Black Cat Sweeps, LLC

"Hi Matt. Yes, we have swept thousands of these during our careers. However, this situation was extremely out of the norm. Normally there is either a fair amount of play in the liner allowing it to be removed and reinstalled to the stove easily or the liner is installed to the stove via a tee or elbow. This allows proper access for cleaning and maintenance. In this scenario, the liner was installed tightly to the stove without any play in it. Due to this unnaturally taught configuration, the liner recoiled like a slinky inside of the chimney when unscrewed from the stove. We recommended that the stove be reinstalled properly with a tee, elbow, or a coupled piece to extend it so the liner has less tension. Being so taught also doesn't allow the liner room for expansion and contraction during heating and cooling. With properly installed stoves, we remove the stove from the liner, sweep it, and put everything back together. I would suggest contacting the original installer to ask them to fix the connection as this should be warrantied by their company."

"This customer "claimed" she had an issue. We tried to calmly and professionally ask for details and other pertinent information pertaining to her "issue" in an email so we could help to resolve it. Instead of calmly answering our emails requesting further details she instead blew up our office phone with derogatory messages until midnight which is when we were finally forced to block her as our office is in our home. We couldn't allow these messages to keep disturbing my elderly mom and our child who were trying to sleep. In the morning we unblocked her hoping she had calmed a bit and that we might get some rational answers to our questions. Instead of rational answers, we got more condescending, harsh, and downright nasty messages from her. Since we could get nowhere we called our insurance company in hopes they could hash out the situation and maybe get the answers we couldn?t get from the customer. We have documented all the erratic behavior from the customer via screenshots. We are fully willing to share this info privately with anyone who might question the validity of our response to this invalid review. I would since were unable to get this customer to work amicably with us to reach a solution for her "issue", like to use this scenario instead as a learning platform. If any customer has an issue with our company's work we are happy to work with you to reach a solution. However, this means we must work together to find the solution and discover what went wrong. We want to know our mistakes and learn from them. If we are not allowed to find out where things went wrong or even if they went wrong then we can never possibly learn from our mistakes and may repeat them in the future. This helps no one. If you have an issue with a service or product the best course of action is to contact us during normal business hours in a non-accusatory and calm manner. Once we have all the facts from you, and the tech who was at your location then we can look at the complete puzzle. Once we have that complete picture we can easily access where the problem is and then rationally find a solution to it. Next, this customer stated we don't know how to do our jobs and are incompetent idiots. My husband has been doing his job for well over 40 years now and takes pride in his work. He was one of the pioneers in the business in fact and is being featured in a sweep magazine in December. He is far from incompetent and far from being an idiot. Verbally attacking people who are trying to help you in a kind and professional manner is not by any means professional. It is in fact something that no one should have to deal with when they are simply trying to help someone out. Gary and I have worked through the COVID pandemic despite the fact we are both in at-risk categories. We have not complained once and have never once given up because we truly care for our customers and their welfare. We have seen far too many untimely deaths of beloved customers, friends, and relatives to even consider using unprofessional treatment. Life is far too short to be harsh and condescending towards others. Something that led the customer to call him an idiot and incompetent was that she felt a chimney is supposed to be swept with the appliance pipe pulled away from the thimble hole leaving the thimble hole open. This is completely incorrect and would lead to severe damage to a customers home should we do it this way. If the thimble hole is left open, with no pipe attached to it, any loose matter on the sides of the chimney will fall through the thimble hole and into the home during the sweep. A sudden backdraft of air could also pull massive amounts of soot, depending on the dirtiness of the chimney, through the thimble hole and into the home. During all sweeps the pipe to whatever appliance attached is kept in place! No exceptions!! I?m not sure who told her this but it is comp"

"James, this is Melody Norris, the Proprietor of the Maine branch of Gary's Chimney Services LLC. I was completely unaware of this situation. Recently we had an employee whom we thankfully caught, who was canceling customer jobs without our knowledge or the customer's knowledge as well as not sending out proper inspection reports or quotes. We let this person go. However, we later found out that they broke into our accounts deleting a lot of to-do lists and other pertinent customer information including many booked calendar requests from customers. Due to this debacle, we have been left trying to figure out who was wrongfully treated and who wasn't. To be honest, the only real way to sort it all out is if customers come forward to tell us they have had an issue. Otherwise, we really cannot tell since so much information was either outright deleted or moved to the ex-employees new business she created for her husband using our customer files. Our various software and tech people have secured all our accounts and have tried to retrieve our files back from this person's computer system but I'm afraid a lot has been lost regardless of our best efforts. We posted several messages on social media and our web page warning customers of this issue and asking them to come forward immediately should things not seem right or should a scheduled appointment not be kept by us. We are doing everything in our power to fix these issues. However, we need customers to please come to us, preferably on a private platform so we can be fully aware of any issues we haven't caught. I say this so others reading this can have a heads up if they too are having issues. In responding to this complaint I did try to find information pertaining to your situation. I did find some original notes that appear to be intact but not complete. These state that you have 2 fireplaces and 1 woodstove running on the same flue, which is not up to code. It also stated you have a raccoon issue even with a cap so the cap has failed. The job was set for 1/12/21 but the notes go on to say that Kat and Jay were unable to access the roof due to snow and ice conditions at that time. However, the ex-employee simply ended the notes with, "We need to go out and measure for a cap and a liner." This incomplete assessment was done on 1/19/21 according to electronic time stamps on the document. This was exactly the time we were having issues with this employee, unfortunately. It was also brought to our attention that she was putting her personal phone number on email correspondence with customers. I cannot find a single email correspondence with you in our files but that doesn't mean they didn't exist at one point in time. Is it possible you called her number directly and not our actual office number? Although there really isn't much we can do now that you have hired someone else we can offer our sincerest apologies for the misconduct of this ex-employee and assure you and other customers that we are fully aware there is an issue. We are trying our hardest to resolve these issues so as to give our customers the amazing service that they fully deserve and expect from our company."