Complaint Review: Rescue Rooter

So a few days ago I started noticing a weird smell in the kitchen.  After cleaning anything and everything I possibly thought it could be the smell was getting worse. I thought the only thing it could be was something crawled under the house and died.

So at 8:30 at night I go looking with a flashlight through the vents on our raised foundation house for the source of the smell.  After a few minutes I noticed a big pile of soap bubbles from the dishes we had just finished doing.  Good news was we found the smell. Bad news was it was time to call a plumber. 

Seeing that it was late at night I figured the only people who would come out would be the bigger companies.  I knew they would be a little expensive but at least just wanted somebody to tell me what was going on.  So a little while later a really nice guy named Ben showed up.  He went under the house and said not only was there kitchen issues but the main line that ran across the house was rusting out since its an older house that still had the galvanized steel.  He got on the phone to call out his supervisor Curtis because apparently he couldn't give an estimate for that or something.  Not really sure why.

So we waited about 30 minutes for Curtis to show up.  He didn't even go under the house.  He just looked at some pictures Ben took and listened to what he said was going on.  After that Curtis goes off to write the estimate.  He came back a few minutes later and said he could get it all taken care of for only $11,782.  After I shook off what he had just told me I said well its 11 at night at this point.  I need to look over the finances in the morning and see how I would pay for this.  Curtis was very quick to point out they have helpful financing available.

The next day we called out a few other plumbers for estimates.  These are the following quotes we got: $1,500 $1,100 and $700 for the same work.  Whenever we showed them the Rescue Rooter estimate they could never believe it.  One guy said he would replace every pipe in the house with new copper for half of what they wanted to replace one pipe and a few joints with plastic.   We eventully went with American Plumbing and Rooter who did an excellent job for $700. 

Stay away from Rescue Rooter.  Call them out for a free estimate if you just want to know whats wrong but do not let them do the service.   After reading other online reviews it seems like one of their more popular scams is to have the initial worker call out the supervisor and then hit you with the scare tactics and huge bill.