Hiring Sun Splash Pools and Spas for the installation of an in-ground pool has unquestionably been the worst buying decision of our lives. If you are thinking about an in-ground swimming pool, you may want to reconsider; however, if you are thinking about hiring Sun Splash, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. I have hesitated to post a review of our experience because, nearly a year later, our pool has not been completed to our satisfaction; however, I feel a moral obligation to warn others against repeating our mistake. If you read positive reviews about this company, I would caution against taking them seriously. I strongly suspect that those may have been written by friends of the contractor or the contractor himself.
The only part of our project that was completed in a timely manner was the signing of the contract and the start of excavation, and that is where our problems began ... right at the start. Once you have a big hole in your yard and a mountain of dirt, it is difficult to turn back. Get used to looking at that big hole and a mountain of dirt for a long, long time. Also get ready to be billed for a long list of cost overruns, once the project gets started. We agreed to pay for a $36,000.00 pool project and would never have entered into the project had we known that the final cost would be $45,000.00. Sun Splash Pools and Spas knows that, too, and that is why they will "lowball" the price on the contract.
Detailed soil data and geographic information are readily available from the Massachusetts Office of Geographic Information, the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station, and the United States Soil Conservation Service. Anyone with years of experience in pool installations should be accessing this data prior to quoting on a project and should easily be aware that there are glacially deposited rocks in the Southern New England subsoil. To excavate under the presumption of a best case scenario that simply does not exist in reality is, at minimum, highly irresponsible. It allows an unscrupulous contractor to write up an order at a unrealistically low price that he knows will have no basis in reality.
Our biggest problem with this project is the false allegation that this type of pool installation takes 3-4 weeks, "5 weeks under the worst case scenario", and the assurance that we would be "swimming by the Fourth of July". It did not take long for us to realize that nothing that the contractor would tell us came anywhere close to constituting the truth.
Although this company may have earned a positive reputation in years past, something has gone seriously wrong. The volume and severity of complaints seem to have dramatically increased in 2011, probably the result of writing up more business than the company could handle. As a result, our project was repeatedly stalled, and we were continually on the receiving end of broken promises. As stated in the beginning of this review, this was without question the worst buying decision of our lives, and our problems have still not been properly resolved. read more