Mid-Atlantic Waterproofing of NY

Lloyd looked in the basement, boiler room (in the basement), outside, and gave a very long explanation of the job and sales pitch. He recommended a pump in the basement connected to pipes going outside and under the boiler room where water had been coming in for many years. This pump required a lot of digging and opening some walls to install the piping. The pump is an eyesore with two long electrical cords. Mid-Atlantic will not even accept an Angie's List coupon. I had to pay a handyman several hundred dollars to repair the walls cut for the piping. After they finished, water still came into the boiler room and they sent a different foreman to check the work. He said the pipe in the boiler room should have been installed lower down and he changed it. Water still came in after a rainstorm, but their work did decrease some of the water. We were told by the second foreman that the problem was coming from either the kitchen area or bathroom of my basement and they would have to rip out more walls to locate the cracks. That would mean more expensive repairs by a handyman! When I tried to reach Lloyd several times to find out the cost of locating the cracks (which I didn't even plan to have them do since they were already incompetent) he did not return phone calls or was just too busy to talk. It seemed like he had given up and would take the money for the pump that didn't stop water from entering the boiler room. I finally spoke to him briefly but he did not have a price to even look for cracks, and was supposed to follow up which he never did. Luckily I found an excellent waterproofing company that diagnosed the problem immediately, excavated outside ONLY to fix the cracks, without any damage to inside walls requiring repairs. They charged 1/4 of what Mid-Atlantic charged for the pump and I haven't seen any water in the basement since then. Stay away from Mid-Atlantic, I thought a big company would know how to waterproof a basement but with them it's trial and error.

Proposal was for a french drain system with a single catch basin and pump. A single trench to be dug along the front and side wall of my basement, wrapping around an interior concrete wall which separates the main area of the basement from a work room (and former coal bin). Trench and drain tubing to be graded and pitched so as to lead water to the catch basin and pump. When the day of installation came, the workers arrived promptly. The job foreman took one look at the installation plan and he realized that it could not be completed as originally planned. What the estimator missed was that the inner wall which separates the workroom from the main space was actually the foundation wall of the house and that digging down and through the floor in the doorway would compromise the footing of the house and make it structurally unsound. The foreman called Mid-Atlantic and a supervisor came over. His solution, and the only one truly possible: divide the basement into two areas (workroom and main room) and install two separate systems. This meant an additional cost that he stated was $2500. At this point I should have told him to either do it for the original price or to pack up his toys and leave. But we compromised and split his stated cost and added $1250 to the original price for the second pump system. The workers then proceeded with the work. They broke through the basement floor, digging trenches around the foundation, and put down the drainage piping system. Never once did I see them check the level to make sure it was properly pitched. While doing the work, they disconnected and removed an old sink in the basement and in moving it out to the yard it basically fell apart. I purchased a replacement sink and when their contracted plumber came the next day to make the pump connections I had him also connect the new sink. Mid-Atlantic originally balked at paying for the extra work for connecting the new sink, but I pointed out that it was *their* workers who broke it and that it was only fair that they pay for the replacement's installation, which they would have had to do if the old sink were reinstalled. Once the job was done, Mid-Atlantic did a reasonably thorough job of clean-up of the area. To date we have not had any issues with water in the basement so it's likely that the system is working as designed, although the pumps never have kicked in to my knowledge and there is only a little water in the catch-basin, left over from the pump tests at installation time. In summary: Mid-Atlantic's initial job estimator made a serious error in his remediation design that, had he done it properly, I would never have accepted the proposal for the job as it was too costly. And having made the mistake, they still tried to nickel-and-dime me for the additional cost of the plumbing hookup for the new sink. This is not the way to keep a customer happy and although the quality of their finished work appears to be adequate I cannot endorse them due to their business policies.

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