In the end, It did not go well and I will file a complaint with the New Jersey Better Business Bureau.
II am a high school science teacher in Vermont. During Feb break, I went to New Jersey from Vt. to help my brother with repairing and cleaning his house as my brother had had health problems for a few years and his house had come into disrepair. My goal was to get as much cleaned up and repaired in the short amount of time i had. I bought a new light fixture for the upstairs bathroom as the old fluorescent light had a bad transformer. I installed the light which I could get to light using the existing wire, but the light switch could not turn off the light so something was bad between the light switch and the light fixture that I could not repair . Just outside this bathroom, there was also a hall light on a 2-way switch that would not turn on. So I called DK Electric to repair these 2 things. Derek was responsive when I first called, arranged for a technician to come out the next morning. He said he knew the neighborhood in Willingboro where my brother lived and said these houses used aluminum wiring in the 50s and these wire often have problems.
David, the electrician, came the following morning and was on time and a pleasant guy. He said he would have to charge me something like 334.48 to diagnose why the light would not go on and off with the switch. DK electric uses a book like Auto Repair shops. The prices are listed by the job, not by the time spent. I thought this was high but I had limited time in NJ and needed things to get repaired so I agreed and he started using his tester to test different wires. I stayed with him in the bathroom as I had information to share with him since I had already tried to install the light and he was a pleasant guy to talk with. Together we discovered that the light and switch were on circuit 2 because the breaker was tripped by his diagnoses and it would not "untrip." It was broken at that point. The electric panel in my brothers house is an old push button panel. David explained that these old push-button circuits breakers are no longer used and are actually illegal to repair. He said his company cannot repair the breakers and that to get the light in the bathroom to work my brother really needed a brand new breaker panel and we were quoted at three grades, the top 2 grades being a mix of copper and aluminum, or all copper, He said these old breaker panels are dangerous and my brother should really have a new one installed. he made it sound like there really was no choice and that it was really dangerous to keep this old circuit breaker panel. I wanted to help my brother so I agreed it should be done so all the lights and switches would work. I paid a $2000.00 deposit. They put through the charge immediately and I received a receipt online at my email. "Receipt 02/18/2016, 09:40 AM" through an Intuit Quickbooks David found broken wires in the 2 hall light switches, made a quick repair and the hallway light worked. So to recap, We hired DK electric to install the bathroom light, fix the bathroom switch and fix the hallway light. We had to pay for a diagnosis, the bathroom light was not installed and the switch was not fixed, and the push button breaker was broken.The hallway light was repaired. The bill for that came to $354.46. I have images of all of our receipts. David spent about 1.5 hours at the house.
They would start the work the following Monday. I headed back to Vermont.The next day (a Friday) my brother canceled the work order for his own reasons. Derek called me to tell me that my brother cancelled the service and did I know?I didn't know so I called my brother and I tried to convince him to get it done but he wanted to get three bids and find a lower price. Good idea and it is his house. This is when the trouble began.
I called Derek and explained that I would need my deposit returned and he said of course and that "i just need to figure out how to do it. I've never had to return a deposit before. Give me a few days. I should have it by Friday." I didn?t understand why returning a credit should be so complicated. Companies do it all the time.
In the meantime Derek changed the bill from 354.46 to 575.02! He added ?Replace two 3 way toggle switches(add on Rate) 120.32 EACH for a total of 240.64 for a total now of $575.02.When I called him on Friday to ask about my refund he said that he was going to charge me a $78 dollar refund fee because, ?I am not going to eat what my credit card company is going to charge me for refunding your 2000.00. I pay a 4% for every transaction and I am going to deduct this from your $2000.00 because I should not have to pay or eat that loss!? We argued over the phone-I was back in my classroom trying to deal with this guy between classes. I just wanted my 2000.00 refunded. He now was being a real jerk and so I said that we had obviously come to an impasse and I would not argue with him any longer and I hung up. He kept trying to call me back but I would not pick up at this point.
And then he said that he was not going to refund any money until the bill was paid. That was when I found out from my brother that he had increased the bill by over 240 after I cancelled the job! When I called him about this increase he said that David, the electrician who had come done the work, made a mistake on the bill and was chastised for it, he was relatively new, but he made an error and did not charge us for the light switch repair since we were going to get the new Service Box. So we argued about that and at this point he was holding my 2000.00 hostage!(I have all the texts and all the emails and all receipts as evidence.)In the meantime I filed a dispute through Visa and while I had Visa on the phone I told them the story that DK Electric is trying to charge me 70 dollars to credit my 2K with the excuse that his credit card company charges him a fee and 2 different Visa reps laughed! The Laughed and said they had never heard this before.
I realized that there was nothing I could say or do to reason with this thief. My brother had a check cut for the 575.02 which cleared last Monday-March 4, 2016. My brother received a check from DK Electric for 1,932.00 so Derek had deducted $68 dollars from my $2000.00 deposit. So as far as I am concerned, DK Electric was dishonest and robbed me and my brother of several hundred dollars. Do NOT do business with this company. Derek is an unreasonable man.