On January 16th my tenant called me and stated that the water company had called her about a possible leak at our property. The water company was noticing huge amounts of water being used, which was not normal.
Paragon Plumbing went out to the property the following week after I called them and said they did notice that the back yard was overly moist. At that point they wanted to get a leak detention company out there to pin point the leak, then bring in a backhoe to dig up the dirt and then they could repair the leak. This seemed excessive, but they said this has been happening all over Prescott Valley and that they have been doing a lot of this type of work. Later they called back and said that since there was Sch 20 PVC pipe on the property they would recommend removing all the PVC pipes and replacing them with PEX Piping, so we would not have this problem again. This made a lot of sense.
After numerous phone calls on our part, we finally received the bid on February 2nd. Turns out the person who does the bids and anything else concerning site work is Bob, who only works Tuesday through Thursday. And as we found out later, he is the only one who will talk to us about what is happening at the job site. So if he does not return your phone call by Thursday, you are out of luck until the following Tuesday.
The bid was higher than we were expecting $1,990, but we wanted the work done correctly, we thought it would be money well spent. From the point they received our 50% deposit, it was like a comedy of errors. Turns out the leak detection company could not actually find the location of the pipes, even though they charged us as if they did. So the backhoe ended up doing a lot more digging then they had originally planned. Later we found out, they could not replace the PVC pipes because the pipes go under the deck and they could not get to them. We agreed not to switch to the new piping and they stated that this should save us some money. Turns out that due to the excessive backhoe digging a lot of the irrigation pipes were now also broken and not usable. Unfortunately, I did not hear this from Paragon Plumbing but from my landscaper weeks later.
It turns out the original problem was caused by one PVC connection not being glued, even though it had lasted over 30 years previously.
So the pipe was glued and the dirt was spread around. They said the best way to prevent this from happening in the future was to place a pressure regulator on the line from the meter to the house. I have done this type of work before and knew that it was not very hard to do, so I assume that it would not be that expensive either. This was my fault for not asking up front what this charge would be. They said that since they had already dug up the area already and it would be easy for them to add it now. Well it turns out when I received the invoice; this work was an additional $696. When I called them about this (naturally I had to wait over a several days to talk with Bob) he said this bill was not excessive.
From the very beginning they seemed overworked, over booked and like they were trying to cover their tracks. Working with them was very frustrating. However, I must mention that their office staff was great and very personable; however she could not talk about the work being done at the site.
The tenant never knew what days they were going to turn up or if she would have water that day. There was no follow through communication with us or with her.
The work was finally completed over a month later and I received their invoice at the end of February. That was the first time I knew that the bill had raised to $2,800.
I would have been so much better if I would have hired a day laborer , dug a trench, found the leak and glued it myself. Then at least the backyard would not be an entire disaster now, the irrigation piping would not be broken in several spots, I would not have to replace the landscaping, nor have to put down a truck load of DG.
I would not recommend this company to anyone. read more
