My wife and I have, unfortunately, hired Apex Plumbing and Sewer three times. The first time was when our pipes froze in early 2015. We were in desperate need of help and went with Apex because they would come out quickly. This was our first time meeting their technician Jay. Their work helped our problem; we were able to get our house back up and running. My only complaint would be that when we had a handyman in later to reassemble the panels under the sink, he really didn’t like how Jay had rearranged the pipes. He said this could have been done better. We paid a lot for this work; around $2,000. Having read some of the other reviews here about Apex overcharging, I am worried we may have wasted a lot of money with this company. The following year, in 2016, our plumbing in the basement started backing up. We called Apex and again Jay came out. He explained that our basin in the backyard was clogged and that this involved work through pipes under the house out to the street, and that this was again going to cost around $5,000. We didn’t question it; we just did it. I thought we had a good working relationship with this company and we just wanted to get the house up and running again. Without doing this we couldn’t do laundry or use our downstairs bathroom. This involved Jay digging up our front yard to fix pipe in the yard. This was when things with Apex started to get weird. Jay dug up the front yard and did some work but then disappeared for a week. It took persistent calling to get him to come back and finish the job. Let me add at this point that I am able to work from home two days a week, and add more when needed for maintenance situations like this. My wife is off every Wednesday. If both of us had jobs that required us to be at work 9:00 to 5:00 five days a week, it would be impossible to work with Apex. The third time we hired Apex was when our pump in the basement failed and we needed to also repair some concrete between that and the drain. This was in January 2017. Again it was Jay who came out. Again this cost a lot; $3,300. He replaced the pump and did the work fairly expediently. But in checking out our pipes he removed our downstairs toilet, which made our entire basement smell like sewage. He put it back after checking that line but must have done something wrong to where it wasn’t properly sealed, because the smell remained. Also, the downstairs basement started flooding around this toilet. These symptoms came and went, to where we didn’t immediately call Apex. But eventually we did. I talked to Jay on a morning my wife would be at home. He said he’d be there in an hour to 90 minutes, absolutely. He never showed and never called. We let this go until there was a lot of rainfall in Chicago and our basement flooded, again. So I started texting and calling Jay, admittedly very angry. But at this point we were – and are – in for about $10,000 worth of guaranteed work by Apex that they are not supporting. Jay came out. My wife dealt with him. He looked at the toilet producing the sewage smell, tightened the nuts around the base and told her, “That should do it.” That’s not going to fix anything. He obviously didn’t seal the toilet back correctly; really fixing this would involve removing the toilet. He told my wife he’d come back. In the interim, my wife started interacting with a woman at Apex named Christina. She took Jay’s unpredictability very seriously and said she was going to make sure it was addressed. She told us Jay came out and checked our pipes via a port in the front yard and found no issues. Here’s where the situation gets even more disturbing. We had another company come out to power rod our sewer line. In doing so, they needed to access that same port in the front yard. They told us, “Someone really told you they came out and checked this? It’s covered with dirt and was really hard to open. No one has touched this thing in months.” And it was very obvious. We could suddenly see the port, whereas we hadn’t since Apex worked on it back in 2016. So Jay had blatantly lied about coming out and checking it. Moreover, this other company ran a camera down in the sewer and found that the work Apex had done the second time we hired them was bad and had allowed giant concrete chunks to block the line between the old pipe and the new pipe, which had caused massive amounts of toilet paper and waste to back-up in the line to the sewer. They showed us a picture of the problem. So my wife called Jay and discussed all this with him. He was with what he said was his boss at the time and expressed his concern. He questioned the findings of this other company. He said what they did was not going to fix the smell in the basement, which he caused. Even when my wife told him she considered the matter resolved, he insisted he or his company needed to come out and look into this, and said they’d be calling us and coming out. Big surprise; they didn’t. So, today, I started calling Jay. No answer. I called Christina. She answered. I started going over the particulars of this situation with her. Now, if you’ve been reading Yelp reviews of Apex, you’ll note that Christina responds to them. There’s even a picture of her attached to her response. But she told me that she does not write these responses; that her boss or Apex’s “social media manager” does this. Regardless, Christina moved to distance herself from the situation, saying she is just the office manager and has no real responsibility here. She also threatened to call the police on me for “harassment.” In the interim, Jay had called me, so I called him back. I discussed the findings of the other company with him, as well as the sewage smell that he caused and won’t fix, as well as his not showing up when promised. He refused to commit to coming out at any set time; saying this would be determined on Monday. He also insisted he was off today, Saturday, when Christina had just told me that he was on an “emergency job” with his boss. When pressed about his failure to show up in the past, he started shouting. He cursed at me – using the F-word – six times and, as Christina had, threatened to call the police on me for “harassment.” He hung up on me without us reaching any conclusion about this situation. TL;DR: Apex charges huge amounts of money for work it doesn’t do, and when questioned about this starts swearing at you and threatening to call the cops.