I started out an eager and enthusiastic customer of Achieve Renewable Energy LLC. We chose to participate in the HeatSmart program of the towns of Concord, Carlisle, and Lincoln MA in 2018. We were interested in replacing our home’s old central air conditioning and heating systems with a cleaner, more efficient geothermal heating/cooling system.
Achieve Renewable Energy LLC’s director, Lawrence “Larry” Lessard, visited our home to assess it for a geothermal (a.k.a. ground source heat pump) system. He concluded it was suitable for such a system and wrote up a custom proposal for the project.
We went to substantial efforts to secure loans and grants for the geothermal project. We got a $25,000 MassSave Heat Loan and paid that to Achieve Renewable Energy LLC as the deposit. Then we waited for them to install the geothermal system. And then we waited longer. Month after month we were having to make loan payments for a nonexistent geothermal system! And I was finding Achieve Renewable Energy LLC was not particularly responsive or reliable, no matter the problems or complaints. I would send an email and get no response. So I’d send another email about the same matter days later… and get no response. And on it went.
Then there was Achieve Renewable Energy LLC’s bungling. Billing us for money we did not owe. Botching several tasks in the project, sometimes dangerously. Usually making no apology for their errors. And sometimes communicating in a fashion that I found offensive and counterproductive.
To me, it was an overly long, needlessly aggravating, sloppy project. But that wasn’t necessarily the worst of it. The worst was possibly when Achieve Renewable Energy LLC finally installed our WaterFurnace geothermal (GSHP) system. Because that’s when our electricity bills skyrocketed. We started having to pay far more to heat our home with their new geothermal system than what Achieve Renewable Energy LLC estimated in our contract. And unlike our prior oil-fueled heating system, the geothermal system Achieve Renewable Energy LLC installed did not heat our home well. It could not maintain normal minimum living space temperatures during winter.
And what was Achieve Renewable Energy LLC’s director, Larry Lessard’s response to my complaints about this mess? He expressed no concern for the financial difficulty it was causing us. And he made no apology for his project’s failure to deliver the “dramatic” reduction in our heating and cooling costs his contract promised. Frankly, he didn’t even seem concerned with any of that. Instead, he blamed our house. Yes, the very same house he visited and examined before preparing a custom proposal for the geothermal project.
Unfortunately, that was only the tip of the iceberg. As I delved further, I discovered that Achieve Renewable Energy LLC and its subcontractors had not obtained the required ducting permit; had committed and left us with multiple electrical code violations; installed a geothermal heat pump with a full load heating capacity well below our home’s true heating load / needs; had made numerous misleading statements about this project both to me and to multiple MA state agencies to obtain money from us; and had left other geothermal system customers of theirs in similar predicaments with similar complaints. For more details of and documentation of those and other complaints and reviews, I invite you to explore the rest of this website.
I hope this website is informative and helpful for you. Want to share your own story about Achieve Renewable Energy LLC and its geothermal system projects? Have questions or feedback for me? I welcome you to use the form on this site to contact me.