Summer in Atlanta usually means sweating through the heat, not sweating over whether your air conditioner will still be there when you get home. But that is exactly what a growing number of metro Atlanta property owners are dealing with this season, as thieves have been swiping entire HVAC units in broad daylight, leaving victims without cool air and without thousands of dollars they didn’t budget to spend twice.
Casey Ingram is one of those victims. He was out to dinner with his wife when his Ring doorbell camera caught two men pulling into his driveway, backing a truck right up to his AC unit, and driving off with the whole thing. No tag on the truck. Low hats. In and out in under seven minutes. It is the kind of footage that makes you wonder if these guys rehearsed it, because there was nothing frantic about the job. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Ingram ended up paying nearly $3,000 for a replacement unit on a property he was preparing to sell, reported WSB-TV, which is its own kind of insult. You fix up a house to get it ready for a new owner, and somebody decides your investment is their payday. He has since installed a protective cage around the new unit, and honestly, that feels like the smart move for anyone in an affected neighborhood going forward.
Security Measures
Security contractors are seeing the same pattern. Chris Welch, who owns Ornamental Security, says he has never fielded this many AC theft calls in his three decades in business. He recently outfitted a Vine City Airbnb with a cage after its unit was stolen overnight, and he has also worked on a Kroger grocery store where thieves stripped copper and other metals from multiple units…