We decided to book Alpine Electric to rewire our house panel, up our garage power and run wiring for a hot tub. The original quote was $2400. Our appointment was booked for July 18 and was scheduled to take 12 hours, so I took the day off work, assuming that they would send two electricians as they never booked for a second day. The electrician showed us and before he even set foot in the house he told me that he didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing and that he was given the job just a half hour before. He also told me that because the work was going to take 10 hours that he would need to come back another day. I told him that I needed this work completed. Because of the wiring we had to dig trenches in our backyard and had a landscaping company bringing a mini backhoe in the next day to fill in the tranches and level the backyard. I asked him to call his office and clarify what he was supposed to be doing and to ask if they had a second person to come help him. He kept asking me specifics of the job and because I’m not an electrician/handyman, I called my husband and asked him to come home to deal with this. He came home and ended up chatting with the electrician and we learned that the estimator had drawn up the quote based off of completely inaccurate information. We called the estimator and he said that he messed up really bad and that our quote was going to easily double, but that because it was their mistake that they were going to cover it. He let us know that he was in the area and would be headed to our house to talk with us right away. An hour and a half later, he shows up, goes right downstairs to where the other electrician is working, talks to him for 5 minutes and goes to leave. I ran outside and asked him if he was intending to talk to us like he said he would. He said to me “I’m not having a good day, today didn’t turn out how I planned. I need more time to figure things out, I’ll call you guys later tonight”. We ended up calling him at 9:30 when we didn’t hear back. He told us he would need another day to get things together. We didn’t hear back from him for the rest of the weekend. We ended up calling him on Monday evening when we still hadn’t heard back from him, and he told us that our new quote was going to be $3475. We asked him about when he told us that they were going to cover the cost and he said that he couldn’t do that because he wasn’t going to be able to pay him rent and he would lose his job. He also told us that we would have to pay Enmax to come ($450). He asked us to call Enmax to book the service. With the limited information that he gave us, we called Enmax and they told us that we didn’t need to get that service. We called the estimator back and he gave us completely different information about what Enmax was supposed to be doing. I called Alpine’s office and explained to the lady that answered that we were having difficulty with the estimator and she offered to have another man put on the job. We rebooked with them for July 25th and were told that it was safe to rebook our landscapers for the next day because they could guarantee they would be done. While negotiating the final cost with the lady on the phone, I let her know that I wanted Alpine to cover the cost of Enmax (which they agreed) and that I would pay the deposit (50%) but wanted to withhold final payment until I had a chance to talk with the owner of the company. This really made the lady mad, and she told me that she looked me up on Facebook and she knows what I do for a living and that I should be good to pay the bill. I also found out later that she recorded our conversation without my consent or knowledge. July 25th comes along and the electricians show up and tell us that they will need to have Monday and Tuesday the following week to complete the work. I told them that that wouldn’t work because we rebooked our landscapers to come in on the 26th. The one guy said “We can pack up and leave right now if that’s what you want” I told them to continue because we didn’t have any other option. I cancelled the landscaping company who were not interested in working with us anymore as we had cancelled on them twice at the last minute because of Alpine. Tuesday afternoon, Alpine calls and tells me that they will need the house again on Wednesday, I told the guy that I wasn’t happy about it but if that’s how it had to be. He said “I don’t know why you care; at least it’s going to be done” As for the work itself, the electricians left garbage behind when they left, used my tenants bed as a workbench without any tarps, spilt a drink on his pillows and didn’t mention it, folded back our shingles on our roof, exposing the underlay, without pushing back, and left holes in the filling that they used to fill the holes in the side of our house. I did end up talking with the owner and he said that he’s only had the business for 6 months (according to BBB the company has been around since 2010, with the BBB file opened in 2013) and that they were experiencing difficulties. He did give 10% off our final bill. All in all, I would not recommend this company. Everybody makes mistakes, but this company seems to want to blame the customer and made us feel like we were inconveniencing them by trying to get this work done.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $3,200.00
