MiniSplitWarehouse.com refuses warranty and lies about customer to BBB Tampa Florida

At the request of the agency that handled my complaint, I want to state, for the record, that I was assisted by the HIllborough County Consumer Protections Agency.

I mistakenly thought, based on links I followed to get to this agency on the Internet, that this agency was housed in the office of the Attorney General. That is not true.

In any case, I'm grateful for the assistance as without them, I'm pretty sure nothing good would have happened.

A few weeks ago, I contacted the Hillborough County (FL) Attorney General and reported the events I've posted here.

What I was asking was that Mr. Gilley honor the warranty and send replacement parts. Rather than ship parts to me, he offered to refund the purchase price so that he would not have further liability in the event of new warranty claims. The offer is to refund the $800 less shipping costs.

Because of the lack of trust between us, everything is going through the Attorney General's office. He has already sent the cashier's check and shipping label, and I will be shipping the units to him shortly.

$123 to ship. Going out asap.  Keeping my fingers crossed!

Speaking of a libel suit, do you realize that you have to prove that something I said and/or wrote something about you or your business that was untrue? That’s just one of four criteria. You can’t just sue because someone said something about you that you don’t like. Well, I guess you could file, but you’d be throwing away your own money. Something I’ve written or said has to be untrue. I’ve got your emails that confirm a verbal agreement that you made with me to provide replacement parts should the manufacturer deny my claim. What do you have? I hope you say that you have the phone calls recorded. Oh, and since you’re talking about suing me over this post, it’ll be Arizona state law that will apply. In Arizona, because of the anti-SLAPP law, I’ll be awarded any and all legal fees associated with defending myself against your baseless suit. TN & FL have anti-SLAPP laws too.

To me, you're whole position falls apart here: even if I hadn't provided you with a license number (which I did provide), you simply denied the claim without any explanation. If you couldn’t find it, you should have simply asked for the missing information. Instead, you apparently relished sending the following quote as the complete response to and denial of warranty claim: "Your claim has been denied, the information you provided for proof of install, and diagnosis was rejected by the factory warranty department. As I had discussed with your husband, before you so rudely contacted me making demands, I was going to take care of it in house IF they denied it. But after your rude phone call and false complaint to the BBB, I don't think we are going to be helping you out."

That’s it. “The information you provided… was rejected.” And, “I don’t think we are going to be helping you out.”

Interactions like this, with companies like yours, are exactly why Ripoff Report and others exist.

What loss would you have experienced by helping us with the warranty claim? Warranties are not a cost to the distributor (you). But did you offer me any way of appealing or providing additional detail? No, you didn't. And, to this point, you still had refused to provide me with the manufacturer information.

No other complaints against your business? I found a couple on Webutation, and the BBB (Tampa) has 5 claims against Ministplitwarehouse.com/AMG Inc. All 5 were there before I filed mine, so I’m not sure whether mine is unaccounted for or what. That was just a cursory search.

That may not sound like much, but frankly, I believe the units you sell are a good product. My problem is with your lack of assistance in the times that someone has a problem with one.

When you said, in your rebuttal, that "Mr Maddox wasnt patient enough to allow the process to be completed, they decided to call us before we got an answer from the factory and threaten to complain to the BBB and numerous other online complaint forums if we didnt give them a new unit right away." I had to pick my jaw up off of the floor. I've been on the Interwebs long enough to know that I shouldn't expect the truth, but it still amazes me when I see things like this. I’ll answer in pieces.

How much clearer can this be? Mr Gilley, you have *never* called us. You never told us anything in terms of timeframe for processing or anything else regarding the wait for warranty fulfillment. Not one single time have you *ever* called us. You told me twice, once during each of two times that I called you, that you'd call me back. The second time, you said you call me back THAT SAME DAY, but you have *never* *ever* called me despite having verified my phone number every time. And in those conversations I was pleasant with you, hopeful, patient and very accommodating as a direct result of working in customer service, myself. I waited 3 days after you didn’t call me back within the same day because I know that everybody needs a sick day now and again.

You, on the other hand - as soon as you knew that this was about a problem and not a sale - started setting my expectations by telling me that these manufacturers like to ask a lot of questions and say that it's something I did to the unit (not an exact quote but very similar). You said that to me the first time I called you. I should have known that you would be difficult.

Secondly, you stated that we demanded that you “give [us] a new unit right away.” Where are the recordings of these calls? How about we quote you just two sentences later in your rebuttal? “…we actually would have replaced the entire outdoor unit at our expense. However, it seems they did not appreciate our offer enough to be patient and allow us to get an answer from the warranty department.” So we didn’t appreciate your offer enough. So it was your offer or our demands? I never heard you offer that. Wait, are you saying that we demanded… your offer? I hope, for your sake, that you have these demands and offers recorded because your story is all over the place. This whole bit about a new unit is a complete fabrication on your part.

And, you have your story out of order. I never even thought about BBB or reporting or anything until after the call with my wife. I had never even heard of Ripoff Report until I started searching for ways to make this situation known after you lied to the BBB. I made an account here just so I could post this. And neither of us ever threatened you with anything related to the internet, social media or the BBB. If you want to rebut that, then provide the audio recordings of our calls. They were made to your business, and you don't have to worry about looking for any of your outbound calls as you never made them.

Since you mentioned the BBB complaint, though, I’ll go ahead and quote my BBB complaint “demands:” (copy/paste from BBB)

Mr. Gilley should be willing to provide the following:
1. Contact information for the manufacturer's warranty claims dept
2. Proof of submission of my warranty claim to the manufacturer
3. Proof of rejection of my warranty claim by the manufacturer
4. Should the above not result in a warranty claim being fulfilled, Mr. Gilley should provide a fan blade and coil for the unit as he stated he would do in our telephone conversations and as he alluded to in our email conversations.

And, while I'm correcting your misstatements, let's treat this one, "The invoice provided as proof of installation had no license number from a contractor, just a simple letter from an individual saying that they installed the product."

This lets me know that you didn't even read what I sent. Letter from the installer? You didn't ask for that, and I didn't provide it. You didn't request, nor did I provide you with, an invoice either. I'm not sure what documents you could be referring to. I sent you a letter that contained a diagnosis of the problem as stated and signed by state certified HVAC technician. I also sent you the license information of the installer that you claim to not have received. See my previous rebuttal for a more detailed breakdown.

What's great about this whole situation is that I've acknowledged from the start that you really don't have any obligation to me at all. The warranty isn’t yours. It’s an agreement I have with the manufacturer. I asked you originally if I could contact the manufacturer (who I assumed was Toshiba and you never corrected, despite my using that name several times in conversation) directly, but you volunteered to be the intermediary (and only a few days ago finally revealed the manufacturer in your BBB response – not to me directly). You also valiantly offered assistance in the form of replacement parts (which I would have appreciated) and then retracted it.

That's why this report exists. Others need to know how you manage relationships after the sale.

I'll provide a more lengthy rebuttal later, but I just want to correct the assumptions made by Mr Gilley since it appears that he more closely reads this website than he does my correspondence. Mr Gilley said...

You never had your system installed by a HVAC contractor, you did your own install and voided your warranty. Threatening us on the BBB and over the phone will not resolve your problem. Your warranty claim was denied, due to the fact that you did not supply sufficient proof of installation by a licensed HVAC contractor.

The invoice provided as proof of installation had no license number from a contractor, just a simple letter from an individual saying that they installed the product.

The short answer is what I originally provided to Mr Gilley. I'll provide it again, here: (((link redacted))). The link, as well as the Word document I included in my email, gave Mr Gilley a state HVAC license number of 52198 and the personal information of the licensed HVAC tech that installed our unit.

The email that contained this information was sent on May 11th at 12:30pm in reply to Mr Gilley's emailed request for information received on May 6th. My emailed reply included the information above, 10 pictures that documented the condition and damage and a PDF (scanned) damage assessment from a state certified HVAC Technician whose information I also provided in the Word document.

Side note: It took me 5 days to put this information together and reply. Does that smack of someone who's  pushing a company to the point of being rude/vulgar/threatening?

I did not provide an invoice of any kind. I did not provide a letter from someone saying that they installed anything. I provided a letter from me, attached to the email referenced above, that gave Mr Gilley the licensing information of the installer - just as he requested - and the assessing technician.

Mr Gilley is correct in pointing out that I didn't include the installation fees in the assessment of my loss. I didn't think it appropriate to count the installation as a loss because I would have had to pay them regardless of the origin of the unit. I don't regret having installed a mini split unit. My only regret is that I purchased from MiniSplitWarehouse.com.

Bottom line: I have given a factual representation of what happened to me.

Mr. Maddox, Please know that this report you have filed will be used against you as an act of libel.

You never had your system installed by a HVAC contractor, you did your own install and voided your warranty. Threatening us on the BBB and over the phone will not resolve your problem. Your warranty claim was denied, due to the fact that you did not supply sufficient proof of installation by a licensed HVAC contractor.

The invoice provided as proof of installation had no license number from a contractor, just a simple letter from an individual saying that they installed the product. We can clearly see now that you did not actually pay anyone to do the install properly, since you claim here to have lost $800 (the cost of the unit itsself), and you didnt claim to have lost the money you paid to have the system installed. Someone who would have paid a contractor to do an install for them would claim they lost $800 plus the installation cost. Since you didnt pay a contractor, you are telling people you have lost $800 which was just the cost of the unit.

As you can clearly see we are a company who try's to help all of our customers, we have never had such a complaint about us before. We were contacted about the problem, and we submitted the information to the warranty department. Mr Maddox wasnt patient enough to allow the process to be completed, they decided to call us before we got an answer from the factory and threaten to complain to the BBB and numerous other online complaint forums if we didnt give them a new unit right away. We informed them that we could do that, so they contacted the BBB to complain (they seem to think the BBB will make companies do things).

If Mr & Mrs Maddox didnt contact us in a threatening manner, threaten legalities, and be just plain rude to us- we actually would have replaced the entire outdoor unit at our expense. However, it seems they did not appreciate our offer enough to be patient and allow us to get an answer from the warranty department.

Customers who have their systems installed by a licensed HVAC technician will have a much more pleasant warranty experience. So be sure to use a licensed HVAC contractor when installing your HVAC system, this will help to stop the problems that Mr Maddox is running into.

I checked back on my BBB complaint, and I noticed that Jeremy Gilley had responded. He's sticking to the story that he had the best intentions to send us a replacement, but that my wife's "threats" (now they're threats rather than just rude) have pushed him to stop all efforts.

Included in that gem was the manufacturer name, Chigo (www.chigo.us).

So, I'm taking my claim to Chigo directly and foregoing Jeremy Gilley because I don't believe that he ever submitted it.

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