I wish I'd read some of these reviews before I had anything to do with Mark Tango Plumbing. He charged me $595 to put a patch on an old heating pipe that had sprung a pinhole leak. The part for the patch is $15. His two employees were at my home and on the job for 1 hour and 40 minutes. The bill was totally outrageous.
When I contested it, speaking to Mark Tango by phone (It took 2 days to finally get him on the phone) and asked for an itemized bill, Mark Tango told me his hourly rate was $190! And he charged for travel time but not, he said, for the two individuals labor since it was a job for one individual. How generous!
He refused to give me an itemized bill, saying he told me the reason for the price, and he continually interrupted me throughout the conversation - literally would not let me finish a sentence - in order to give me a long sob story about the overhead costs of running a small business and that he'd only see about $60 profit from my 595 dollars and that it goes to pay for toilet paper in the office etc. Oh cry me a river!!!
Do not hire this "small business". You will be shafted like I was. The following is the longer story of how I came to be manipulated by Mark Tango Plumbing into allowing his employees into my house for this small job my trusted plumber of 30 years could have easily done for $150. Read on, if you care to know.
Just before Christmas, the pipe sprang a leak on a Sunday, so I needed an emergency plumber. I had to turn off the boiler until it could be fixed. Unfortunately Tango ended up being the one I called. He said he was really busy, and after I sent pictures, he told me I could fix it myself and told me how. He was right. I fixed it myself. I appreciated him saving me the emergency call cost and showing me how to take care of the problem myself, so he incurred my trust.
I decided then, to ask him for an estimate on the replacement of all the old pipes in my basement leading to my radiators. My trusted plumber of 30 years did not do that kind of work anymore. So Mark came out to the house and took a look and said he would be possible to do in stages so that I could still have heat through the winter. After an extended wait, he sent me one estimate by email that was 10,500, and one by text that was 11,000. Rather than get many estimates, I asked my trusted plumber of 30 years to look it over and he felt that it was fair enough. I figured the email estimate sent from the office would be the final fee.
Then, I gave the job some thought and I texted Mark that I'd rather do all the pipes in the spring and have him just replace the leaky pipe as soon as possible because I did not know how long my patch job was going to hold. To get Mark by text or by phone was extremely difficult and though he said he'd fix the leak by replacing the pipe right after Christmas it took numerous texts for me to finally get him to schedule me in. I also asked how long the heat would be off since I had painters in the house doing some work. It took him a long time to answer and finally the answer was 1 hour. This seemed odd to me, since it seemed to me that replacing a section of pipe was a pretty big job and it would take much longer than an hour, but I'm not a plumber, so I said, good.
The date his brother and an employee showed up at my door to do the job I had intended them to do, replace the pipe, was January 26th. Long after Christmas. I was irritated by this, and how hard it had been to reach Tango, but I stuck with him through the wait because his estimate on the big job, replacing all the pipes with copper and attaching them to 8 other pipes leading to my radiators, appeared to be fair, and he had originally told me how to fix the leak myself, saving me money on that infamous Sunday.
But here's where things got shady. His brother, finally on my doorstep to do the job I expected - the replacement of the leaky pipe section - said they were not going to replace the pipe, they were going to patch it. He said they'd replace it with the others in the spring and assured me the patch they'd use would hold. Here's where I should have said no, or at least asked how much it would cost. But since I'd worried for a month that my putty and tape patch would not hold and they were finally there, I agreed. It never crossed my mind that they would charge more than $80 and hour for labor. Certainly not $190 an hour! Then the next shady thing that happened was that Mark's brother, Dominic, asked if there was a bulkhead they could use to bring down equipment. I thought, what kind of large equipment would they need to patch a tiny pinhole in a pipe? I do not have a bulkhead. I said they could walk down the stairs. So they walked down the stairs and I saw no large piece of equipment go down those stairs with them. I can only think that this was some kind of ruse, to make me believe this was a complicated job! Do not Tango with Tango. You will be screwed. read more