Last Friday we called Priority Plumbing to come to our office to check out a blocked pipe that caused a flood of waste water in our basement. As you can imagine, the whole office smelled awful. We wanted the problem resolved ASAP.
The plumber showed up. Payment was required before any work was completed. We willingly paid the $99 fee (+ HST) to have the problem, as we had hoped, resolved and the blockage cleared. We expressed our concern that the blockage was due to the fact that it was raining, and that somehow this was contributing to the cause of the back-up (a smaller flood had occurred a few weeks earlier, also when it was raining). The plumber dismissed the idea, and said that it was highly unlikely that rain could be contributing to the back-up. The plumber attempted to clear the blockage with a snake, but was unable to. He told us that our problem was not due to a blockage, and that it was actually a broken pipe. He explained that the resistance he was getting would not occur if it was simply a blockage, and explained that it could be dangerous to force the snake any further. He pulled out the snake, attached a sonar device to the snake, and sent it back to the location of the “break” in order to get an accurate location of where the “problem” was. He said the blockage was in the middle of the room.
The plumber then explained that we had two options to proceed. Option 1 ($2100): replace the broken section of pipe. Option 2 ($6000): Replace the whole pipe to avoid a future problem. We left it at that and he left.
We called in a second opinion to have a look at the problem. We explained to him everything we were told by Priority Plumbing, and he decided he would re-assess the situation. The new plumber placed a camera down the pipe and was able to move through the entire section of the pipe where Priority Plumbing had identified a “break”. To our surprise, absolutely no break was present, and no blockage was present AT ALL in this section. A BLOCKAGE, not a break, was found much further down the pipe at the front of the house. It was found that the downspouts OUTSIDE were feeding directly into this very location of the pipe, and this is where the blockage was. This explained why the back-up occurred when it was raining heavily. The blockage was immediately removed and cleared, and we are back up and running.
Although there's no way to prove it for sure, we think that Priority Plumbing should have been able to detect what the actual problem was. It seems like we might have been mislead. We would never recommend Priority Plumbing to anyone.
