As a former customer of Blew Baron I can confirm that Peter Garland is one shady character, IMHO. Whether or not his HX will in fact heat anything remains to be seen, as we have not been able to install it in a Performer 405, even though we were assured it would be made to fit in our machine. My business partner Chris Newman has been waging the battle online with Mr Garland, since he will not return phone calls and has stated, "you're on your own". We purchased his HX because a percentage of our business is pressure washing, and the HX we purchased was supposed to be 3000+ PSI, which we hoped would allow us to do more than clean carpet with our Performer. The OEM HX was only rated to 1200 PSI.
Perhaps we were suckers, or naive, but we've done a lot of business on ebay for all types of items and in general, people are pretty decent. When we considered Peter's HX, we did so with the understanding that we were trying to find a part for one of the most widely used machines in the industry, and Peter was clear in his answer when we asked if he could make it to fit the Performer. He assured us it would fit, no problem.
Peter has since agreed to refund $830 of the $1005 we have invested with him. Oh yeah, after we paid him for the original agreed upon amount, he told us he would need an additional $200 in order to actually ship us the part, due to all this additional work he had to do to make the HX fit such a rare, exotic machine. It is over a month ago since he agreed to a refund, after having us send the HX back to him. We have not received anything from him, other than excuses. Mr Garland thinks that he can avoid negative feedback by closing deals off ebay, but what he's finding is that google does a good job of tracking discussions like this, and the negative karma surrounding him online will cost him much more than $830. Too bad this thread will not be seen by google... or will it? We still hold a glimmer of hope we'll see our money, but life's lessons aren't free, and we'll learn from this one.
