I wonder if that's the reason my HVAC guy tried to charge me $700 for running a thermostat cable less than 8 feet (that I later did myself in less than 30 minutes).
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Thermostat: your system isn't wired for two stage.
Me: ?!?
Look under thermostat, nope, previous wiring. Call installer company (one of the biggest in the area). "We'll come out and have a look tomorrow." They do, and give me a similar quote, maybe $500ish.
Uh, no. I paid for the installation of a two stage system. That installation should include the wiring to run the system as a two stage system.
Another call and it was no charge, but I shouldn't have had to make either call.
And then of course, being the "cynic" I am, I wonder how many people with this company that have brand new two stage systems happily running on single stage.
This is after I was told if I waited for the off-season, there was a 15% discount. But the AC died at the start of summer, so I said, I'll take it ASAP. I made a down payment, duly waited... and then was told - the night before the install - that they wouldn't be there, because they had no stock of the air conditioner (what, you just discovered that now?). No big deal, my furnace was working fine. I'll wait. Six-eight months. Which, fine, it got installed before next summer. But if I'd known that you had no supply, and were never going to be able to honor the installation window, I'd have opted for the "off-season" install.
High-efficiency, dual stage furnace. There were cheaper options, but I didn't want the cheapest option.
I fixed it myself on two different occasions when I'd woken up to a super-cold house in the middle of the night, with both fixes relating to condensation building up where it shouldn't. (One of these was a manufacturing fault that was corrected by slightly shortening a rubber hose, and the other was an installation fault relating to the drain plumbing.)
Sure, I could have called the next day and maybe they'd have shown up eventually to fix it (maybe for "free"), but meh: I got it sorted, my fixes were cromulent and safe, and I had a warm house sooner instead of later. The installation manual contained enough theory of operation that it wasn't too bad for me to get a solid understanding of the concepts at play and to proceed with good confidence.
It was a scorching hot day in July before they showed up to charge the aircon so that it could be used, and they never did come back to set it up for two-stage operation despite promising to do so (so I paid extra for nothing).
4/10, at least they managed to graft on the new duct work with good transitions and reasonable tightness, and it was somehow reasonably well-balanced by default.
(I'd have configured the dual-stage bits myself, too, but I didn't have the right tools. It's been a rather long ago now, but IIRC I needed two digital thermometers to make sure the heat rise was correct and a manometer to correctly set the first-stage blower speed. Buying these tools would have been cheaper than paying for a service call with another company and was kind of a no-brainer to me, but another flood came by before I had the chance and forever changed our perspective on living in that location.)