This company is a joke. They use deceptive business practices, lie, employees steal and come to the job while they've been drinking, don't show up when promised, are unprofessional, and do very poor quality work. We had a sewer backed up that my roommate discovered on a Saturday night. She contacted Roto Rooter to come snake the drain. They came quickly and had a young man come to clear the line. Supervisor Justin showed up quickly to look at the basement. He told us that the kid was not able to clear the drain and that they had to bring in a jet to clear it and a camera to look at the sewer lines. Justin also told us how serious the damage was and said that a crew would need to come in and basically "gut" the basement. Trying to sell us on their services, he said that his crew would come with hazmat suits on and rip everything out and clean it, and then sanitize it with some "chemicals." Another "supervisor" Brent also came out to the house that night and told us that we had a "belly" in our sewer pipe outside, and needed to have it replaced. My roommate had to get financed for this repair and was approved for $7,500 - which just so happened to be the amount of the repair.
As a side note - we have ring cameras at our front and back doors and can see everyone and everything that comes and goes into our house.
We decided to go with Roto Rooter to clean out the basement and to fix the sewer pipe. They come out 2 days later, the following Monday, to start the job. The excavation in the front yard was a nightmare. Brent told me where the sewer line was in the yard and showed me where they would be digging. 14 feet down and there was no sewer line. I work for the city that I live in, so I contacted our buildings/zoning department and got 2 different sewer maps and gave those to the crew. Both of these maps showed where the sewer line was. Brent, and another supervisor, Jordan, then had the crew dig another trench over 12 feet deep, in the wrong spot. A different man brought them so tool with a sensor on it that they could use to try and find the line - the device he brought was dead, so we had to wait for someone else to bring another one. After using the tool, they decided to try digging in between the two holes they already dug and finally found the line. They were not able to finish the job that day because they needed trench boxes/shoring and said they had to wait for them to be shipped from Chicago. The entire time they were digging they talked about how the ground in my city collapses very easily because it is very sandy - they also talked about how deep sewer lines generally were. If you already knew both of these things, why would you not be prepared with the trench boxes already? We had to wait an extra day because we got snow and the trucking company would not deliver the trench boxes. The crew showed up that next day and was able to repair the line. They again, were unprepared, though. They knew that they would need rock/gravel to put under the new pipe and did not bring any. They had to leave for 2 hours to go get the rock. The young man digging told us that he would try to get our yard back to the way it was as much as possible. Our yard looks TERRIBLE. I understand they don't grade the yard or reseed it, but they could have filled the holes back so much more than they did. Our entire yard is just a dirt pit. They also left our porch slab not stabilized - they didn't fill the dirt back under it so part of it is just hanging. They tore out huge chunks of the street at the end of our driveway and at our curb and left huge chunks of dirt and a bunch of the rock in the street. They did not clean up after themselves at all. read more
