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Paul, can you explain what you said like I was a 5 year old…..

What I have found is that population density has a very strong effect here: In more sparsely populated areas, consumers are simply happy to have a normal sounding person that returns a call and is willing to come out in a reasonable time frame (Very hard to find).

So, a fairly professional person or company in the sticks, does not suffer the tire kicking and price shopping that even highly competent and legitimate individuals and contractors in large cities and M.S.A.s are subject to.

In these densely populated areas, on the outskirts of medium and large cities, the consumer has a whole sub-strata of fairly competent to highly competent staff who work for large and medium sized Contractors, Govt, universities, hospitals et al who Moonlight - with no professional license or insurance - but can get the job done to varying degrees of success. Their numbers are Legion.

Legit, professional, licensed and insured contractors fight a daily battle... struggling to compete with "competition" who can undercut them on every front and at every angle. The key is that the public, who are keenly aware of whose who, will take that gamble if they can spend alot less.

Even if one becomes very adept at filtering through the daily volume of phone calls, texts and email inquiries about possible work, it's still a huge time eater and can be quite frustrating and demoralizing. Some very excellent and legit professionals grow weary of the fight and can wind up souring on all inquiries.

Mad Dog

Lots of great stuff to reply to here, and I will later. But first, as per @EdTheHeaterMan’s suggestion, for the very first time to the general public, a photo of the thick black sludge that was only in my mind, not the boiler, after a year of operation. This is with the small leak on the supply.

(Given this nice gray water, would it still be worth it to treat the system with cleaner then inhibitor like Sentinel’s X400 and X100 or another brand? The system will be open soon to repair that leak, however if that repair is all I do I’d just have to drain enough to get below the supply tapping — zones closed — which is a lot different than draining the whole system and refilling with all that fresh oxygen. Another possibility is just to use the inhibitor, in theory Sentinel’s can be injected with little or no draining.)

It is quite overwhelming, the number of people who tell me in a given week that nobody will call them back. I will admit that I forget sometimes, but 99% of the time I will drop what I'm doing to take a call. I will listen to what they have to say and if I don't have the time or desire to perform said task, I simply tell them the truth. The vast majority of those saying they couldn't get a call back are polite with reasonable requests, at least from my POV (and I'm probably more judgemental that I should be), so it's doubtful that they were being ignored due to something they said in the voicemail. Sure I can move that spigot, but I have to charge it as a service call and it's going to be expensive despite being a "simple" job. If I have to spend 2 hours driving to and from your location and another hour swapping a circulator and purging your system, that's not a "simple job" anymore. Most people understand that, but I've learned to be upfront with everybody that calls for service and just say it's $$ for my first hour and $ per hour after that including windshield time round trip, plus parts. Some will have a conniption and call somebody else, but most just want it fixed. Once in awhile it even turns into a $$$$ job with a whole new system, though I'm not the "oh my gosh this is going to start a fire, you need a whole new system ASAP or we're going to have to red tag it" kind of person. We can throw parts at this and limp it along if you want, but I'll leave it entirely up to you. Very seldom do they want to limp it, and I think many of them trust my opinion more because I made the effort to take their call and get over there tomorrow to assess rather than have Harriett write up a proposal when she gets to it next month.

Drive by a Wawa at lunchtime, ask a person in a HVAC van. They usually scrap, and they can recover the refrigerant. They can be checked for acid and non condensables to determine its fate.