Ace Plumbing & Sewer Service

Cassie A.

In short: this company did not properly diagnose the problem and thus did not fix it, and in the process they charged me an exorbitant amount of money to do completely unnecessary repairs, and while doing those repairs they tore up my house!

In full:

In February I was getting puddles of water in the carpet next to the utility room. I called and made an appointment for someone to come out. They said the diagnosis was grim: something was wrong with a pipe that runs from the water heater to the kitchen - in order to fix it they would need to run a new line up the wall of the utility room, across the hallway, and down into the kitchen. I was told this would be a half inch pipe and that there would be ""minor damage"" to the wall. In addition, they couldn't believe that my water heater was still working since it was almost halfway full of sediment and it needed to be replaced.

I wanted to fix everything so I went ahead and paid them $1800 for it all.

The ""minor damage"" to the house? Just look at it in the pictures. I was expecting a half inch pipe, so maybe three-quarters of an inch for the hole for it to go through - look at how huge the holes are in the wall for the half inch pipe! They completely punched through way more drywall than necessary - there are multiple circle-shaped punch holes, as if they used a trial-and-error method to decide where to put the pipe. Additionally, in my kitchen there are two places where they duct taped some white cardboard to the wall. This is not my idea of ""minor.""

Fast forward to May. SAME PROBLEM starts occurring. I call the company to let them know that the problem hasn't been fixed and to ask if it's possible that the cause could have been something different. The man on the phone with me was SO INCREDIBLY RUDE. He seemed personally offended, would not offer any idea of what solutions may be, and said, ""Well, if you want us back out there, it's going to be the regular $94 an hour charge."" He was so rude to me that I just got off the phone with him and called someone else. Shame on me for not being more assertive.

I called Roto-Rooter out to look at things. The first thing the man says is ""Wow, there is absolutely no reason why they should have done the repair this way. It would have been a little bit more difficult to run it through the ceiling, but not that much. This is completely unnecessary and we can fix it for you."" When I told him who did this, he was surprised and said he thought this company usually did good work.

The man from Roto-Rooter ruled out the problem as being due to plumbing. He said that if it was plumbing there would be a number of other issues as well, none of which I had. They left - and didn't charge me anything.

Finally I dug around some more to try and get to the root of this. I noticed there was condensation around the air conditioning unit in the utility room. Lo and behold, it turned out that the drip pan wasn't draining properly and the water was running off to the side and out to the floor. Some Google led to me clean the pan and take a shop vac to the drains. Problem fixed.

So, I bought a new water heater, severely messed up the drywall in my house, and spent $1800 on repairs - when it could have been fixed by a shop vac. I understand this company are not HVAC specialists, but they should have at least been able to diagnose that the problem was not plumbing, which is what Roto-Rooter did!

Moral of the story: always get a second opinion.