Herr Plumbing

"We are very sorry that this customer feels they were not given good service. As you can see from all of our other reports that this is not the norm for Herr Plumbing. What we have here is a very unfortunate sequence of events. The date of service reported is incorrect and Angie’s list is in the process of getting this corrected. The services were performed in July 2010 and this is the first we have heard of this customer’s dissatisfaction. We had to turn this customer over to collections. They just recently finally paid the bill which would explain why they are just now reporting this. Their water heater had stopped working over the weekend. On Monday we responded to their call. The plumber called the manufacturer with the error code. The manufacturer instructed him to reset the water heater which he did. It fired right up. He waited around a little while to make sure it continued running and it appeared to be fine so he left. The following day the customer called again to say they still didn’t have hot water and now the water heater was giving a different code. We sent a plumber over that day who again called the manufacturer and this time the manufacturer determined it needed a couple parts replaced. The water heater was still under warranty so they would ship those parts out at no cost to the customer. The parts should have arrived the following day. The following afternoon we were under the impression the parts had arrived (a neighbor was supposed to be watching for them). We proactively sent a plumber to install the parts but after tracking down the neighbor it turned out they hadn’t arrived yet. As soon as soon as we were notified the parts were in (the next day) we went and installed them. I don’t know why the manufacturer didn’t get those parts there sooner but that was out of our control. I do not recall the customer ever calling and asking for a break on their bill but we had actually already given them a break. On our first trip over we typically have a $40 trip charge and a half hour minimum. We only charged the trip charge no minimum. Nor did we bill any trip charges for 2nd 3rd and 4th trip over there. When I mailed past due invoices in August and September that would have been a great time to call us and let us know they were not happy. But instead they just chose not to pay so I had no other recourse than to turn them over to collections. I called the customer today to try and talk about this situation and she is still very angry and says that we should have stayed longer that first day. At the time we had no reason to think that the problem wasn’t fixed and the water heater did give a completely different error code the second day. The whole time we were trying to get the water heater fixed for her she never let on that she was this mad or felt she had been treated poorly. Again I think this is an unfortunate chain of events and I feel for them that they were without hot water so long but as far as our responsiveness and our billing I believe we were excellent and more than fair."