We bought a portable Air Conditioner from Appliances Direct last year. It worked for the entire summer, and in the winter we used it's dehumidifier function.
In this years heat wave, the air cooling function kept cutting off, and it would only work on fan function. My husband emailed them as it was under warranty, they asked for a photo of it installed. We sent one of it installed as per the instructions. Appliances Direct then claimed it was incorrectly installed and that we'd blown the compressor so the warranty was void.
DH pointed out that they can't make that judgement without opening it up as the compressor is internal, so they eventually agreed to take it back and have their engineer look at it to establish whether the fault met the warranty conditions.
My husband chased Appliances Direct after they'd had air conditioner a week, and Appliances Direct said that their engineer tested the air conditioner and it was in working order, however they were willing to refund, or pay £600 for the model they had in stock as all their air cons are out of stock.
DH emailed back asking if we can just have our air con back if it's apparently in working order. And they emailed back saying "apologies, we can't send your air conditioner back as we've sold it".
All correspondence has been via email, so we have a paper trail showing that it was definitely in for inspection and potentially repair. They never asked if they could sell it, we never mentioned it being sold.
DH wants to ask them to replace with one of the ones they tried to upsell us, at no extra cost.
I'm absolutely raging, and want to escalate this, because imo it amounts to theft.
AIBU for wanting to escalate now instead of asking for a replacement?