Before you hire any Water Control company hire a plumber to make sure you really need drain tile…read more After we hired this company we still had seeping water issues. After they were called twice they finally told us we had a leaking pipe. In addition, an employee stole a cellphone and a FIT BIT watch from our home and damaged our egress window. They fixed the egress window. The owner was not very pleasant, made us feel like we were not telling the truth. My husband literally spent hours changing passwords and canceling credit cards since the cellphone contained sensitive information. A few days later through Google find my device we pinned the cellphone at this business location, we called the police and had to take time away from our work to retrieve our phone. We never retreived our FITBIT watch. It was a nightmare! The company apologized but the damage was done!! The job itself was OK.. our sump pump has not been running at all .. probably because we never needed the drain tile in the first place. Be on alert when you have strangers coming in your house!! Apologies are not good enough after what this company put us through!!

We have had a little water come into an unfinished part of our basement after every rainstorm since…read morewe moved in (almost a decade ago) and it's clear it had gone on for a long time before that. Obviously, it's something we want to fix. In 2023, we sought a quote from another company, Innovative Basement Authority (oh yiss we naming names). They sent a man out after a month, and with a week of preparatory emails insisting that all decisionmakers be present for the appointment and that it would take no less than 90 minutes. Their man went down in our basement for nearly an hour with a laser to take measurements by himself, then came back up and told us the bad news: it was a serious problem, it would cost $16,000 to install a complicated drainage system to resolve, there were no cheaper options that would solve the problem, if we didn't fix it soon it could cause serious foundation damage and maybe cost twice that much, but thank God he was able to offer us a series of (complicated) discounts and financing down to $11,000 as long as we signed immediately. We were only seeking a quote, as we had been clear about from the start, but the Innovative salesman was very aggressive and refused to take "maybe" for an answer. My wife was so upset by the very unpleasant experience that she refused to even consider getting another quote -- even from another company -- for several years, while I dealt with Innovative's continuing email and phone campaign ("special financing offer!") for the next six months. I was still worried about what the Innovative man said about the problem potentially getting much worse (and more expensive) in the near future, so, this year, I finally prevailed on my wife to let me get another quote, on condition that she be allowed to be at least ten miles away from the house at the time. I called Standard Water on a Wednesday. Without further ado, their man Todd was at our door the following Monday, and we almost got a Friday appointment. Todd, too, headed down the basement with a laser, but the contrast was like night and day. He didn't kick me out to take his measurements by himself, but had a conversation with me about the space, when it was built, and my concerns, then started explaining everything he was seeing. I am very dumb about homes (my talents lie elsewhere), and he was happy to explain... well, a very great deal about my own home to me, pointing out how the basement had likely developed over time, where the owners had punched a hole in the original foundation, and where the water was going. He made some suggestions about things I might do to mitigate the problem in the near-term, gently shot down some ignorant suggestions of my own, and advised me on how to prepare the space for full treatment (by Standard Water, of course) on my own time, saving me money. Todd also told me honestly that, no, my house was not going to fall over because of this isolated seepage, and that it poses no imminent threat to the rest of the house. Then he explained how Standard's solution would interact with our existing sump system, why it would greatly improve our existing radon system, and gave a couple different ideas for how he would suggest arranging things if we went ahead with the project, taking laser measurements as we talked. His quote: $5800, with a "June discount" down to $5500 if we made a decision in the next week (not on the spot). No pressure tactics, no nonsense, just a good conversation about the job and the bottom line. He was in and out in 30 minutes, not 90. One follow-up email thanked us for the opportunity to come into our home, and we've heard nothing since -- and with every day of silence that passes, Standard rises in my esteem. Partly as a result of Todd's honest answers to my questions (but mostly because, unrelatedly, our car got totaled and we need to replace it, so there goes all our money), we are not going forward with the project this year. However, we are eventually going to solve this water thing. When we do, there is no doubt in my mind we'll be calling Standard and nobody else. In the meantime, a nice review seemed like the least I could do in exchange for a lot of valuable information and even more valuable peace of mind.