Blue Watchdog Systems

Summary:  While at least one of their technicians is quite knowledgeable and responsive, Patrick Crais (the owner) is rather unprofessional and it is mainly because of him that I would never work with them again, nor can I recommend them to others. Our first water bill after their work was 400% of our usual water bill, all due to a leak in the irrigation system for which Patrick refused to accept any culpability. If you can get your mind around that kind of risk, please read on to get the full story...

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Full story: We recently moved into our home and have had high water bills and problems with landscape irrigation (too much water in some places, not enough in others). We read about Blue Watch Dog online and asked them to come by and give us an estimate. They bid $1000 (inclusive of labor only, not parts) to spend a full day finding and repairing everything they could, and then anything that went beyond a day would be billed above the $1000. I told Patrick I had managed to get my water bill down significantly by simply reducing watering times, so I was not willing to spend $1000. We agreed to $600 for a single day's work, which I was happy with, especially knowing that it was likely they would need more than a full day and that I would have to pay more. Patrick asked his lead technician, Gregg to come and do the work. Gregg is very knowledgeable about irrigation systems and water usage, and I was impressed by his diligence in examining every aspect of our irrigation system and explaining the issues to me. They repaired most of the main issues in the first day of work, but some others remained and I agreed that I wanted them to come back and fix the additional issues. They returned a couple of weeks later and finished the work. I walked around the property with Gregg and was satisfied with what they had done. There were a number of issues with the system that Gregg had found and repaired and he walked me through all of them in great detail. I felt the $1200 or so we spent in total was more expensive than my gardener had bid to do the repairs, but that I had learned a great deal about the system and about our water usage.

About a month later, I received a water bill that was 4 times higher than my usual bill. From the gallons used, it was clear there had been a huge leak. It was also clear from observing the water meter that the leak had stopped. Patrick and his team determined that the leak had occurred in the two week hiatus between their initial work and their later work. To make a long story short, his judgement was that a freak accident had occurred in a part of the system that had been previously turned off, but which they turned back on and which developed a massive leak in the 2 weeks between when they started and finished their work. The leak happened, he said, because a valve broke and part of it lodged in a pipe downstream, and he has never seen such an event in all his experience. I told Patrick that I understood this may be an unusual event, and I acknowledged that his team had done some good work by finding and fixing many small problems throughout the system. So I asked him to refund us $500 of the $1200 we had paid him. I explained to him that I thought this was a fair resolution. $500 represents only 30% of the $1500 overage that the leak had cost above our historical water bill, and it represents less than 50% of the fees we had paid Blue Watch Dog. But he refused to admit that his team could be culpable at all.

Let's face it: disasters sometimes occur in the course of ordinary business, and it is often difficult to allocate responsibility accurately. However, in my experience reasonable and professional contractors admit when a problem happens on their watch (especially when that problem, as is the case here, occurred in a part of the system that had been previously turned off), and they are willing to negotiate some refund. One can never prevent unexpected issues from arising, but some people handle these issues more professionally than others. Patrick simply refused to admit any responsibility, and it was no longer worth my time to keep discussing the matter with him.

I subsequently ran this by a friend who is a very reputable general contractor with over 25 years experience in the area who said that when he has had disasters that occurred during the course of his work (as happens to the best of contractors), he has usually shared the cost at least 50-50 with the client. He also suggested that a more diligent contractor would likely have completely shut off the zone in question until the the repair was complete, eliminating even the very small risk that a "freak" valve break could lead to a $1500 leak.

The technician, Greg, took an hour and a half to come up with what was causing the problem and what he thought needed to be done.  He had a hard time finding the valves, which I would think would be something he would be trained to do.  He said the problem was I had no master valve and that one station valve was acting as the master and that is why it came on each time I ran each station.  He proposed digging up the piping and rerouting it around the faulty valve to solve the problem, an expensive and time consuming solution. After I paid him,  I called the previous owner of the house and he told me that there was in fact a master valve (that Greg failed to find) and where it was located.  Greg's boss at Blue Watchdog was supposed to call me over the weekend to schedule the 'pipe rerouting', but he never called to follow up with me.   So I am back to square one and out $117.00 for basically bad advice from a technician who could not figure out how my irrigation system worked or what is really wrong with it.  From my conversation with Greg it did not sound like they do a lot of residential repair work. They advertise as a water conservation company so perhaps they should stick to that rather than repair. 

UPDATE:  I spoke with the owner about the situation and he refunded my money so I am upgrading my recommendation from F to a C