Business ProfileforHalpin Plumbing Inc.

I contacted Halpin Plumbing to do three small plumbing jobs. I am not a plumber. When they told me the price for doing the jobs, $900.00, I figured they would be here all day, lots of parts. They were finished with all of my projects within one hour!! They offered me nothing in writing to explain how I would be charged $977.00 for this service. I paid the invoice because I agreed to it when they first told me, no knowing the work would take them an hour and maybe $50 in parts. I called to complain about being over-charged and was told that they charge by the job, not an hourly or parts rate. They charge like this in case my work would take a long time, which it did not. My complaint fell on deaf ears. I am a single, elderly woman who feels like I was taken by these bandits. This is a deceptive business practice and I am sure I am not the only person who has been taken advantage of. I will also be contacting the Consumer Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. There must be a way to stop this kind of comsumer abuse.

Upon seeing this review, we looked into ****** service. She agreed to all pricing a head of time, told us the quality of work, technicians and office staff service was great but simply was upset that we weren't at her house long enough for her to justify the cost. We called her twice to discuss the complaint and also ran the technician's truck report which verified his drive time. For her job, we had to make two trips to her house because we had to make an extra trip to locate a part she needed from a supply house in order to complete everything same day. Because of that, we had 3 hours invested in her job with on the site work and drive time. When we calculated all the parts used, she had over $200 installed. I also had a second technician in training which cut the production time in half. We then broke out her invoice to time and material and refunded the difference to show the flat rate pricing is fairly accurate and we didn’t want her to feel as though we “were bandits”. However, she refused to believe we didn’t fabricate the costs associated with our work. We have been charging this way for over 8 years and it often is within $50-$100 in either our benefit or the customer’s compared to time and material invoicing. The biggest difference is flat rate pricing allows the customer to know a head of time instead of waiting on the office to compile everything and send an invoice to be shocked by later. This is a growing industry standard practice. We are also a family run company who take reviews very seriously and did our best to help **** understand and see value not only in our work, but also customer service.