Incompetent, unethical, unprofessional.
Came out to service a well pump shared by 3 houses -- never contacted the third house (ours) or checked that we were receiving water. Set the water pressure at the lowest acceptable level and, since we are uphill, we were not getting enough water pressure.
Called them later in the day and informed them of the situation. They sent a technician out, who kept saying "You should have water. There's pressure." I showed him that ZERO water was coming out of any of our faucets. Then he seemed to think it was another issue -- he removed our particle filter and said "Huh, it's pretty clean. Probably not a problem here." and, of course, it didn't fix the problem... still no water. He said "Well, you have pressure." I asked "How can you tell how much pressure we have? Do you have a gauge or something you could use to actually check the pressure? (all he was doing was letting some water run over his hand down at the line/filter and saying "Yep, there's pressure.") He said "Yeah, let me go get that from my van." Several minutes later, he came back and said "Sorry, I didn't actually have a pressure gauge on me, I had to rig one up." (What sort of water pump "professional" checks pressure using just their hand, and doesn't have a pressure gauge??)
After checking the pressure he said "Huh. Yeah, you have a pressure drop of about 10 from what it is at the well." (gee, ya think?? Our house is uphill from the well... any pump professional should know that moving UP pipes is going to reduce water pressure) Then he said "I had set the pressure at the low end of the range. Let me bump it up." So he did, and the problem was finally fixed -- it should never have been a problem in the first place if (a) he had checked if we had water before leaving, and (b) set pressure at appropriate setting.
I was fine and happy at that point... until we received a bill which specifically had a SECOND charge on it (over $100) just for that return trip to fix the problem that THEY caused through their negligence/incompetence in the first place. This is unacceptable, and the only time in my life a business has billed me because they had to come back to fix their own error.
In addition, they LIED on the invoice, stating that the problem we had was due to our filter (it wasn't -- it was due to incorrect pump pressure)
When I contacted them via email and said this was unacceptable and they needed to fix the bill (by removing that 2nd charge), the manager, Nik Lutz, got snarky and condescending and said that he found my email complaining about the service and the bill to be "disturbing", and that he was going to "acquiesce" to my demands -- but at no point did he admit that they screwed up, or give a sincere apology. He said they are "uncommonly ethical" (apparently, doing sub-par work, not checking with the home owners to see if they have water before leaving, and then double-billing for it and lying about services rendered and problems encountered is considered "uncommonly ethical" by Oakville Pump)
I also informed them I would have to video-record any and all work performed by them from now on, and would advise my neighbors to do the same, since they have proven that they can't be trusted in their reporting and billing. His response to this was to provide me names of other services I could use instead of Oakville Pump.
What does that tell you when a business would rather lose your business and send you to competitors rather than having their work documented/recorded? It tells you either they have no faith in the competence of their employees, or they KNOWINGLY engage in these shady business practices and don't want the truth to come to light.
So, we got incompetent service, followed up with unethical billing, and topped off with unprofessional communications
AVOID this company. If you do use them, record everything, including your communications (even spoken/verbal) with the technician, as well as video or photos of what troubleshooting and work they actually do. read more
