Evenaire Heating & Air Conditioning

Beware of this company! There has been a change of ownership in the past 2 – 3 years, and the current owner does not have the experience, integrity, or financial stability that used to come with Evenaire. The current owner is actually a lawyer whose license got suspended in Iowa and then Stoughton, WI (search James Hammis Law Office for full details). He owes thousands of dollars in unpaid claims to the state, and is not reputable. He just lost a case involving ac installation issues and more are pending. Working with this company has cost us thousands of dollars in repairs, was hugely inconvenient, and also ended up exposing us to chemicals, lead dust, and potentially asbestos.
We hired Evenaire for an install of an AC system on an older home. We had a boiler system and wanted to add a conventional central air AC system for both stories of our house. At first, the owner seemed very personable, attentive, and knowledgeable. The first problem started when he told us we need to hire an electrician to upgrade our system. He told us it would be around $ 500-​$ 600. After we signed a contract with him and got a few quotes, it ended up being about triple the cost for the work. We found it odd that he wasn’t more familiar with the cost of the necessary electrical work (or had a relationship with a specific electrician), but we didn’t think much of it. The next round of problems began the week he started work. We have a small child and had spoken extensively with him about the dangers of lead dust when drilling into our ceilings. He assured us that his staff would take the necessary steps – use plastic, clean up with a HEPA vac, etc. When they actually showed up to do work they did not lay down any plastic and started drilling carelessly into the ceilings. They then clogged up the HEPA vac we had provided for them and instead used a shop vac to try to clean up. Anyone familiar with lead dust knows that this just spreads the dust around. The mess was so bad that another contractor on site doing separate work actually called us to warn us how unsafe it was. In the end, they left a HUGE mess (chunks of plaster on the floor, dressers, etc), and it took us over 7 days to clean it all up. When we called to complain, the owner offered no solutions or assistance.
There was also a problem with the holes. Two the holes were cut improperly, and resulted in large holes in our ceiling with insulation hanging down. We had vacated the house for a week to give them a chance to do their work, but when we returned the holes were all open and anything from our attic could reach the second floor. After days of complaining about this, the owner finally located a plasterer to fix the holes. In the meantime, we had to use bedrooms that had 100 year old insulation hanging from the ceilings.
Things just got worse from there. The owner claimed he had a «crew,» but we only saw the other two employees twice. Otherwise, he would just show up on his own, work for a few hours a day and then leave. The holes he cut in our floors in the first floor were crooked, and when he hooked up the duct work, you could literally see right into the basement because they were so badly aligned. When we complained, he used foil to fix them. The duct work downstairs was not sealed properly, and we are pretty sure he ripped down asbestos insulation on some of our boiler pipes while doing his work and never said anything (or didn’t know what it was). In the end, we had to pay another company over $ 4,000 to reseal all the ductwork in the basement, add larger and additional vents because the ones he did were too small for the capacity of the unit and it kept freezing up, refit and rebuild all of the boots/​vents connecting to the floor, rebuild the main drop to the unit because it was full of gaps and poorly built, and fix 24 code violations (Yes! 24, this is pretty unheard of – if you know what you’re doing you don’t rely on the city inspector to tell you what you need to fix).
Overall, we fired Evenaire from the job after trying for 2 MONTHS (yes, 2 months) to get him to complete the work and fix his mistakes.
There are plenty of reputable AC companies out there that do way better work than this guy. Don’t trust him with anything — last minute repair, new installs, warranty issues, etc. He will just create additional problems down the road. He even managed to disconnect the thermostat to our boiler during his work, and when we went to start our heat, it wouldn’t work. He also doesn’t have the money to fix his mistakes. When we started letting him know the extent of the damages, he gave us a lot of run around – promising off and on to give us money to avoid a lawsuit, but, in the end, he just completely stopped taking our calls and will not settle the matter honestly.
Beware of Evenaire!

Installed a new A/​C — was not licensed in the city of Madison and did not pull a permit. The installer used profanity repeatedly. The new A/​C did not work the first time we used it. Evenaire tech came to repair it, and it only worked for 48 hours. Evenaire tech then did not show up 2 days in a row when scheduled to be here. I finally called another company, who said the install was done incorrectly, and they melted a valve when soldering which caused a leak. RUN AWAY from Evenaire, which is now located in Stoughton WI.