Lee Despain

Outstanding service. Our old water heater gave out and was leaking on the floor. He put in the new one that we had provided. We have used him in the past. He's very busy, so it can take some time to get into his work schedule, but he always does a thorough, professional job.

Lee was the fifth plumber I called after three weeks of total frustration and $1500 bills for new pump, switches, tanks, copper tubing and more, none of which fixed my water problems. Years ago I lived in a dry cabin, and never did I think I would be back hauling water from Fox again, but I had to for weeks! Lee studied the mess left by these plumbers, worked hard to figure out the problem which really took some studying. He taught me what was done wrong previously, patiently explaining how all the pumps and valves worked, and he got me water after many botched attempts by incompetent so-called plumbers who claimed to know what they were doing. Lee is a bit scatterbrained, quite opinionated, but guess what-- he fixed the darned thing! He made appointments, and when something unavoidable came up, he called me to re-schedule. He is honest, easily admitting when he makes a mistake or miss judges a problem. After my experiences with the other plumbers, I will be calling Lee again-- he got me water, and my pump works! Enough said!

We first scheduled Lee for the end of summer 2012. He didn't get around to us until December, and by then it was freezing cold so we had to run electric heaters through the house to stay warm. He is a really talented and knowledgeable plumber, but if you use him, be aware that your project will not happen in a timely manner, that it will probably take at least 3 times as long to do as he thinks it will, and you'll overhear a lot of funny radio shows and chit chat if he has other people come in to work on the job. As for how much it cost ... he never wrote down his hours so our final cost was an estimate that we and he finally agreed upon after some estimates that weren't too solid. But they seemed fair.

On March 10th I had an appointment set up for an estimate to replace our water filtration system. This was a new appointment after he missed the original appointment on March 9th, in which I ended up calling him almost an hour after he had told us he would come check the water system. The original plan was that I would come pick him up at the bottom of our main drive as the snow has made it a bit tricky to drive on without 4WD. In the morning I had gotten up early, prepared the truck to go down and get him, instead he called me from halfway up the drive asking for more directions. That was fine, but when I drove down to help him find the way, he had turned around backwards and I informed him he only had a short stretch of straight road and could park in a wide turn around just ahead a few hundred meters. I told him he could just turn around at the three way intersection he was stopped at, but instead he informed me he would just go in reverse. Then after a few hundred feet he attempted a 3 point turn in a neighbors drive way and allegedly got stuck (I looked at the front wheels - he just needed to turn then a little to the left and would have been fine.) SO after all of this, he informs me and quot;this isn't a 2 wheel drive road, this isn't what I wanted to deal withand quot; gets in his van and storms off. I found that last part humorous since our original agreement was that I would pick him up at the bottom of the hill (in other words I had already informed him the road required a 4WD). So after wasting all of one afternoon and a morning, I am back to having no estimate. He seemed to be knowledgeable, but I wouldn't recommend him after this. I feel slightly bad about it since he seemed to genuinely know what he was talking about, but the professionalism is another issues altogether. If you have a 4WD road, I wouldn't call this plumber. Especially if it is not clearly marked or plowed to dirt.

They were really good. They came out within less than an hour of me calling them, and I was really impressed with that. They were really efficient; he fixed the problem and didn't try to sell me something I didn't need. They are very reasonably priced compared to other plumbers. I would use them again in the future if I needed to.