well as the toilet began making noise. Note that AB May installed that toilet several years ago after the first toilet they installed broke. By the way, their service plan for $960 per year (plus $60 per visit) doesn't cover porcelain even when they sold and installed the toilet! But they cut me a deal and knocked a hundred $$ or so off the cost of the new toilet. Wow, thanks AB May for being so generous.

When the plumber arrived, he took apart the faucet to determine the cartridge required and reassembled it when he realized he did not have one on his truck. He then proceeds to replace the siphon column assembly inside the toilet tank with a part he purchased at Home Depot. After he left, the toilet would barely flush away urine, much less solid matter.

After about 2 weeks have passed, he returns to complete the faucet repair and he brings a new faucet because AB May lost the original part shipment (or so I was told by him). All good so far, right? Then he proceeds to install the faucet and reverses the hot and cold water lines. (only discovered after he left our house when doing dishes that evening). I told him about the toilet not working properly so he makes some kind of adjustment (and it starts making a gurgling sound after he leaves). A new plumber is dispatched to fix the hot/cold water supply and fix the toilet again. All these visits required me to sit at home on ""hot standby"" waiting for them to grace me with their incompetent employees.

When I complained to the customer service rep, her response was that I don't need to sit at home waiting because they call 1/2 hour before the repairman comes. ""How does that help me if I'm in the middle of a movie with my grandchild?"" I asked. Her canned response was that I don't have to sit at home because they call 1/2 hour prior to the service call. I'm sorry, but I did not realize that stupidity was a contest and she was trying to win the competition.

Let's get to these last two weeks. Previously, we purchased a new Honeywell humidifier after remodeling the house and installing over 4500 pounds of hardwood flooring on two levels of the home. The installer placed the unit in the wrong location on the furnace and it could not regulate the proper humidity. He came back to patch up the hole he left in the furnace with the original installation and mounts it in a different location on the furnace. The first unit stopped working within a year and they wanted us to pay $60 to come fix it as it's common for humidifiers to stop working. My wife told them that we're not going to pay for a defective unit to be repaired every year, so begrudgingly they installed a new one.

Fast forward to this fall when they came to check out our heating system to ensure everything was working. The service man said everything worked fine including the humidifier. When we had a cold snap hit the area, I realized the humidifier wasn't working. It read 10% actual humidity while the gauge was set for 25% humidity. Hmmmm. If it was properly checked out and supposedly working, how did it magically quit working? Once again, we get hit with a $60 service call to repair something that was fine a month or so earlier. Once the service man arrives he confirms that the solenoid is plugged and recommends we get a water softener. I pointed to a spot about 20 feet from the furnace to show him the water softener we purchased from AB May several years again. Like magic, the upselling spiel ended.

The same week, the same toilet started making gurgling sounds again. The plumber tells me that the stopper was worn and it should have been replaced instead of the syphon tube. I asked why the first plumber did not catch that. He had no answer, but I paid another $60 for a repair done incorrectly but not within their 30 day cutoff period.

Can anymore go wrong? It sure can. While the plumber was here, he recommended we replace the pressure regulator at no cost since he was already on a service call. Great, but there's more. He replaced it without incident, but failed to notice one of the hot water tanks was leaking, yet he said he blew water out of the expansion tank and had to be right on top of the leak. So out comes AB May today to replace the hot water tank. I get informed that our hot gas exhaust piping is too close to a PVC sewage pipe. After the plumber spends about 1/2 hr in my basement, he says the hot water tank installation crew needs to come out and oh, by the way, I'll owe them $412 for a different flue gas exhaust pipe. Did I mention that I blew another afternoon waiting for AB May?

Steven A.

The night A.B. May stole Christmas from my kids!!!!!

We purchased a home warranty through AB May when we bought our new home in Aug. 2016. This past Thursday, December 8, 2016 our range/oven quit working. We paid our contracted fee of $75 for a service call to fix our range/oven. The technician assessed our oven/range has a critical error in the control board making our oven inoperable, but the stovetop burners still worked. AB May's solution is to either rebuild the control board or give us $185 credit towards a new range. To rebuild the control board, it will take 2 weeks and we would not be able to use our oven or burners during that time - meaning we would not be able to cook any meals. We were advised we could expedite the rebuild at our own cost of $100 (which is insulting) and that could, but won't guarantee, it will be fixed any earlier than the 2 weeks. They will not give us a loaner oven and will not replace the oven. To make matters worse, it is 2 weeks before Christmas, so our kids will not get any Christmas cookies and our Christmas meal in our new home with our family is now cancelled.

Even though in their ""Terms of Agreement, Section 7 under limitations of coverage"" states they will offer cash or credit in lieu of repairs when parts are unavailable through standard purchasing channels, they are still unwilling to abide by this section and replace our range. Since parts are unavailable they should offer a reasonable cash offer.

I would advise anyone purchasing a home warranty through A.B. May to do their research and shop around!!!!

Dan N.

We've been customers of A.B. May for years and Precision (which they absorbed) for even more years. We called them last week to unclog a partially blocked washer drain which overflowed. I had tried to unclog the drain with a manual snake but couldn't. The plumber they sent was personable and efficient and used a motorized auger to pull out the clog. The entire process took no more than 10-15 minutes. The bill was $231. I believe A.B. May has just priced themselves out of our market.

Steve J.

I called to make an appointment and it took two days to come out to fix a few minor plumbing repairs. They couldn't make it out the day they said so I waited another two days. When they come out, these small plumbing problems turned into 500 bucks! I was expecting no more than 250. The next morning I see there is a leak under the kitchen sink. That wasn't even one of the problems I called about. This was the plumbers fault. I find this leak on Sunday and they can't send anyone out to the house on Sundays unless you have a contract with them. So I have to wait until Monday while my cabinets soak up the water. First and LAST time they get my business!

Tom D.

I go to church with Dan who works for AB May. So when I had AC trouble I called Dan. So much for knowing someone. Way overpriced for what you get. I won't make that mistake again. I will stay local for a lot lot less.

Sara B.

I had a great experience with buying my new furnace. But I had a pretty bad experience when their plumber to came out to fix my faucet in the downstairs bathroom that wasn't working. He spent a lot of time in the basement, then came upstairs and told us that the piping in my 100+ year old house was not done correctly, and that he would have to tear up my kitchen floor, tear up the bathroom, and tear up a wall between the kitchen and dining room, and re-pipe the entire downstairs, at a cost of over $6000. As you can imagine, telling a woman you want to tear up her beautiful, tiled, recently remodeled kitchen did not go over too well!! I could not get him out of my house fast enough! I called another plumber and he said that's ridiculous, the pipe is going through a crawl space from the basement to the bathroom and all that needs to be done is the pipe needs to be insulated and the crawl space insulated, he charged me under $300 and the faucet has been working every since. I feel like the AB May guy was seriously trying to overcharge me! Also every time they come over they try to sell me their gold plan. High pressure to buy the gold plan but I am not interested when the service is hit or miss.

Rob O.

We have had a Gold Maintenance agreement with AB May for many years now. We recently had a problem with our A/C and they offered us a deal to replace it rather than repair it with R22 freon (which is $100/ pound now). They offered us a discount equal to the amount of the repair (which would have only cost us $60 out of pocket) and would have cost them as much as $1500 or more depending on the amount of freon we required.

I was curious and got two other estimates from a couple local companies. The price from AB May was 37% cheaper with the discount from the lower of the two bids. The other bid was 50% more costly.

We got a free upgrade because the unit we selected 16 SEER was unavailable at that time but they could get an 18 SEER unit at no additional price since what we wanted they could not get in a timely manner.

Since our house has two a/c and furnaces, we got a good deal on the second unit as well.

Our house is very nice and cool now and we are able to keep it at a higher temperature and still feels good. We got the Google nest thermostats. Pretty cool also.

If you didn't know, there are only a handful of air conditioning / furnace manufacturers around. So, before you get your a/c or furnace replaced, check to see who's unit you are buying and why it is so much more expensive than another brand with the same warranty.

FYI - AB May sells only Daikin, who also make (and own) Amana and Goodman. One of the bids we got from another company was Amana system. The highest bid was for Lennox. That salesman was trying to be really technical but I researched and found he was full of bologna. He said we did not have enough airflow for a high SEER unit without a lot bigger ductwork.

So, they pretty much have you in a pickle when your a/c is broken and you need it fixed quickly, but if you are proactive (if your a/c is around 15 years old you better think about it) you can find the best deal and save big money.

The only discouraging thing we feel should have been done better with AB May is that with the a/c check this spring, someone could have inspected the unit and found the potential problem before the condensation flooded our garage. So now I have some drywall repair to do but saved $6K overall if not more. I can patch drywall and paint.

Michael C.

Excellent service on a scheduled maintenance visit! The serviceman worked in 95 degree heat but did a thorough job.