The Grand Sewer Canyon (Dec. 6 - 8, 2010)

Just to put it out there, Jen and I will never use Whipple Plumbing again! In my opinion they are crooks.

When they came out about a month before this, they said that they replaced about 10' of metal and clay pipe on our main line in order to fix the sewer and it cost us about $5,000.00 in order to fix it. They told me that they connected to plastic pipe on both ends and that it should be plastic from there all the way to the house. I told them that I was planning on putting in a basement entrance and wanted to know where the sewer line ran. They told us that the sewer line ran in a straight line from the right side of the bathroom window to about where a tree in the yard was (where they  were digging to do the fix) and then slanted towards the street and to the west from there.

Well, Dec. 5th the sewer backed up again and we thought it was weird since Whipple had just fixed the line. Because of what they had told us we called them again. They brought out their video scope and located where the backup problem was and we were totally confused by where it actually was. We found that the sewer line came out of the house on the far left of that side of the house. Because they had told us that it was farther to the right we thought that cutting a door farther to the left would be safer but as it turned out that was wrong. But we were father confused when the line that we found was clay. Things really weren't adding up so I asked a friend to help uncover the whole line to figure out where it was going because if they replaced 10 feet of pipe they must have known the direction the pipe was going.

It turns out that they only made a spot repair about a foot and a half long and gimmy-rigged a "clean-out" with some odds-and-ends pieces of pipe and fittings and they didn't even connect into plastic but connected directly into clay pipe!

They brought in their "regional manager" to "work things out with us" and to "investigate" what actually happened, but really all he was there to do was to spew forth lies saying they didn't do anything wrong (PR - and just ticked me off really). He agreed to fix the pipe but said he would have to charge us to "cover costs" and said that he'd bring in the equiptment to dig it out the rest of the way and put in the correct plastic pipe from the house to where they did the spot repair. (My friend was smart enough to know that they wouldn't actually dig it out the rest of the way so he dug it out the rest of the way that night before they came back in the morning.) When they came in the morning the "equiptment" they brought in was a spingle spade shovel... They where surprised to see the whole line completely dug out and then went to go get the pipe.

Before they left to get the pipe and the whole time they were doing the repair the kept asking me, "So are you planning on getting this inspected?" Since they asked the question I thought it would be best if I did so I said, "Yes!" every time they asked. Right before they were done they asked me again and then they said they were going to go and get some gravel (see the "Pond Pebbles" picture below) and went and got one or two bags of the "pond pebbles" stuff they called gravel and spread a very thin layer of "gravel" on either side of the pipe. FYI: the gravel is supposed to go down before the pipe and be packed so that the pipe won't sink. What they did was try and make it look as if they did it right (which they did a half ... way... job of doing). And they charged us $1,000.00 to do it.

That's $6,000.00 for something that I could have done a better job doing myself for less than $1,500.00! Not to mention that I wouldn't have had to deal with horrible service!

P.S. That manager they sent out, every time he said something he reminded me of a mobster boss.