Last year my husband and I called Ideal Pools to come and replace the sand in our filter. This was our first year owning a pool, and we were advised by family that it may be a good idea to change the sand so we'd know the age of the sand.
We easily scheduled a service call, and Ideal Pools came out hours after the scheduled time. Our sand was replaced. Upon services being delivered, we tried to pay by check. The service man told my husband he "doesn't like dealing with money" and we'd get a bill in the mail. He also offered to dispose of the sand from the filter, which we appreciated until we learned his disposal of the sand meant dumping it in our garden. If only that was the worst of our problems with Ideal Pools.
Once we had the sand replaced, I called Ideal Pools multiple times a day to pay this bill. I would get told I'd be transferred to the person to pay, only to get hung up on after extremely long hold times. As you can imagine, this would be extremely frustrating. We received a bill in the mail, because the service technician would not take our payment, and it was noted on the bill we would start being charged a late fee for failure to pay! I again called and called, and after hours of calling was finally able to speak to someone.
When I was able to speak to the service manager, I explained how frustrating this process was. I was newly pregnant at the time and extremely sick dealing with this while my husband was at work. The service manager was extremely rude, and when asking me how the service was I told him it wasn't good and we'd use another company next time. This is when the service manager started to yell at me, and told me to "never come back" to HIS f***ing store with my "threats and lies" and to have a "nice f***ing life!" while hanging up on me.
At this point, both my husband and I left reviews of Ideal Pools. I was messaged on Facebook by Laura. She asked me to reconsider and to try to use them again. She then read my husbands review on google, told me there were a lot of "misunderstanding" and that the service manager would not be apologizing for his behavior because it was my fault. She stated that he had taken some other bad phone calls and by stating we'd use another company I "broke" him.
All summer we had some sand coming in from the filter. We just assumed that it was because the filter was old. While it was annoying, it was an extremely hot summer and we used the pool. Upon opening it this year we had another company to come out and do general maintenance to our pool. He noticed some of the sand as well, and took a look at our filter. I received these pictures while at work, of cracked parts that were caused by Ideal Pools. If this had been found while they were out, I'm sure they would have told us and fixed it to be able to charge us for a longer call and more work.
This is a horrific thing to discover. Not only are the service technicians clearly inept, they will break your parts and leave you with an unusable pool while their service manager will yell and swear at you, while also deleting your reviews. I hope no one else goes through the headaches were now going through, paying hundreds of dollars for new parts and service calls due to Ideal Pools carelessness. read more