Sears Heating & Air Conditioning

We have had an awful experience with Sears Home. As part of an eco audit a few years ago, we updated our A/C, furnace and water heater. We have absolutely no complaints about the furnace or the a/c, but the tankless water heater we rent, has been a lemon from the start and our experience with Sears customer service has been a nightmare.
To be fair, most of the customer service reps and repairmen have been generally nice, if entirely ineffective. We have had multiple repairs to this unit and they refuse to replace it, even though it is a rental. Even some of the techs have agreed this is a poor model and Sears should replace it -- they no longer install it this model -- but Sears policy is to refuse it. We’ve been told it needs to have the exact same issue 3 times before they replace it. It broke again before Christmas, and the repair technician did something and blocked a pipe, which flooded our basement. That was 4 months ago, and we still haven’t heard about our claim. In the meantime, there have been many other issues, and Sears passed us off to a contractor to fix it, who also gave up on it and sent it back to Sears. It appears to be leaking again, though currently the sump pump can keep up with it.
After over 30 service visits – and likely over a 100 calls to customer service -- and many missed days of work on our behalf to meet the repair men, my husband called another company to see about renting one of their units. According to our contract with Sears, if we provide 30 days written notice, and allow them to remove the unit (which apparently is not standard for other companies), for a fee then we can terminate the contract. My husband called them today to arrange for them to pick it up and they are refusing and telling us that we will have to pay all sorts of penalties. He was put on hold and then hung up on several times today. He has had countless people promise him they will look into this and get back to him, and only one ever has – and she basically said there’s nothing she can do. We are tired of the noises this thing makes, afraid it will flood our basement again, and completely over Sears. We used to buy all sort of things from there, but last week I refused to buy my friend a registry item for her baby shower from there because I cannot support this company any longer.