Complaint Review: Perma-Seal Basement Systems

WARNING:  Read the contract very carefully.  The final clause in the contract is an Arbitration Clause that dictates any and all disputes must be handled through a mandatory arbitration.  This means if and when they perform their shoddy work on your basement or crawlspace, YOU CANNOT SEEK LEGAL ACTION AGAINST THEM in a court of law.  I tried and failed.  The cost of this mandatory arbitration is currently $775 for any claim between $0 and $10,000, plus another $200 final fee for any case that proceeds to a hearing.  How many consumers can afford to spend another $1000 when they've already spent several thousand?  Especially when you can t expect to recoup all of your money, even if you were to resolve your dispute through arbitration. 

Do your homework on this company.  Reading reviews such as this is a good step.  I foolishly relied on their A+ Better Business Bureau rating, but have since learned that Roy Spencer, president of Perma-Seal, is also the chairman of the board of the BBB of Northern Illinois and Chicago.  Feel free to draw your own conclusions on that.  The overwhelming majority of reviews of Perma-Seal on sites such as this and Yelp, etc., are negative.  It is a rarity to find a 4 or 5 star review. 

Briefly, our experience with this company was that their salesman lied to us about them leveling out the uneven dirt floor in our crawlspace.  We were later told they don't do that.  It also wasn't until after the work had been done that we were informed that the base of the concrete support pillars in our crawl being uneven with the ground wouldn't allow them to tighten the plastic they had laid and that we d be stuck with a floor that looks like an unmade bed. 

Perma-Seal performed service calls on two occasions to attempt to address our complaints and both times we were told that there was nothing more they could do.  Instead, we were told that our crawlspace looked good "for a dirt crawl".  Yet when we were sold on this system, there was never any qualifier that it would only look good for a dirt crawl.  I paid $4500 for it to look good.  Period.  The dirt crawl displayed in their promotional materials looks good.  It's not unreasonable that I expect mine to look comparable. 

If our crawlspace were in good shape to begin with, we would've had no need for a company such as Perma-Seal.  We were never informed that our uneven floor would be an issue before signing on the dotted line.  Silly me, I figured a company that specializes in sealing crawlspaces would have some sort of system for dealing with these situations.  Something more palatable than draping the plastic between support pillars like a circus tent. 

We feel that we were mislead, if not lied to by these people.  Don't make the same mistake we did.  Look into any and all other options.  In my opinion, when you deal with Perma-Seal you deal with nothing but aggravation.