Beware of Winds Mechanical

Note: This is not the company web site of New York City HVAC contractors, Winds Mechanical, 1401 Blondell Avenue, Bronx, NY 10461. This is a consumer protection web site designed to warn you away from hiring that company. If you have questions or your own stories about Winds Mechanical, please e-mail me.

New York City air conditioning contractor Charlie Babbish of Winds Mechanical ripped us off. His company simply does horrible work. They are dishonest, careless, and unprofessional. Because I can't get back the money we paid Winds Mechanical, I have set out to create a web site for his company to let the world know what they are all about. This is the start of that project. Enjoy! And stay away from Winds Mechanical if you need HVAC work in New York City!

November 2, 2004

Dear Franklin Report,

I am writing to tell you about the horrible experience we had with Winds Mechanical, an air-conditioning contracting company that came highly recommended in the 2003 New York City edition of the Franklin Report. As your favorable review was influential in our choice to hire Winds, I truly hope that you will reconsider their ratings. Or, more appropriately, I urge you to consider removing them from your esteemed guidebook altogether. After our experience with Winds Mechanical, it is difficult for me to imagine this company doing good work for any client.

Throughout most of 2003 we renovated an old townhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where we now live. As a part of this renovation we installed a central air-conditioning system. Our architect told us that since we were gutting the house and building a new interior, our HVAC job would be relatively easy to do. Upon his recommendation and the Franklin Report’s review we hired Charlie Babbish of Winds Mechanical as our HVAC contractor. Though I wanted to do more due diligence on Winds, we rushed to cut Winds a check so that Charlie could quickly make drawings for a Buildings Department permit application that we needed to submit before Christmas 2002. We began to suspect our quick decision was a mistake almost immediately. Yet, with a large, non-refundable check of ours in Charlie’s pocket and a complex renovation project to manage, we felt like it would cost more to fire Winds than to just maintain a friendly, civil working relationship with Charlie and forge ahead with the job.

During our renovation, we hired many different types of contractors and tradesmen, and as to be expected, there were many glitches, quirks and problems throughout our year-long project. We never lost our heads and managed to work through everything with everyone. In the end, Winds Mechanical was the only contractor that we felt were really, truly careless, dishonest and horrible at their job. They simply do not deserve to be listed in the Franklin Report as one of the city’s “best contractors.”

In order of offensiveness, here’s a rundown of the problems we had with Winds Mechanical and Charlie Babbish:

We paid for a new HVAC system but Winds installed a used compressor on our roof.
The day after the crane came to install the big compressor unit on our roof, I went up to take a look at it. It was dented, missing some screws and had old leaves and white crud inside of it. Though we paid for a new air-conditioning system, Charlie Babbish actually installed a used one on our roof. After finally catching him on the phone (he avoided my calls for days), he sheepishly admitted giving us a “floor sample” model that had been sitting out in his yard for some period of time. This was the most mind-bogglingly dishonest and expensive rip-off I have ever experienced.

Winds didn’t properly permit the job with the city.
Last month I went back to our expediter to finally close out our Buildings Department work permit. The expediter informed me, however, that unlike our general contractor and plumber, our HVAC contractor never properly permitted his work. After three weeks of phone calls to Winds Mechanical with no response, our only option is to pay the expediter a fee to do the permit work that Winds was supposed to do. For me, this final $500 insult and three week waste of time is the last straw and the reason why I have put together this web site. They didn’t even do the most basic, bare-minimum paperwork correctly.

Winds left a leaking drain pipe open behind the wall.
During our first summer in the house we discovered a mysterious puddle forming in our basement. It took a while to figure out where the water was coming from. Eventually, we found that our careless HVAC installers had left a copper drain pipe completely open and unconnected behind the wall of the second floor of our house. It leaked into our insulation, wiring and finished walls for weeks before we finally caught it.

Winds didn’t install the SpacePak duct system correctly.
When Winds initially installed the HVAC trunk and SpacePak ducts they didn’t pay attention to our architect and contractor’s drawings and comments and didn’t leave room for a couple of other items that needed space behind the walls of our house. As such, much of the HVAC system had to be disassembled and reinstalled. The second time around, the installation was done very sloppily, with lots of slack and sharp angles in some of the ducts. Because of this, some of our vents do not function.

Winds’ analysis methods are archaic.
Charlie Babbish’s “rules of thumb” for calculating the necessary size of an HVAC system are no longer used by any credible air-conditioning installer. He determines the size of your system based only on the square footage of your building. Legitimate HVAC installers, I have since learned, will look at many factors ranging from your roof’s insulation to the number and type of windows on the south side of your house. When an architect friend heard Charlie’s initial recommendation to put a 5-ton a/c unit on the roof of our somewhat small house, our architect friend said, “What, are you trying to cool a Wal-Mart?”

Winds has no awareness or information about energy efficiency standards.
The gigantic compressor that Charlie initially installed on our roof was the cheapest, least energy efficient model he could legally give us. In fact, it may have even fallen just below the legal SEER standards. Because the unit was also way too big for the size of our house and energy prices are sky-rocketing, Winds essentially guaranteed us a lifetime of high energy bills and inefficient energy use. All of this, despite the fact that I told Charlie in the beginning of the project that energy efficiency was one of my top concerns in choosing an HVAC system. Think of Winds Mechanical the next time we have a big summer blackout in New York City.

Winds didn’t provide us with any choices or information on different models.
Rather than meeting with us to show us various models and review choices, Charlie just showed up at my house one day with a crane and installed a big compressor on our roof. We were never given any choices or information.

Winds was expensive.
Our HVAC system was the most expensive part of our renovation. If we hadn’t been ripped off and let down in so many different ways, I would have been OK with that. But Winds Mechanical did a horrendous job. They were dishonest and careless in their work. They didn’t deserve the money they charged us.

There is a huge gash in the main duct coming out of the blower! (added March, 2005)
We just noticed this a few months ago while poking around in the space above our second floor bathroom. There is a huge gash in the main air duct coming out of the blower. This is likely the reason why our third floor never gets cool. And why the second floor bathroom is absolutely freezing. This is the icing on the cake. Winds Mechanical is simply unbelievable.

To sum up, there’s a very Ill-Wind blowing in the Bronx. It originates at the offices of Charlie Babbish and Winds Mechanical. I urge you not just to downgrade this company’s ratings but to de-list them from the Franklin Report altogether. After showing such extreme carelessness, dishonesty, and lack of basic professionalism on our job it is hard for me to imagine that we are the only victims of their work. Winds Mechanical truly does not deserve to be listed among The Franklin Report’s “best contractors” in New York City. In fact, they deserve to be listed among the worst.

Sincerely,
A Brooklyn customer of Winds Mechanical.