K. in Leaside

I ordered chimney cleaning from a Groupon promotion. Got upsold on some chimney repair work. The day scheduled for the work was Tues Oct 30 2012, predicted to be cold, rainy, and unsuitable for quality roofing work which would last. Late last week I called to find out what the weather policy was, and received no specific answer. Monday by noon no one had contacted me about whether or not anyone would be attempting to work in the rain, or when it would be rescheduled, etc. At this point I decided to call and cancel as this company simply could not be trusted to be up on my roof. Scott called back, and without saying a word about the status of the appointment for tomorrow, instead asked what he could do for me. I asked why no one had contacted me and there was no explanation. I asked why I should trust a company that would do roofing work under poor conditions rather than reschedule and Scott said the whole office was laughing at this call. Haha. Suffice it to say that the 40% deposit was completely non-refundable. Check the homepro thread on redflagforums before you sign. I wish I had.

I have an older SpacePak AC unit installed by previous owner of my house. When I called for annual inspection/maintenance service, Davenport Campbell gave me the same rate the previous owner had been getting for the past few years. The service was quick and efficient. Although the repairman did make a recommedation for additional work, there was no hard sell. Overall, a pleasure to deal with.

I inherited a Direct Energy annual home heating repair/maintenance contract for from the previous owner when I bought my house. At first it seemed great. Then I tried to schedule the included free cleaning. The customer service representative spent about 30 minutes typing in one date at a time to find out when the first available free date was, because, apparently that customer service representative did not know how to use the 'search' function in his appointment booking software. Later in the winter, I called for service on what I believed was a faulty circ pump (low frequency resonance in the pipes causing light fixtures to rattle audibly and cracking the plaster all over the house). The repairman denied there was any problem and refused to do any work, on the pump or anything else. Finally, my yearly premium for this service jumped by $40 without any prior notice, and that's when I found out about the unpublished cutoff date for opting out of automatic renewal as well. Well, I managed to talk my way out of next year's contract and now I'm searching this website to look for a replacement contractor for home heating service. Imagine my surprise when I saw the above reviews for Direct Energy.