I recently had work done by Eloy Gutierrez at ENG Mobile Mechanic in Los Banos, CA. Our 2003 Fleetwood Pace Arrow class A motorhome needed a new fuel pump. I hired Mr. Gutierrez to do the work. He worked from home and actually had my motorhome parked there while he did the work. This was Friday night April 12, 2024. A new fuel pump from AutoZone was ordered that evening and would be available by 9:30 am Sat. I was told at the time that the OEM pump was ordered at a cost of $387.00.
Saturday morning came. Mr. Gutierrez and I went to pick up the pump. I was told that I needed to provide cash to Mr. Gutierrez so he could go in and purchase the pump on his business account. I gave him $400.00 cash. Enough to cover the cost of the pump plus tax. Once we returned to his house and the motorhome, he and a friend began work on replacing the pump. It took both of them all day and into the night to drop the tank, replace the pump and reinstall the tank. I paid Mr. Gutierrez the $500.00 he charged for the work, plus $100.00 tip, plus I left him 26 gallons of gas that was removed from the tank in order to facilitate lowering the tank.
The first thing I did was fill the tank at the nearest station. Gas had started leaking out from the top of the tank. I immediately returned to Mr. Gutierrez. He began work for another 12 hours. At this point I'm two days behind schedule. I'm finally able to get back on the road a little past 12 am Monday morning, April 15th.
After driving for approximately 4 hours, the motorhome began to act fuel starved again. I stopped at Grapevine, CA and immediately smelled gas. Gas was aggressively leaking from the top of the tank again. I contacted a local truck maintenance business and had the motorhome towed there.
It took all day Monday to get the motorhome towed to the mechanic. So, work would begin first thing Tuesday morning. As promised, work began in the morning and they had the tank down and the pump out in under two hours. I had held on to the original pump and we compared the original pump to the one installed by Mr. Gutierrez. The pumps were different on a few accounts. The orientation of the pump as it sits in the tank was different. The pressure and return lines were reversed and the float for the sending unit was significantly shorter. Additionally, Mr Gutierrez failed to remove the old seal which caused the new pump to not sit correctly. In order to force the pump to seat, Mr Gutierrez used zip ties, jammed entirely around the sealing edge of the tank. To fix the problem of the pressure and return lines, Mr Gutierrez manufactured adapters out of air hose. It was the air hose that failed after 4 hours of driving.
Being unable to source the correct pump locally, I called the chassis manufacturer, Workhorse, and had the correct pump overnighted. The correct pump did arrive on schedule and I was back on the road within a few hours.
I needed to return the old pump to AutoZone and therefore needed Mr Gutierrez account information. I tried multiple times to call and text Mr Gutierrez to no avail. I gave him many opportunities to make it right. It wasn't until I threatened contacting the BBB, the Los Banos chamber of commerce and leaving a negative review on Google and Yelp, that I was finally contacted by text from his wife.
I was instructed to go to any AutoZone and have them call for the account information. I did just that. There was no answer. Thankfully, the AutoZone employee returned the pump by finding the account information on a sticker on the box. The amount refunded was $301.00. I explained that couldn't be correct. The part cost around $387.00. What I learned was, not only did Mr Gutierrez perform substandard maintenance, he tacked $100.00 to the cost of the part.
In a nutshell, Mr Gutierrez shoehorned the wrong pump into my gas tank. Did extremely poor work and took nearly 48 hours to do it. And, added $100 to the cost of the part. read more
