My Day in the Life of Service
In order to gain a well-rounded perspective, I spent a day in the field with the service and maintenance department a few weeks ago. I spent the day with Matt and we did a little service and a little maintenance.
The first call we went on was a maintenance call. This customer has been with Chapman for over 15 years and has requested that Matt be her technician since 2007. When we got there Mrs. Huckaba explained to me that Chapman had been her husband’s choice in heating and air service and since he passed she felt she should continue his loyalty. She also told me that she considers Matt a part of her family – her very large family of 3 children, 14 grandchildren, and 10 great grandchildren. Luckily, since she has done annual maintenance twice a year since her install, this was a fairly textbook job. Matt wiped down the whole inside system, checked the temperatures, changed the filter, inspected the inside, and we were ready to go outside. Outside he cleaned out the inside of the unit and checked the refrigerant levels. Matt explained to me how the gages worked, what all the numbers were supposed to be at, and what we would do if they were not. Then he let me clean the system. He had some special cleaner that I sprayed the system down with and then washed it all out with the water hose. Once we finished up we scheduled her next appointment for October and we were on to the next one!
The next two calls we went to were service calls. At one of those service calls the homeowner was hearing a vibrating noise. First we had to figure out how to duplicate the noise. After manually turning the system on and off a few time we got it to make the noise! It was kind of a low vibrating noise…now we had to figure out what to fix. Matt looked at the system inside, nothing wrong there. Then we went outside, check the capacitor, motor, all the other colorful wires, nothing wrong there either. Then he picked up his tools and just as we were walking around the house (I thought we were going back inside), Matt unscrewed part of the siding, like a camouflaged tiny door on the side of the house. He looks at me and says, “You coming?”
Do I want to go under this house right now? This is MY time…the infamous crawl space. I didn’t expect it. I couldn’t even prepare for it. So, what did I do? I hopped right in. And of course, Matt identified the problem right away. In total we spent about 30 minutes in this crawl space fixing the vibrating noise. The customer was so relieved that we were able to fix the problem. I was relieved that the crawl space was not as scary as I thought.
Matt and I did one other maintenance and one other service that day. It was interesting to go on these types calls because you don’t really know what you’re walking into. The technicians have to be ready to work on a variety of brands with a variety of issues. This was a great way to follow up my installation day last week, because no two installs are the same, and that makes the service and maintenance different for every system.