I will start by saying that finally, after installing two of these units in my 1500 sf workshop, I am very happy with them. They cool and heat very efficiently and quietly and there are not many units on the market which have the power and features of this one.However, it was a long road getting to the happy point I am at now. I initially ordered two of these from Amazon, and they arrived quickly but both turned out to have been damaged in shipping. This is partially the truckers fault but a good deal of the blame must be laid on the manufacturer who does not package this model with sufficient protection to withstand the typical abuse which cartons endure in truck freight. There is is only about 1/2" of styrofoam between the front and top of the unit and the inside of the carton, and no crush space whatsoever. So both units arrived with bent case frames and one also had a cracked front grill piece and bent interior pieces.
Amazon offered to replace them but were out of stock so after some discussion I agreed to keep the least damaged one (I was able to bend the case back into shape) of the two for a discount, ship back the other for a refund, and order a third unit from TheFactoryDepot, one of amazon's resellers.
Well, guess what? The third unit arrived damaged in shipping as well. After much more discussion, this time with TheFactoryDepot, they agreed to allow me to go pick up a replacement at their warehouse which was luckily only about 30 minutes from my home. This unit was undamaged and so I installed that one as well.
We weren't through with our troubles though because the 2nd unit I installed (the one we picked up at the warehouse) soon started displaying a trouble code on the panel and stopped cooling. So we had to call Frididaire to have it serviced under warranty. There 3rd party service company came to the house and repaired it but they had to order a part so this took about another 10 days. Finally, about 6 or 8 weeks after our initial order, we had two working units installed and they have been cooling and heating nicely for the past 2 to 3 months. The remote is great it has all the controls to change modes, and control heating, cooling, thermostat, fan speed, energy saver, timer, etc. This is important to me because my units are installed 7 feet from the floor (to the bottom of the unit), and I have never needed to actually get up on a ladder to fiddle with the front panel once you get the airflow louvers pointed the way you want there is no need for that.
I wouldn't recommend this model at all if there were a lot of alternatives, mainly because of the poor packaging, but if you need a heating+cooling unit this size and you are prepared to potentially deal with returns and repairs then this is the unit for you. I don't say that entirely facetiously once we got all the startup problems solved these are very nice units. If you can find it locally or can pick it up from a warehouse I strongly recommend that as the packaging is very poor. That's the main reason I didn't give 5 stars.
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