Advance Chimney Sweeps Inc

Very wonderful service, polite, and well-mannered workers also I could not believe all the buckets of soot they got from my chimney. Very Very Satisfied

Review: On April 16, 2013 Advance Chimney Sweeps cleaned & inspected my chimney for $179.76. A few days later, the owner of the company, [redacted], called me to say that the chimney had not been properly waterproofed, causing exterior bricks to spall (crack off), & that it was undersized by modern code. Since I only use the fireplace 5-6 times per year, & resizing it would be expensive, he said not to worry about it. He agreed to repair & waterproof the chimney exterior for a fee of $1600. On May 21, the technicians regrouted & waterproofed the top 6' of my chimney. They said they would come back the next week to clean off the excess grout once it had set. I asked them to wait on that since I had roofers redoing the roof & then painters after that, & they agreed. In late June, as the painters were finishing, they said the back side of the chimney, which isn't easily seen except from the roof or a ladder, still had spalled bricks. I called [redacted] & asked why those bricks hadn't been repaired. He claimed that they had never agreed to repair the spalled bricks, & only ever intended to regrout and waterpoof the chimney. I said I couldn't imagine that repairing the spalled bricks was not considered part of repairing the chimney, & anyway, they still needed to clean off the excess grout. He claimed that it was not part of the original deal but said he would send men on July 16 to do it anyway. No one ever came to do the repairs. On August 12, after returning from a vacation, I left Advance Chimney a voicemail asking when they were going to complete the work [redacted] had promised would be done on July 16. No call back, so I called again 2 days later. I told the woman who answered that I was unhappy being ignored & if they did not do the work I would have to contact the Revdex.com. On August. 17 I received a certified letter from [redacted] claiming he owed me nothing, & that I was not to contact him again. Both the roofer & painter told me the chimney repairs were poorly done. My chimney repairs are still incomplete.Desired Settlement: I would like Advance Chimney to complete the work they promised, repairing the spalled bricks, waterproofing those repairs, and cleaning off the grout, or else pay for another chimney repair company to do so.

Business

Response:

Dear Revdex.com,

I am responding to your most recent complaint that you received concerning workmanship issues related to work performed by our company. I must start off by stating that our company is in well over 2000 homes a year and when taking into consideration the volume of work that we do, the level of complaints that we get or should I say the lack of is quite remarkable. We clearly are one of the largest company’s in the state in our industry and we certainly didn’t achieve this by providing inadequate service to our customers. We value all of our customers and strive to exceed their expectations in every way possible, but unfortunately not all people can bo satisfied.

Our company was contracted to perform a cleaning and inspection of this customer’s chimney on April 16,2013 and during that inspection our company had identified several problem/digcrepancies with this customer’s chimney to which most were ignored by the customer. Contrary to what our inspection had indicated and our report stated, the customer specifically indicated that all she wanted done was the chimney pointing and that was it, so we reacted accordingly as our proposal clearly reflects. This customer also stated that the chimney grout needed cleaned, but I beg to differ. If this customer wanted a chimney that looked brand new than she should have requested a new chimney be built. A pointing is simply putting new mortar in between the joints of the brick and then striking the joint, but clearly the joint can’t be nearly as clean as a new chimney because the brick are not being removed or reset in the process which limits accessibility to the mortar joint. I did observe the photos and can say that the work performed is clearly up to industry standards.

This customer has indicated to me that she was very particular and veiy difficult to satisfy right from the onset of our first conversation and perhaps I should have been a bit more reluctant to provide service to her based off of that conversation, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt, but she certainly did live up to her word. She stated that her roofer and her painter both indicated that our workmanship was substandard, but first and foremost they are both biased based on the fact that they work for her and are compensated financially for doing so and secondly both of these companies are not qualified to give an opinion when taking into consideration their lack of knowledge concerning the chimney industry. I would have given more weight to something that another chimney company would have stated more so than that of a roofer and a painter.

If you really wanted to be technical, there’s not a chimney in any community that doesn’t have nicks, cracks or chipped brick through out it. Most brick when purchased even have nicks or chips in the comers. It would be unreasonable as well as unethical to solicit a repair every time our technicians see one of these issues which incidentally is on every chimney, but as 1 previously stated, we have an ethical obligation to our customers to be reasonable in what we deem as problematic and not problematic.