Brian: I’m terribly sorry that you are not happy with our service. In over thirty-five years, I find that most problems are related to communication. We would like to clarify some points that are not noted in your review.
When you first emailed me regarding servicing your fireplace, all you could tell me was that sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t work. So it worked intermittently. You did not know the make, model or age. I told you in my reply by email that I could not tell you how much it would cost to repair your fireplace without doing some diagnostics, especially on an intermittent problem. I thought that was clear enough. I could not and did not quote you a price to repair the fireplace.
Our prices do not include HST which is extra and that is normal. By law most companies including Gas Fix cannot include HST in our pricing. The price you are saying you paid includes the HST. This is a little misleading.
I did say that often a clean and check can resolve simple problems. I explained what a clean and check includes as you have listed. As you pointed out, I did tell you that extremely dirty units may be a little more. We arrived to a 30 year old (or older) fireplace that was filthy and charged you a little extra because your fireplace was extremely dirty and did not look like it had ever been cleaned. In addition, we found a wiring issue that could have caused an intermittent problem and repaired that problem. A clean and check does not include repairing any issues discovered during the check/inspection.
We test fired your gas fireplace and ran the fireplace while we did a draft test and while we did a carbon monoxide test and the fireplace worked fine and continued to work while we cleaned up, wrote up the bill and completed the payment. By your own account, the fireplace ran until the next day. Intermittent problems are the hardest to repair, especially when the fireplace works fine while we are there.
Although you said I never returned your calls, you never actually phoned me. All your correspondences were made by email. That is fine but emails are slow. If you had phoned the office that is staffed from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM, we would not have had to reply and could have dealt with your problem on the spot. The office is closed on Sat but the phones are forwarded to our field staff. So when you emailed me a video at 3:21 PM on Saturday, January 19, I did not reply until the beginning of the week. I did return all your emails.
We were prepared to return and tried to contact you to arrange a return call. Gas fix will return and check a fireplace that we serviced for 30 days from the original service date. Seeing the video was helpful. If it had acted up like that on our first call, it would have made the repair much easier.
You also filed a complaint with the BBB. We have submitted all the email correspondence we have in reply and the BBB has closed the file for lack of merit.
At Gas Fix, we strive to provide quality service and care to all our clients. Unfortunately, there are circumstances where no matter how hard we try, it becomes clear that this is not possible. We apologize for any misunderstanding and wish you all the best in the future.
