APEX PLUMBING & SEWER COMPANY

WARNING!! TO ALL POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS DO NOT USE APEX Plumbing and Sewer Services!!!! They improperly installed a sump pump in my finished basement in May 2022. They DO NOT back there services! I have tried to reach the owners on 3 occasions to explain that the pump failed after 10 months and got no call back. A more reputable company came in and explained to me that their was work was sloppy and not properly installed. Specifically. they did not replace a broken check valve and did not properly fasten and seal the sump pump cover. Plus the fact that their Made in China pump failed and refused to contact me and explain themselves after I sought a partial refund. I paid $2500 for this work which took less than a hour for them to complete. Also a ridiculous amount given a pump casts approx. $500. THEY ARE RIP-OFFS! I am reporting them to BBB and I warn anybody to use a more reputable company.

They would not give us a price over the phone. They came in a timely manner and fixed the issue. The problem here is that they completely over charged us and each time my landlord or I have asked for an itemized receipt or an explanation they do not respond. It does not cost over $400 to have a plumber rod your sink. The price is typically 150-200 being the higher end of the cost. If they can explain to me what happened here then I will change my review.

I called Apex to request help with low water pressure, they came by and gave an assessment and identified the issue as needing a pressure pump, about $4000. I trusted their assessment and spent an additional $1000 to get electrical wired to support the pump. At the end of the project, the water pressure wasn’t fixed. They then came by again and said it was the pipe issue and it couldn’t be fixed with a pressure pump, that I had already paid for and installed. They would not take any returns nor any credits for their work or incorrect assessment. I messaged them about this and it was ignored. Extremely disappointed and out $5000 for nothing.

We could not have had a better experience with APEX. They were quick to respond, showed up on time, quickly diagnosed the issues, and got it fixed. Aidan was extremely efficient, professional, and knowledgeable and had everything done very quickly. We've used APEX in the past and will certainly do so in the future. -the York family

Here's my personal opinion and why i think you should consider any other plumbing company besides APEX - No care for customer service. They're disrespectful, awful communication, and lie and make false promises of solving the problem. I hired them to address my low water pressure in my multi-unit building. At the time of estimating the job, I was extra clear that pressure is my underlying problem and gave them as much information as I could. They said they could do the job and solve my problem because it seems like my rising pipes were really old galvanized piping. 2 days later they started and collected half the payment over the phone through credit card. I did not allow them to keep it on file and said I would pay again at the end of the job. They started and "finished" 3 days later but I still had little to no water pressure and after getting frustrated that they couldn't solve the problem, one of the plumbers blew up on me and said the "contract" was complete because all it said was the risers needed to e changed and his job was done and they'd put a LIEN on my house if not paid. Issue was still not resolved and I was out of pocket $10k I find out they charged my credit card and illegally stored my info when I asked not to. The owner/boss comes the next day and says **** try to find a solution and all he did was simply walk to the main city pipe and say this is another $30k job because you need to change the main pipe but **** keep looking for an answer. 2 weeks go by and he never called, and when i called him he accused me of being impatient and rude. When i asked what he came up with in 2 weeks, he said honestly hadn't given it much thought. This whole time my walls are still torn out and I have families living here. They also never provided me the copy to the contract until my last conversation with the owner. I can understand if it was 1 employee, but the owner himself provided this type of service - which says a lot about the company. Save yourself the trouble, pay a little more and go with any other plumbing company.

DO NOT HIRE APEX PLUMBING. We had a sewer backup that caused flooding in the basement in May 2020. Apex came out and rodded the sewer line for $495, and that seemed to fix it. 2 months later we had the same problem. They came out, rodded the sewer line again (another $495) and ran a camera (additional $295) which revealed a thick tree root intrusion in the pipes. So after rodding the sewer line 2x they still didn’t fix the problem completely. Then they tried to up sell me by saying we needed hydro jet rodding (additional $1200). I kept asking them why the backup and flooding occurred again after only 2 months and why they couldn’t fix it completely. They had no answer. So I called another plumber — Windy City Rooter — and they were able to cleanout out the tree roots by rodding the sewer line. This process should have eliminated the tree roots the first time, but Apex has no idea what they are doing. All they know how to do is take your money w/o fixing the problem. Do not waste your money on these guys.

This is the second company I had out for sewer problems on a three flat. The first left me with a feeling of dred; after rodding they said I needed $5,000 of additional work. I called Apex, they sent someone out to look at the job and told me what they believed I needed. After cleaning the basin they noticed that the sewage was not flowing freely and decided to re-rod the pipes. Needless to say all kinds of debris was in the pipe. Apex walked me through the entire process. I will use the again.

We used Apex's emergency line to get a plumber out for a basement toilet that started running overnight and was leaking out the back onto the floor. 2 plumbers came out that morning and tried to diagnose the issue. They removed the toilet and after some arguing back and forth, they came to the conclusion that the toilet had an illegal boot at the base leading to the local pipe and that the pipe was clogged and had to be rodded. They also told me the toilet was irreparable. They got their rodding machine and told me they could make it only 2 feet before they hit what they believed to be dirt and couldn't go futher. They hinted the pipe may not be connected to the sewer. At this point, I cut my losses with Apex but they still charged me $900 for essentially removing and moving a toilet (and giving me a bunch of inaccurate assessments...read on). I hired a sewer specialist I trusted from previous work for a video scope (William Sommerville at Sewer Viewer). He hit the blockage but said he could make it at least 14 feet into the pipe by hand (strike 1, Apex). It was tree roots with a blockage in front of normal toilet waste, not dirt as Apex guessed. He got his rodding machine which seemed much more robust than the one Apex brought and got through the waste blockage but was worried the rod would get stuck in the roots. He advised on a herbicide since the local pipe was too narrow for a root rod used in sewers and that has seemed to clear the blockage. So, Apex's rod machine was underpowered for the job and only made it 2 feet, but they still charged me about half their usually rodding fee (strike 2). Next, I had John Baethke Plumbing out to see if the toilet was salvageable. Mind you, this is a 3 year old Kohler toilet, not off brand, but Apex said it had an illegal boot and could not be repaired. The plumber at Baethke laughed off the illegal boot assessment. It was the piece that came with the toilet, it was fine (strike 3, Apex). He also said the toilet was in great shape. It was the ring at the base of the pipe that was corroded and badly installed. He fixed the ring and the pipe connection and the toilet works no problem now (strike 4, Apex did such a poor job that I can't even use a baseball analogy?). Maybe just a bad crew and not Apex as a whole, but why charge $900 for a bunch of bad guesses and no repairs? I will not be using Apex again and will stick with the expensive but always quality John Baethke plumbing.

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.

I thought they were a little pricey. They don't give a free estimate. They gave an estimate on the spot. This is what I didn't like about it. He came out and gave me an estimate on the spot, so either I had to decide to do it right then and there or call back and have it done. I needed to have it done right away, so I went ahead and had them do it. I think it would have been more cost effective if I would have just called another company initially and had them come out and do the work. He did a good job. He was polite and he was knowledgeable. On price, the prices were higher. He was responsive. They were much more expensive. On punctuality, he was on time. They only part that I didn't like was the fact that they don't give a free estimate. They come out and you have to pay, and if you have to pay you might as well have the work done. Where another company gives a free estimate. I was without a faucet at that time so I needed to have that faucet. Another company couldn't see me at that time. He was professional, the individual was professional, it was just the policy of not giving a free estimate I didn't like.

It turned out to be much worse than we expected, but they showed and explained to us each step of the way, so we understood the reason for the amount of time and number of plumbers required. (A previous contractor had pour a lot of cement around a shower drain pipe, locking it in, between our floor and the unit below us.) Chas and Jay were fantastic - and under difficult conditions (small rooms, hot air). We appreciated their conscientious clean up afterward as well.

I just want to follow-up on my review of 3/30/17. After my complaint, Apex came back out to assess the problem. I was told that I have severe tree roots and was given a quote of $5,000 to fix the problem. This, according to them, was a discounted rate due to my being a previous customer. I was also told that I would have to pay 1/2 before they would even start the work. The work would entail digging up my yard, cutting pipe, removing the tree roots, etc with no liability for damage. I was perplexed because there are no trees on my property to cause such damage and I checked with my neighbors and none seemed to be having issues. Please see attached picture of my basement when it rained after Apex supposedly fixed the problem. Please note they complained that I was not home at the time they put the camera down the line to show me, but there was an adult over 40 there and they made no attempt to either show him or leave a picture of the supposed tree roots (which the new plumber I called out said they could have done). I think they took advantage of the fact that I was a woman and they knew that I was panicked and distressed about the sewage in my basement and figured I would go along with anything they told me, which I did in the beginning. That's why I am out $1500. I decided to call out a different plumber (someone recommended by a friend). This plumber rodded out the system and found no issues with tree roots. It has rained about 4 times since the new plumber rodded my system and I have had no additional issues. This was done for a charge of $300.

Jon was prompt, informative, and professional! Thank you!

Always been dependable and professional!

Apex responded to a Sunday call and scheduled a visit the next day for a malfunctioning toilet. The plumbers arrived on time. They diagnosed the problem and replaced the toilet. They communicated clearly about the costs in advance.

I gave him a price range for a new faucet. He went to the local home depot purchased and installed it. It was great service. He was courteous.

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They were reasonable, punctual, and honest. The work got done and they cleaned up afterwards.

They were very professional.  They worked well and watched to make sure that rugs and carpets were damaged as they were coming in an out of my home.

Besides the floor scratches, it went fantastic. Our building had a different plumber try and find the leak and they said they found it, but we had to get another estimate. APEX came out and gave us a much better bid for the same repair, but said they would need to confirm the leak was where the first company said it was. Thank goodness they did because the leak WAS NOT in the place the first contractor said it was. After doing an initial analysis, they determined the leak was nowhere near where the first company said it was and isolated the approximate area between my kitchen and my neighbor's kitchen. After cutting several holes in the drywall in each of our units, the found a tiny leak in a common cold water pipe. It took a while but they found it and I appreciated that they kept digging. 
The next day they came out and were ready to make the repair. My building's water shutoff is in another unit. The tenant's contact was late getting to the unit to let us in and instead of waiting around, Apex went into the sewer in front of the building to turn the water off there, saving a lot of time. Once that was done, the repair took about an hour and they cleaned up and were done. Matt and his crew are very professional and know their stuff. The price was also lower than estimated because the leak was in an easier spot to fix.
I'm overall pleased with the work and  again the only reason I didn't give them an "A" overall is because they scratched my brand new hardwood floors in two places while moving appliances. I realize it was an accident and the appliances were both in VERY tight spaces, but I'm just crestfallen that now I need to get my new floors fixed after having them less than a month.

He was very good.

The man who came was efficient, pleasant, professional, and helpful. He gave me all the help I asked for and lots of advice about plumbing issues I talked to him about. He was great.

We called Apex when we found scummy water bubbling up through a hole in the basement floor. I immediately knew the underground pipe from the kitchen drain pipe had ruptured. Apex came out and estimated the job. We checked comparable costs online, but we've used Apex before and know them to be reasonably priced. And we didn't have time to get bids--the plumber told us that we'd have maggots in a few more days. Yuck! I was surprised that they could complete the job in day, but they broke open the floor, replaced the section of pipe and, when a part of the 100-year-old vertical kitchen drain pipe , then patched everything up. We really like Apex because the plumbers understand old Chicago buildings, they are expert, fast, neat and not god-awful expensive..

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APEX fit me into their busy schedule on the coldest day in Chicago on record in the last 20 years.
Other plumbing shops I called weren't going to come out until Friday (it's Tuesday today!).
A pleasant operator at APEX told me plumbers were in my area with their equipment and would come by
at some point today, but couldn't give me a precise time. Less than an hour later she called back to confirm
the plumbers were on their way, and less than half an hour later Danny and Chez were here with their magic
electric pipe "defreezer". They inspected the problem -- both my hot and cold water lines to the kitchen sink
were frozen DESPITE leaving a drip overnight -- and quoted me a price for the first hour ($465) and the
additional hourly rate (I think it was $165/hr).  They also informed me that the jobs they had done earlier 
today and yesterday typically completed within an hour. About 30 minutes (and $465) later both my lines were
unfrozen without any burst pipes!  The guys were very pleasant, courteous, personable and nice all around.
Keep your water running, NOT trickling or dripping, in this weather. If your pipes freeze, call APEX!