CHILDERS PLUMBING & APPLS

I have a home warranty (don't get me started), and my washing machine was backing up. I contacted the home warranty people, who sent the service request to this guy. He calls me on the phone and is rude from the get-go. Tells me that he can ONLY come out to my house in the morning, because he lives on the other side of town, and works his way back towards his home throughout the day. So I had to call a friend and ask them to come and sit at my house until he showed up, because I do work. I get home that afternoon, and he has tracked mud all over my house and all over my washing machine. Really? It wasn't even raining outside. So then, some time later, my refrigerator wasn't as cold as it should be, and my freezer had frost in it. I called the home warranty people again, and again they asked this guy to come out. He was a little more pleasant this time on the phone, amazingly enough. Then he gets to my house and looks at the fridge. Granted, it's an older fridge, but it has worked fine up until now. He needed to replace the timer, so he went and got one and brought it back. He takes the bottom off the freezer and is trying to thaw out the frost that's built up there. He then starts hacking at it to "hurry it up". I'm sitting in the living room at this point, because I didn't want to "hover". Then he comes out and says that the timer is replaced, and it should be fine now. He leaves. That night, I noticed that the freezer was only about 35°. It stayed that temperature all night. I called him back the next morning, "How long is it supposed to take for the freezer to start freezing?" (cos I will admit, I know nothing about appliances...) He told me to stick my head in there to see if there was any noise. There wasn't. He says the fan must be broken, "...it probably broke when I was hacking at the ice, or just because of the ice being built up around it..." Really? It was blowing fine until he put in a new timer, even with all the ice, so he must have broken it when he was hacking around. Tells me to get a fan and put it in the freezer to blow the air around until he can get over there with a new one. Really? So it takes him about a week to get back over with a new fan. Puts it in, the freezer works great for a few days. Then things start thawing out. I contacted the home warranty people that Monday morning. (5/9) They sent him another service request, said he'd call to set up an appointment. Here it is on THURSDAY (5/12), and he STILL hasn't called. I called the hw people and complained. They called him, and then told me that he said, "I just can't seem to fix the fridge, you're gonna have to get someone else to look at it." Really? Really?? Really??? Could he not have just called me himself and told me that??? No, he didn't do ANYTHING, and meanwhile everything in my freezer has thawed out and some of it has had to be thrown out. What a complete @$$. I wouldn't give him a dead dog to take care of.

UPDATE: AHS sent out another contractor, who found that there was a broken-off piece of styrofoam that had gotten stuck in the fan, which was why the freezer wasn't freezing anymore. They said Childers had apparently broken it off when he was hacking at it, and it eventually moved around to the fan. Unbelievable. He couldn't even be bothered to come out and see what was wrong, what HE had done wrong.

The plumber cum owner, Joe Childers from Childers Plumbing & Appliances is very good. He is good at both plumbing and appliance work. He knows what he is doing. He doesn?t charge a lot of money. He is very prompt. He often comes out the same day I call. He is easy to get along with. To have someone do both appliance and plumbing is great. We have a home warranty and I found him thorough our home warranty service. He will come out and put the same call on warranty. He will work on appliances or plumbing and I just have to pay the warranty fee once. I would continue to use his services in the future.