Get matched with top basement waterproofing pros in Six Mile, SC

"It has been like surviving a natural disaster to try to repair our lives and home after Nano Environmental-Gwinnett and their parent company, Nano Environmental Solutions, destroyed our house and made the mold situation in our home worse than when we started. This situation is very emotional for me and for my family. But I’m going to do my best to present the situation in a fact-based manner that I hope will be most helpful for other families. 1. Destruction of home: Nano cut large, jagged holes in the sheetrock of every room of our house in order to “look for mold”. We now know from an independent air quality tester and two mold inspectors who viewed our home afterward that cutting into walls just to “look for mold” is never necessary. Standard practice is for remediators to thread small, thin lighted cameras through small holes in sheetrock to scan for mold in wall cavities. You absolutely need to cut out sheetrock to get rid of mold, but never just to look for it. Nano reported finding no mold through these cuts in our sheetrock. 2. Demolition crew: Nano hired a demolition crew and told them they would pay them per square foot of sheetrock removed, thus incentivizing the shocking, huge chopped holes throughout the home. 3. Compromising our family’s health: Nano told us that it would be safe for us to return to our home on October 3. We arrived that day to find visible mold throughout the home. I have asthma and in returning to the home, before realizing that mold still permeated the home, my health was placed at risk. We had to quickly leave the home once again, check back into a hotel, and contact Nano to let them know that the home was clearly not remediated and not safe. 4. Price gouging: On October 4, Nano Environmental-Gwinnett’s director contacted us to let us know that not only had they been mistaken about the home being remediated, it would cost another $5,500, on top of the originally contracted $11,414, to successfully remediate the mold. Shocked given that they had told us just the day before that the home was safe for our return, my husband and I repeatedly requested that they send us itemization and justification for the need for these additional charges before we approved them. Nano promised this itemization later on the day of October 4. However, no itemization came until October 17, after the work had ostensibly been completed. Appeals to the parent company CEO did not help remedy the situation. 5. Billing improprieties: When the justification/itemization finally arrived on October 17, it was in the form of an invoice filled with redundant charges. Nano even billed us twice for the same dehumidifier – at two different prices. They explained that the double charges for work such as “wiping down walls” were because they hired subcontractors, given that they were “very busy with other clients”. So we had to pay both Nano and their subcontractors for the same contracted deliverables (that’s how we obtained the receipt showing the subcontractor’s work; Nano told us we had to pay their subcontractors as well as pay them). We explained to Nano that we contracted with them to complete clearly defined objectives and that it was inappropriate to pass along redundant charges to one client because they were busy with other clients. In addition, we noted that the invoiced charge of $5.38 per square foot of sheet rock removed was 8 times greater than the price in the signed contract, which specified 65 cents per square foot IF any removal was needed (Nano had said that they would remove as little as possible and only if needed). 6. Leaking caused by incorrectly installed dehumidifier: Nano incorrectly installed a dehumidifier in our basement three times, causing extensive leaking in our basement twice. We were only saved from further water damage the first time because the water from the dehumidifier streaming across our basement floor triggered our motion detector in the basement at 4:45am. On the phone with our alarm company, we went downstairs to see what had triggered the alarm and found water pouring across the floor. We finally had to hire an HVAC company to install the dehumidifier correctly. The HVAC company showed us how Nano had the water draining uphill to its termination point and had attached pipes with tape. In addition, they did not install a drain pan. Instead, they mounted the dehumidifier on a piece of wood salvaged from our basement. 7. Disrupting our internet access: Nano’s demolition team chopped into our Ethernet cord, yanking it from the wall. We were without internet in our home and home office (I have an LLC that I operate from home) for three days, waiting for AT&T to be able to come make repairs. AT&T noted on the invoice that the damage had occurred at the site of the contractor’s work. 8. Losing most of our family’s belongings: Most devastating to our family, Nano did not remove or cover our furniture or belongings on the main and upper levels of our home when their demolition crew chopped large holes in the wall of every room (they covered only items in the basement). And they did not seal off the chopped sections with plastic. Thus, stagnant, mold-laden air trapped in the walls was released throughout our home, contaminating all of our unprotected belongings. Consequently, we had to throw away all of the large, porous items in our home (e.g., mattresses, sofas, chairs, cloth-covered photo albums). Nonporous items had to be wiped individually, if they were to be saved. We are trying to salvage what we can. But everything could have been saved if Nano had just followed the routine remediation safeguard of covering our belongings before cutting holes in our walls in every room. 9. Testing inconsistencies: A Nano employee told us on a Friday that he had taken posttest air quality samples and that we would have the results the following Monday. When we emailed Nano on Tuesday to ask about the results, a Nano representative emailed back that they had “decided not to analyze the sample” because they were concerned that some work we needed to do around our front door might cause the test not to pass. We did, in fact, need to fix leaking around our front door (work now completed). But this was the first time that we had heard from Nano that this front door issue could be a reason our house might not pass an air quality test. We were actually back living in the home at that point, because Nano said it was safe to do so. They had reported that they temporarily encapsulated the front door area, so it would be safe for the short term. If the front door issue could be causing the mold levels in our home to still be unsafe, why would they tell us (a second time) that it was safe to live there, especially knowing I have severe asthma? At this point, I had an alarming suspicion that Nano might actually have analyzed the sample and just not want to tell us that the test results had come out badly (We will probably never know). I worried they were just covering their bases by suddenly saying that good test results were dependent on our front door repair. That’s when I hired an independent tester, a company that does not do remediation, to test the air quality to see if our family was safe in the home. And that’s when we learned that the levels of mold in the home were worse than before and that we would have to immediately leave our home again. When Nano first began working on our home, we stayed at a hotel because our former home was on the market and we wanted to keep it presentable. But after the independent test results, we realized we had to find a longer-term solution. We had tried to put plastic around the large, jagged holes in our daughter’s bedroom walls, to shield her from the awful smells coming from them, but learned that the plastic could not keep us safe. We had to move back to our former home, ultimately taking it off the market. Another mold remediation company has now successfully remediated the home. And another contractor is repairing the holes in our walls. Because Nano chopped holes in paneling that cannot be patched, that means ripping out and re"

"I would absolutely hire them again. Superior customer service and knowledgeable technician. We had a "trouble spot" on our roof that we have tried to fix for years. Just could not get water runoff routed correctly so we had cascading waterfalls every time it rained. The technician took his time to evaluate the issue and figured out how to fix it. Great job. No more waterfalls!!"