ALL-CITY SPRINKLERS

Critical: Professionalism, Quality, Responsiveness Dan showed up, did a job. It was okay I'd say c- work and way overpriced. I asked him to bid a 2nd job (rewiring system in the basement), we set an appointment. He showed up and did the work while I was working. Many hours later he came up and said I owed him something outrageous. I told him I wouldn't have commenced at that price and he kept talking down to me and calling me "tough guy." Anyways we meet in the middle. I go to test the system out and some of the zones dont even work anymore. I give him the weekend and many messages to fix it. No response. I cancel the check I gave him and ask him to fix it first. Ignores me and then proceeds to put a lien on my house for the work done.

unknown

We have a sprinkler head that leaks water all the time even when the sprinkler system isn't running and hasn't been in days. We called to make an appointment to fix the leak and had to wait about two weeks before someone could come out. (To be fair, this seemed to be the case with most sprinkler companies about this time--I guess it is a busy time of year.) The guy arrived maybe half an hour or an hour late or so--not too terrible but enough that I called to see if he was still coming. The gentleman I talked to didn't seem to know where the employee was but said to call if he didn't come and he did call later to make sure he had showed up. When the guy arrived, I was not impressed. He was a little bit brusque and had brought his dog. His dog was not on a leash and was allowed to just roam around while he worked. The dog was well-behaved but it still struck me as rather odd and unprofessional. I explained the problem we were having, but when we turned on the sprinklers the guy said it didn't appear to be leaking and said the stream of water into the sidewalk was just normal drainage and would stop soon. I explained that this was what happened every time but that the water drainage DID NOT stop, ever--it just kept leaking until we turned the water to the sprinkler system off completely at the pipe in our basement. He kept insisting it was fine (he said he was 100% sure, in fact) and I kept insisting I didn't think so. I asked what should we do if tomorrow there is still a stream of water into the street. He said in that case I'd have to locate the valve box (we just bought a new home and don't know where all the buried valve boxes are) and call them back. Finally I gave in, seeing that I was not going to be able to convince him to do anything more at that time. I asked him to do a quick tune-up on the other sprinkler heads since he was already there and he proceeded to spend a few minutes adjusting the direction of a few sprinkler heads and then charged us $123, of which $100 was their basic service call fee. We decided to see what happened and watched over the next couple of days to see if it would stop like he said. Sure enough, the water kept leaking for over 48 hours later--that is not "normal drainage!" We called back to tell them it was not fixed and get the guy to come back. I set up an appointment with the dispatcher lady but the guy later called back to say that if we hadn't located our valve box then he couldn't help us. I would have expected a sprinkler repair company would own or at least have access to a solenoid detector which would locate buried valve boxes but I guess not all do, and this is not one that does. So basically we paid $123 for almost nothing and still have a leaking sprinkler system. I was going to give the company an F but the guy did text us later with three phone numbers of companies that DO have valve locator equipment, so I decided to bump it up to a D instead. I found the employee who came out to our home unfriendly and unprofessional. He acted annoyed when I told him I thought it was still leaking and didn't seem to want to help us solve the problem. He had no problem charging us despite not fixing the leak that was the reason we had him out in the first place. No apology or refund was offered when his "100% sure it will be fine" guarantee turned out to be dead wrong. We will never use them again.

All City services are kind of a mixed bag. Most recently we had sprinkler jets replaced with quieter ones which was very nice (no more being woken up by the hissing and thumping of morning lawn watering) but they didn't properly adjust the spray patterns and water pressure, so there were sections of the lawn that died out throughout the year. We've replaced several solenoids (and re-replaced them subsequently) - I'm not sure if it's typical for the solenoids to need replacing every 1-3 years or if it's the brand they are being replaced with. They have all lasted at least a year and some have lasted several.

System works great. New system installed with very little disruption to the lawn. Very prompt and professional.