We’ve been battling our gas pack for months now. And every time someone comes out to look at it, we get a different diagnosis.

It started back in the summer, when we came home one day to find the house a cozy 90 degrees.

Delicious.

We called our home warranty company — American Home Shield — and they sent out a company called Total Comfort, which was a Total Disaster. The tech poked around a bit, then determined that it was the pre-installed zoning system. Which our warranty doesn’t cover. A quick call to the manufacturer of the system revealed that only two companies in all of Greenville deal with zoning systems. We called one of them: The Service Company (TSC in future reference).

They sent out a tech who spent an hour undoing what Total Comfort had done. Basically, the TC tech made a mess that the TSC tech had to fix. It took an hour. After another hour of testing, checking, and ruminating, the TSC tech determined that the transformer for the zoning system had blown and would need to be replaced. He also informed us that whoever installed the system did it poorly, because it should be on its own dedicated circuit. He worked up an estimate of how much it would cost to fix everything: it was well over a thousand dollars.

I contacted the previous owner to ask who had installed the zoning system, and when. “It was The Service Company, about two years ago.”

Armed with this info, I called TSC back. Sure enough, they were able to confirm that they had installed it. As such, I politely requested that they come out and fix the problem. And they did.

The air conditioner was fixed, and we thought our woes were over. But alas, all of this was only a prelude.