In the past, I’ve had good luck with DirecTV’s customer service, but a bizarre series of billing errors has made me change my mind and I must now characterize its customer service as crap.

Due to these billing errors, almost $800 of incorrect fees were added to my account. Yes, you read correctly: $800!

The short version of this story:

1. My HD DVR unit was defective. Let me rephrase that: My second HD DVR unit was defective (as was the first one, which DirecTV replaced).
2. A tech dude came out, saw it was defective and replaced it with a new unit — telling me that DirecTV would send me a “recovery kit” with which to return the defective unit.
3. The recovery kit never shows up.
4. DirecTV bills me $300 for a “lost or damaged” unit. (My unit is neither lost nor damaged; it’s defective.)
5. I begin a long series of phone calls to DirecTV. Sometimes I’m cut off in the middle of a call and have to call back, retelling my long story all over again.
6. DirecTV promises to send me a recovery kit and remove the $300 charge. It takes them over three weeks to remove this incorrect fee.
7. The recovery kit arrives; I immediately send my unit back.
8. Two weeks later, DirecTV charges me over $400 for not returning the unit.
9. Phone calls resume. It takes two weeks to remove this charge. Consequently, for several weeks there is almost $800 of incorrect charges on my account.

Now that is crappy customer service.

…Service.

(I could have included “Service” in the title, but I couldn’t resist all the “C’s” in “Circuit City’s Crappy Customer.”)

Circuit City frequently annoys me. Usually, it’s just some little crappy thing that builds on another little crappy thing that builds on another… You get the idea. Before you know it, you’re drowning in Circuit City’s crap.

One frequent problem I’ve had there is having to wait for service. This week, I thought I’d circumvent my wait time by buying an item (an external hard drive) online and picking it up at a local store in Tuscaloosa — taking advantage of their “24-minute in-store pickup” guarantee. They proclaim on their Website, “If we don’t have your order ready for you within 24 minutes of your confirmation email, a $24 gift card’s yours.”

Of course, the guarantee’s disclaimer is that it “excludes customer wait time in store lines.”

See, you can’t just walk up to a cashier, show him/her your receipt and an ID and be gone. Nope. You’ve got to wait in the customer “service” line before you can get your merchandise.

The first time I tired to pick up my drive, there was a single customer “service” representative. The line wasn’t too long, but in 10 minutes it did not move at all; and I had a limited amount of time as I needed to pick up my son from day care. So, I had to go.

Came back a few days later, determined to wait it out. This time, there were two reps and only four people ahead of me and still it took 15 minutes to make it to a rep. Now, I know 15 minutes is not that long a wait time in the grand scheme of things, if we were living in Soviet Russia, for instance. But had I bought a drive at, say, Office Depot, I could have parked, walked to the shelf, picked up a drive, gone immediately to a cashier, and gotten out of the store in maybe 10 minutes tops.

So, the “convenience” of Circuit City’s in-store pickup is a complete fraud, because one must suffer through a customer “service” experience. Heck, if I had just had it shipped to me I wouldn’t have had to spend any time waiting in line.

When I finally did get through to a CC rep, I politely asked her to tell her manager that I was frustrated by the wait time and that I would never use their in-store pickup service again. The clerk was unrepentant. All she said in reply was a snippy and condescending remark: “I’m sorry there were people ahead of you in line.” Obviously, she didn’t intend to pass my comment along to her manager.

Consequently, I send this complaint out into the ether. Who knows? Maybe a CC customer “service” manager will read it one day and, for a brief instant, feel sorry that they’ve lost (another) customer.

For quite some time, I’ve been a fan of Adobe Premiere Elements (APE). It’s the best low-cost solution for editing video on Windows and it’s just as good as iMovie. Even does some stuff that iMovie cannot do.

Since APE is relatively inexpensive — compared to the full, professional version of Premiere — I’ve happily upgraded it each time a new version came out. So, when version 4 appeared recently, I was one of the first in line to buy it.

Now I’m wondering if that was a good idea.

First, its interface is slightly different than version 3 and I find it a bit dark and it puts functions where I don’t expect them. I guess that’s gonna happen with a new UI and maybe I’ll get used to it. But it also does not maximize properly. I have a two-monitor system and I put my quick launch bar vertically along the left side. When you maximize APE, part of it slides under the quick launch bar and it does not fill the left monitor completely.

More significantly, APE does not do YouTube like it claims to do. In a review on Amazon.com that was posted just two days ago (10 October 2007), carlamari explains the YouTube-APE situation well:

I purchased this product because I wanted to upload better quality videos to YouTube. The item description for this product states – “Broadcast far and wide by uploading your movies directly to YouTube or your personal sharing page. Adobe Premiere Elements 4 takes care of optimizing and formatting for the specific destination so your movies always look great.” Unfortunately, that is completely untrue. The product’s presets for YouTube result in a final video stream that is inferior in quality to most of the videos that are currently on YouTube. It is definitely inferior in quality to the MP4 files that I had been previously using. Therefore, it does not optimize for the specific destination. In addition, it does not allow you to adjust the YouTube presets so if you want to upload your file directly from Premiere Elements 4, there is no way to make any adjustments to improve the overall quality.

On top of this, I am completely unable to directly upload any videos to YouTube, bad quality or not, since the program keeps giving me an error message that says “Online service encountered an error. The service will now be terminated. 10: unable to send HTTP request with GetLastError of 12002”.

Over the past two days I have spent hours on the phone with their technical support staff trying to troubleshoot this connection error. After trying many many different configurations, the problem has not been solved and I can escalate the case to a higher level of tech. support. But of course, why should I bother wasting my time on all of this tech. support if even after the connection issue is fixed, it uploads such poor quality videos? The tech. support staff even agreed with me that the YouTube preset is not of the highest quality or what it should be. Since they are unable to answer alot of my questions, they have referred me to filing a “feature request” on the adobe website and/or emailing their corporate office. So I can waste more of my time being a beta tester on this new product. They really should have worked out all of these bugs BEFORE they released the product.

The first time I uploaded a vid to YouTube, it worked okay — although, like carlamari its quality was inferior to other uploads I’ve tried — but the second time I tried it pooped out on me and I got the “GetLastError of 12002” message. It must be a new issue as carlamari’s post is the only thing that turns up on a Google search and there’s nothing on Adobe’s support site about it.

More to come on this…

Updated, 10/30/2007:

Still no luck uploading to YouTube, but now the error message has changed. Instead of the cryptic, “GetLastError of 12002” now it just says, “Sorry, unable to connect to YouTube. Please try again later.” Not quite as cryptic, but no more explanatory.

Clearly, this aspect of PE4 is not ready for prime time. Anyone who upgrades thinking PE4 will facilitate their YouTube uploads is going to be disappointed.

We recently had a Rinnai water heater installed at our home–at a cost of $2,600 (considerably more than a conventional water heater). It’s a tankless heater, which means that instead of constantly keeping a tank of hot water at the ready, it virtually instantaneously heats water when a request for hot water is made.

The principle is a great one and Marysia is quite familiar with their use in Poland where, as in much of Europe, they are quite common. They conserve one’s use of natural gas as the gas only runs on demand. It doesn’t needless heat hot water when hot water is not being used. They’re so green that they qualify for a $300 tax credit.

It all sounds great, right? So, what’s the problem? Well sir, the reason these heaters are possibly crap is their minimum water-flow rate. As the Rinnai FAQ puts it:

20. What is the minimum water flow rate required to operate a Rinnai?

The Rinnai tankless water heater must be able to sense water flow in order to initiate operation. Most Rinnai models will operate with flow rates as low as 0.5 gallons per minute. [Our unit is officially rated for 0.6 gallons per minute.] This is the lowest minimum flow rate in the industry and is an important benefit.

In practice, however, the flow rate in my shower frequently runs below this minimum. Consequently, the heat turns off after about two minutes of showering–and that’s with the hot water tap turned fully on. The problem is my low-flow shower head. By restricting the water flow, it takes me below the minimum the Rinnai requires.

In my wife’s, Marysia’s, bathroom, the shower head is more powerful and she doesn’t run into this issue as often, but when she takes more extended showers she has lost heat.

We asked the plumbers (Hicks) who installed it and the dealer who sold it to us (Central Supply) about this issue, but they were unable to explain it to us. It was only after I read the manual and figured out how to use the heater’s control pad to diagnose water flow that we learned of this flow issue. Using that diagnostic tool, we learned that my shower is drawing .6 GPM, the bare minimum to keep the unit heating. Evidently, it must drop below that minimum and cause the heating to stop. Marysia’s shower runs at .7, which is usually good enough to keep the heat on.

What are we going to do about this? Removing the heater would be a huge expense and is not really an option. Just today, I took the flow restricter out of my shower head, which may help. We’ll see tomorrow when I shower. Obviously, this is not a very earth-friendly solution.

It must say it burns my bacon that this expensive, high-tech, efficient heater does not function as well as the funky old wasteful system. I’m going to call Rinnai’s tech support tomorrow to see if they can offer any other solutions.

P.S. The minimum flow-rate issue is well described here (scroll down to “Minimum Flow Rates”):

http://www.profitableplumbing.com/_wsn/page5.html

Update 9/9/2007:

After trying for weeks to get the Hicks plumbers to come out and check our unit (and withholding payment), we finally wrote them a letter saying we would ask a different plumber to inspect our heater and deduct their service charge from our bill. This finally prompted Hicks to come to our house and check it.

His diagnosis was that it was a flow issue, although he said it was quite unusual for there to be a flow problem with showers. He made some adjustments to the shower heads and said we should try them for awhile and that if the problem persisted he would swap out our unit for another to see if it was defective. However, from looking at it, he could not see any problems.

One irony is that right after sending that letter, my shower started working properly. The heat stopped cutting off. Mysterious. This was at about the same time as the weather here finally turned cooler — after we in the South had suffered through the hottest August since weather record-taking began. For weeks, the “cold” water coming from the tap felt warm to the touch — evidently it was over 98 degrees. Could it have been that mixing this “cold” water with the Rinnai-heated water was a problem? Could the warm “cold” water coming into the Rinnai unit have affected its heating process? Could the water pressure in our house have been reduced in some fashion due to the record-setting high temperatures and accompanying drought?

The plumber was unable to answer these questions. So the reason the unit started operating properly remains a mystery, which is frustrating; because we have no guarantee that this problem won’t recur next summer.

The ambiguity of this situation leads me to believe that, at least in warm regions, the Rinnai water heater is not a wise investment.

I do plan to send an email to Rinnai explaining my experience. We’ll see if they respond.

Update 10/30/2007:

The Rinnai continues to work. I can’t help but suspect that the cooler weather has had something to do with it. Now that the temps aren’t over 100 on a regular basis, the heater seems to have an easier time knowing when to come on.

So, we aren’t dissatisfied enough to rip the system out, but I cannot say our experience with Rinnai water heaters has been a fully satisfactory one. Indeed, if I were given the opportunity to do it over again, I would not buy a Rinnai water heater.

Rinnai did respond to my email, but essentially they told me to talk to the plumber. They offered no further guidance.

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Original Article Comments

When this article was posted on my original Crappy Software blog, it generated 17 outraged comments. After I discontinued that site (because Blogger turned to crap), I copied the comments over here to this much-improved, WordPress-based site.

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Blogger MrPages said…

Could it be that in the hotter weather you take cooler showers? If you have less hot water flowing into the mix (your at the same overall flow rate, but less hot water flow rate) the hot water tank isn’t sensing enough flow. When it cooled down outside, you used more hot water and it works.

A possible solution might be (that you’ve stumbled on to without realizing it): Rather than turning the cold on and warming it up with hot, turn the hot on to a good flow rate and then add cold to cool it. This guarantees your hot water flow rate no matter how hot or cool you want your shower.

We’ve examined these too, and had decided not to go with one for other reasons (our water is too cold in the winter, the degree-rise of the units we looked at isn’t high enough to give us a good flow rate of hot water in the winter)

Thanks for this, there isn’t much non-company-sponsored info on people using these in North America.

10:04 PM
Blogger channel said…
One possible solution would be to add an extra controller in your bathroom and set the temp required on the keypad, this way you only need to turn on the hot water side and will receive the needed flow at the correct temperature-Phill@Channel Plumbing.

3:21 PM
Anonymous Gray Frierson Haertig said…
Try lowering the output temperature of the Rinnai.

This will reduce the amount of cold water that you need to add to temper the hot water to proper showering temperature and thus increase the flow through the Rennai.

As someone else suggested, you could add remote controllers in each bathroom and just set the Rennai output temperature to whatever your preferred showering temperature is. Then you just open the hot valve in the shower and ALL of your shower water flows through the Rinnai.

To a first order approximation, the energy cost is the same whether you heat the watter hotter than you need and temper it with cold water, or just heat all of the water to the proper temperature.
Gray

3:34 PM
Blogger Jeremy Butler said…
Yes, we tried lowering the temperature. Turned it so low that no cold water was necessary when showering. It still crapped out.

So, the idea of paying another plumber to come in and install a second controller (which we would also have to pay for) to set the temp each time we shower does not seem worth the expense. Plus, it would be a hassle one doesn’t have to mess with with a conventional water heater.

This week we had a plumber over for some other problems and I had him check the first plumber’s work on the Rinnai. He (the second plumber) said it looked fine.

In addition, although the hot water hasn’t cut out completely on me since the summer, the temperature does fluctuate slightly while I’m showering. Not a good sign.

Thus, what I wrote earlier still stands: if I could do this over again, I would not buy a Rinnai.

7:27 PM
Anonymous Anonymous said…
High inlet temperatures mean the burner may cycle when flows are low. Min firing for the Rinnai is 15MBH and if the flow is above the .6 gpm but still too low that the 15MBH is going to over heat the water the burner will cycle off for a few seconds. This results in what is known as “cold water sandwich” where a slug of unheated water gets into the hot water piping. Adding a small tank in the hot water line will absorb this, tank can be a 5 to 10 gallon electric and doesn’t have to be wired (if it is not the water inside will cool during periods of non use and will have to be flushed out each time the hot water is activated). It would be easier to change the shower heads to 1.5 gpm or greater and set the outlet temp to 110º or whatever your ideal temp for showering is. There are wireless remotes available as well to install in the bathrooms that are easier than pulling wires.

9:33 AM
Blogger Jeremy Butler said…
Interesting… So, even though the flow is above .6gpm it might still cycle off if 15MBH will overheat the water.

But what is MBH exactly?

Thanks for the useful comment.

8:00 PM
Anonymous Greg said…
MBH is 1,000 BTU or British Thermal Unit per hour, 1 BTU is the energy required to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree farenheit. Min flow at 0.6 gallons is about 5 pounds of water per minute 300 pounds per hour, which will require 300 btus per degree of temperature rise. 15 MBH at 82% efficiency yields 12.3 MBH enough energy to raise the temp of the 300pounds of water 41 degrees which may exceed the setting on the heater causing the burner to cycle, setting the heater at a higher temperature won’t help as once you blend cold water with it your flow through the heater will drop below the .6 gpm.
My only solution would be to use less economical shower heads with flow rates sufficient to require the unit to fire at least minimum fire and flow.

2:33 PM
Blogger Jeremy Butler said…
Ah, I see…

So, if we assume the flow were near the minimum then it would run at 300 pounds per hour and the Rinnai is capable of raising that much water 41 degrees. If we further assume that the Rinnai is set to keep water at 110 degrees, then INCOMING water that is hotter than 69 degrees (110 minus 41) would cause it to cycle off because the Rinnai believes that heating it will put it over the 110 degree maximum. E.g., if the incoming water were 80 degrees, then heating it 41 degrees would make it 121 degrees — surpassing the thermostat’s maximum.

Thus, when we had a series of 100-plus degree days, the incoming groundwater was probably above 69 degrees and the Rinnai cycled off in order to avoid making the water too hot!

Very interesting… and frustrating. Wouldn’t this be a very common problem in warm-climate areas?

2:44 PM
Anonymous Anonymous said…
Saw your post on the Rinnai and felt I had to comment. I will start by agreeing with the anonymous poster that the minimum firing rate combined with the input temp can cause the unit to cycle in order to avoid overheating the water. I was told when I had my unit installed almost two years ago that these things really like to run at 1gpm or more minimum. We don’t have a problem with our shower, but our dish washer pulls about .65gpm so sometimes we see problems with that. Our combined problem is the fact that the dish washer only pulls about a gallon of water per wash, so the “cold water sandwich” mixes with what is supposed to be hot water and cools it even more. Add in the third strike of well water at a low of 35psi and we’re lucky the thing supplies hot water to the dish washer at all. We solved the problem by installing a 2 gallon point of use heater under the kitchen sink. Maybe you could do the same thing near your shower. I know it’s another strike on the energy efficiency scoreboard, but at least it’s not heating 30 gallons plus of standby water. The Rinnais are in my opinion one of the best tankless units on the market, but they do have their limitations.

2:39 PM
Anonymous Anonymous said…
Wish I had read this before I had a Rinnai installed. It’s been almost a month and I have had one good hot shower. The plumbers? have installed regulators on all appliances, removed the low flow indicators from shower heads, cleaned the filter so many times they finally broke it,(and which left water running from it. We were out of town so didn’t notice until 5 days later) and have almost driven me insane.

8:38 AM
Anonymous Anonymous said…
Looking into getting a tankless, the only two friends I know who have them experience this same issue. I just tested what .5 gpm would look like and it’s a strong stream to me. I rinse dishes in 1/4 of that flow.

Thank you for this article and all the comments. If you have any more news, let me know.

Otherwise I think I’ll stick with the big, ugly tank because I like hot water when I turn the faucet on and until I turn it off.

6:26 PM
Blogger Lamont said…
We have had a Rinnai for about 3 years… if you have hard water just dont buy one of these… you will constantly have chunks coming through, clogging filters etc. Youc an build yourself a pump and run vinegar through it once a month… but who wants to do that? This was DEFINATELY a bad decision!

10:43 PM
Anonymous Anonymous said…
I have had fluctuating temps with an upstairs shower where the pressure is lower than the downstairs. After much head-scratching, I found that if I leave the SINK hot water running about 1/3 – 1/2 way while I take my shower, no problem. Wasteful, but cheaper than re-doing plumbing.

9:31 PM
Anonymous Anonymous said…
Hey, thanks for the great post! I just had a Baxi tankless hot water / heating combo unit installed two months ago, and I have been having similar problems. No one tells you about the possible low-flow issue when you’re looking at these things, but it must be really common! In my case, at a gallon per minute, the water temperature fluctuates about 10 degrees F. Like you, plumbers kept coming over and saying “Hey, it’s fixed” but the problem persisted. Finally they took out all of our airators and flow-restrictors, which seems to me a terrible solution! I mean, I installed the thing to be MORE energy efficient! Now I have to use MORE hot water than I want to! I feel like the shower is beating me to death, it’s so strong!

Today we finally had a Baxi representative here, and after taking the whole thing apart and putting it back together, he basically said, that’s the way it is…

It has been summer here, so I’m thinking that the input temp may be the issue for us, as some here have described. I’m going to try to lower the water temp so there is a greater flow of hot water and less cold, but it looks like I’m just going to have to live with crappy showers during the summer months…

8:02 PM
Anonymous Anonymous said…
I too turn on the bathtub hot water when showering. Works fine now. BTW, at first used the sink, not the tub, until I neglected to notice that the drain was closed. DUH!

10:48 PM
Blogger Ralf Thompson said…
Well tankless water heaters are efficient and great these can’t heat the water like other water heaters but these are good too.

8:19 AM
Anonymous Anonymous said…
i also have a tankless water heater. all the same issues. i turn on the sink faucet while i shower. in the winter the heater shuts off because there’s also a MAX FLOW setting? WTF? it seems as though a quick change to the crappy software would do the trick. why does the min flow have to be 0.5 gpm? i understand it has to sense the flow, but that is clearly too high for many of us in the real friggin world. my kitchen faucet has a 0.2 gpm max flow. these settings make no sense.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I reluctantly acquired an iPhone.

My wife and I were forced into a new phone purchase by AT&T (ah yes, the return of a monopoly!), which discontinued the TDMA service and killed off our old phone. We were perfectly happy with it and with the super-low $30 plan we were on, but AT&T (the former Cingular) required us to both buy a new phone and, if we were to stay with them, “upgrade” to a plan that cost more money and suited us less.

But that’s a post for another Crappy Software day. What I want to chronicle today is the iPhone’s shortcomings. Actually, for the most part, I’d say the iPhone is filled with longcomings or shortgoings, or whatever the opposite of shortcomings might be. I’m 75% pleased with it, but that remaining 25% is driving me a little crazy.

25% iPhone Crap:

The biggest iPhone failings are in the Department of The iPhone as a PDA Replacement:

1. On Windows, the iPhone calendar only syncs with Microsoft Outlook.
2. There is no task manager, and thus no task manager to sync with a desktop application.
3. There is no password manager.

I absolutely hate MS Outlook and I’ve managed to avoid using it for many years. I do not want to start now. So, I’ve tried to get around this by using Google Calendar, then syncing it with Outlook using Remote Calendars and then syncing Outlook with the iPhone. Outlook thus becomes a mere conduit between Google and the iPhone. I should’ve known such a bass-ackwards workaround was doomed, but instead I invested about five hours futilely trying to get this to work. I’m sure Remote Calendars is a very fine open-source project and it’s probably Outlook’s fault, but RC kept crashing and stalling out and giving me odd errors such as “startindex cannot be less than zero.” Huh?

So I’m stuck. No suitable, acceptable desktop calendar app which which to sync my iPhone.

And Apple, how hard would it be to come up with a task manager? In this respect, I guess I’ll have to go with a Web-based manager. Remember the Milk looks promising, but I’m not ready to fully commit to it.

I’m already sorely missing a password manager. I’ve seen some Web-based solutions proposed for this, but I don’t feel comfortable trusting my most-secret passwords to some online service. It looks like I may have to keep using my Palm PDA solely for this purpose. I’ve got a great password manager on that: SplashID. Oh, if only it were ported to the iPhone!