I told him we needed to replace all of the ductwork and he got livid and refused to let me do that
You see a lot of weird stuff working in the HVAC industry. I’m not just talking about the people who answered their door with hardly any clothes on either. I’m mostly talking about the do-it-yourself repair attempts where the homeowner try to save money by fixing something. This generally fails and they end up having to call out the HVAC professionals, like myself, in the end. Unfortunately, a bunch of do-it-yourselfers end up doing more damage to their HVAC system and it would have been better if they had just called us out for the original issue. This makes my job harder too. Not only do I now have more problems to fix, but I also have to worry about broken and missing pieces and trying to figure out exactly what the homeowner did to mess up their HVAC system that badly. Regular HVAC breakdowns are usually pretty self-explanatory. You just back track the problem until you find the solution. That’s not always the case with the do-it-yourself issues. There was this one do-it-yourselfer who used plastic plumbing pipes instead of ductwork. I could tell that there used to be ductwork in his house but he had ripped it all out and put in 3” PVC pipes instead. There were several layers of duct tape attaching the pipes to the HVAC Vents and the Machine itself. The homeowner did not understand why his HVAC system was not cooling as well as it used to. I told him we needed to replace all of the ductwork and he got livid and refused to let me do that. He just wanted me to fix his HVAC system. I eventually ended up leaving without doing any work at all because I could not fix his HVAC system without fixing the ductwork.