Great Service but greatly inflated prices
I have been using this company for over a year on a maintenance plan and I put a nice review up just after starting with them for the work that they did. However, I had a service on a hot water heater about 6 months ago. It involved a lack of hot water because one of the heating elements was out. The technician drained the tank, unscrewed the bad element, screwed in the new element and refilled the tank. The bulk of the work involved waiting for the tank to drain and then refill. Unscrewing the old element and screwing in the new element, took 2 minutes. I looked up the element on the internet and found that it was an average price of $23. The charge for the repair was over $300 and the technician was in and out in under an hour. Problem solved.
I filed this experience away until an issue last week when my gas fired heater went out. Now let me first say that customer service and the service technicians have always been extremely friendly and they work very hard to get out to the house and get things taken care of. However, having no heat on a Friday and having to wait until Monday with any hope of repair is not the best prospect in the middle of winter. However, the technician determined that the main circuit board on the heater had gone out and a new one could not be ordered until this past Monday. With that prior experience in mind, I looked up the board that would be needed on the internet and found it for overnight shipping from Amazon for $164. I read several reviews online that indicated that you simply take a picture of the board and swap one wire out for the other and the entire job can be done by a novice in 20 min. As I feared, I received the call from the technician on Monday who had gotten a quote on the board. Job cost would be over $450 to replace the board, including labor.
if you are not aware, customer service and the technicians have no idea what the charges are for work to be done. They simply input what needs to occur into the system and the charge is generated and so you don't even get a breakdown of a cost when they give you an estimate. These two examples clearly point to price gouging and once I received the quote for this recent repair, I told the technician and then I called the office and informed them that I would not be continuing service with their company. It's ridiculous that they can charge the fees that they do and it's an insult to the fine customer service and technicians that they employ because they are left explaining that there's nothing they can do about the prices. Well, there's something that I can do for sure.
I received the board today, took a picture of the old one, swapped out the wires and I had my heat up and running fine in 20 minutes.
The price for repair didn't include the diagnostic part. The maintenance plan covered that and so the entire price quoted was to obtain the board and swap it out which was easily done as I described above. I understand that they're running a business but I just can't get behind that sort of markup on parts and labor.
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