Here's the situation; we moved into a new home at the end of April and it came with a 13 month home warranty. Awesome! Now we don't have to worry about repairs! So in June we find a pool of water under our HVAC system in the utility room and call home warranty. They send out an HVAC company to take a look. They say that water was caused by something freezing and then thawing too quickly and it caused water to overflow onto the floor. They checked the coolant level, said it was low so they topped it up, recommended we changed the filter and then said it was fixed. I didn't think they were great, they were Russian and one guy didn't speak English, and they didn't really communicate things to me well.
Anyway, fast-forward 3 months and this weekend we had someone out to help us raise the AC unit ready for some landscape grading to be done and noticed that the pipe going from the unit to the wall outside the house was completely white with frost (picture attached). They explained that it's usually caused by low coolant, and if we just had it topped up in June then it means we probably had a leak somewhere, likely either in the coil or the pipe itself. He recommends we don't raise the unit until the issue is addressed as it may void the home warranty and finding and fixing the leak would likely be expensive.
I call the home warranty and they send the same company out again. He checks the filter, looks good, checks the coolant and says it's a little low so it's probably a pinhole leak. He puts in something called "Easy seal" tells me to run the AC for 4 hours straight and then leaves. He didn't even top up the coolant. He seems in a hurry, likely because they reopened the initial claim and so he's probably not being paid to come back.
My concern is that this guy just did the bare minimum easy short-time fix that isn't going to fix the problem long term. If there's a leak in the system then we really want that fixed permanently so that the issue doesn't reoccur once the warranty expires. Now that he's put this "easy seal" stuff in though I'm not sure that we'll even be able to find the leak anytime soon as it's supposed to temporarily clog any holes. I'm a little annoyed that he didn't explain anything before putting it in, as if he had then I would probably have told him not to put it in so that we can find the leak and fix it.
At this point I'm not sure what my options are. The home warranty expires next May and as the Fall is approaching we aren't even likely to use the unit much before then. I want a reputable company to fix the issue permanently, but it doesn't seem as though the home warranty company (Home Warranty of America) cares about that. I'm guessing their main motivation is finding the cheapest contractor to do the cheapest fix so that they don't have to pay up for replacing parts or actual fixes. I'm frustrated that their short term "easy seal" fix has essentially rendered it impossible to actually fix the underlying problem.
Has anyone else ran into this, or a similar issue, with their home warranty? And if so, how did you deal with it?