Full disclosure, I didn't end up hiring E.A. Bibey for work due to the issues I'm about to describe.
I trust my plumber with my life but he wasn't able to perform a boiler repair for me so he referred this company. The property is a rental so my property manager was speaking to a woman at E.A. Bibey. They said they couldn't get us on the schedule for 2 weeks but couldn't actually give us a day or time. My property manager tells me the woman she's speaking to has a bit of an attitude. They finally call back with a day and time which is the following day. We need to give tenants 24 hours notice so luckily that worked out.
Then the woman at Bibey calls me to go over terms. First, the service call is $310 dollars ($200 for labor, $110 for travel). Having friends who are 20+ year union HVAC techs, I know that $200 an hour for labor is insane. Also, spoiler alert, unless you're fixing other people's boilers at your own house, you need to travel. Round trip to the property is less than 1 hour.
Then she tells me I need to have someone on site with a check or they can call for a credit card when they're done but it's a 4% service charge. I explain to her that there's no way I can get a check and get it to my property manager in time and she can't be on site. Now, if you're going to charge me 4% for a CC, you need to give me the option to pay some other way to avoid that. I could literally drive a check over to their business 10 mins away but that wasn't sufficient. Or, take my CC without the fee (as does many other businesses like this).
For context, it's been below freezing several times during this 2 week wait and my tenants are using a space heater.
Being put into a price and terms jam, I call a different company. They can go to the property tomorrow and their service call fee is $119. (I got a bid from a friend who works for a big corporate HVAC company and doesn't do these calls and he told me his site fee is $105). Work was done by a different company, paid with CC, no 4% fee.
I don't care if these guys are miracle workers with boilers and HVAC, the way they handle business is their achilles heel. read more