Doc’s Plumbing

I had docs plumbing install a new water heater. I was very pleased with the outcome. I was charged exactly the price I was quoted. The service person arrive just about perfectly on time, and worked carefully to make sure the install was done correctly. It took a few hours but it was well worth it. I’m a very satisfied customer.

Doc’s Plumbing is the absolute best! The owner always makes sure everything is done right and they stand behind their work. The techs are always friendly and knowledgable. I have used them for 5 years and will continue to use and refer them.

Doc’s Plumbing was bad in several ways.
1. Their business office closed before 5 pm.
2. They did not return the message I left for them.
3. The plumber was late.
4. Nobody from Doc’s called to tell me the plumber would be late. Instead, I had to call them after I waited for him and he didn’t show up.
5. When he did finally arrive, the plumber would not even talk to me in my condo after I was the one who had called for him to come out. The Doc’s plumber did talk to me after he finished but falsely blamed me for the problem.
6. The plumber solved one problem but failed to find the more severe problem.
7. The plumber failed to use logic about how water leaks result in damage and how gravity works when he told me that the damage to the cabinet against the back wall was caused by a leak which he said had happened under the sink in the middle of the cabinet.
8. The Doc’s plumber blamed me for something which was obviously not at all my fault.
Here is the long story:
I had a problem with horrible odors and some evidence of a water leak coming from under my kitchen sink. I asked around and someone recommended Doc’s. My condo manager also said the association uses Doc’s and that he recommended them too.
This was not an emergency and I had to arrange a time when my upstairs neighbors would be home. So I called Doc’s at 4:38 on a Friday afternoon. They had already closed up for the day but I left a message for their answering service. The woman told me they would call me back. I expected to get a call back on the following Monday morning. By Monday at noon, no one had called me so I called Doc’s again. This time I spoke with someone in their office. I told her my problem and she scheduled a plumber to come out a few days later between 12 noon and 2 pm.
The day the plumber was scheduled, I waited at home as did my upstairs neighbors. When it was almost 2 pm I had not seen nor heard from anyone from Doc’s. So I called them again. They told me that the plumber was running an hour late! Why couldn’t they have called me with that information???
The plumber showed up shortly before 3 pm. Not once did the Doc’s plumber talk to me until after he was done working. He never asked me questions. He never even said, «Hi». The Doc’s plumber looked at the situation and snaked out the clog from the drainpipe behind my kitchen sink.
Next the Doc’s plumber told me that the problem was that I had put something down my sink like food waste or grease which had caused the clog. I had already opened up the pipes and took pictures before the plumber showed up. Those pictures show a mass of gray stuff in the pipe coming down from upstairs but my PVC pipes were almost clean with slight residue which lessened the farther away from the drainpipe. Also, the damage to my cabinet was at the far back wall not directly under the sink, indicating that the water leak came from the drainpipe in the wall behind my sink, not from underneath my sink. Even though I tried to argue logic (water falls due to gravity and takes the shortest path possible, plus how clean my PVC pipes were and how the residue was worse closer to the drainpipe) the Doc’s plumber kept blaming the problem on me. My condo manager stuck by the Doc’s plumber but did offer to have the association pay for the problem this time but next time I would be charged!
Several days after the Doc’s plumber «fixed» the problem, I started having smelly water seep out onto the floor in the room behind my kitchen wall. That waste water got worse and worse. Instead of putting up with the poor service from Doc’s Plumbing again, this time I got a recommendation for a different plumbing company. I called them. They came out the same day, called me early to say they had a cancellation so they could come a few hours sooner than the original appointment, and then found the actual source of the leaks which was a gash in the cast iron drain pipe in the wall coming down from above my condo. They replaced the 50 year old drain pipe. The condo association paid for it. My condo manager never apologized even after I confronted him about blaming the problem on me. I have not had another plumbing problem since I hired this other company.

You might know it would happen late on a Friday afternoon. It probably did that in compliance with Murphy’s Law that, «If anything can go wrong, it will,» along with the inherent corollary for that being, not only will it go wrong, but it will «Go wrong at the worst possible moment!.» For me, it was my kitchen faucet with the cheap white metal insides of the handle breaking off, leaving me waterless, right smack in the middle of my prize preparation of a Cajun Shrimp Étouffée. Ugh!
However, it was one phone call to Doc’s Plumbing which gave me the assurance that a plumber would be out to my residence by 1:30PM on Monday. They even offered to send a man out immediately, but not thinking that failure to completion an etoffee constituted an emergency or matter of imminent threat to life, I declined.
In the meantime, being the semi-​Geekie type of guy that I am, I checked the Internet and then went out to Lowe’s in search of a high tech electronic faucet. That’s kind that comes with a battery pack and solenoid valve switch wherein you merely tap the faucet with the back of your hand to turn it on or off, meaning that when I have both hands a mess (most frequently the case with me) I will no longer dirty up the faucet hand when I go to wash up.
On Monday, even an hour early, I got a call from Doc’s telling me they could have a plumber at my place within minutes. Sure enough, 12:30 and he was here, a gentleman who was well mannered, polite, considerate and thoroughly competent. Though he had never seen or heard of a high tech electric faucet, managed to do the job quickly and efficiently as if he had performed the same task hundreds of times in the past.
So no, I have a newly installed electronic faucet! I the know rule that the more gizmos something has, the more can go wrong, but I can’t see that anything could be worse than that expensive but cheaply constructed facet I had with those crappy internal parts made of that prone to breakage white metal.
Anyway, I couldn’t have asked for better service than I got from Doc’s, a better plumber and foremost, done at what I considered to be an exceptionally reasonable price. Five Stars!!!