Response from AMERICAN TREE EXPERTS
Dear [member name removed], Thank you very much for your kind review. I am sorry we had to charge an additional amount because of damage to our saws from the metal we encountered within your tree. We avoid doing this as much as possible and will often waive additional charges if we only run into metal a couple of times in a tree. The tree we removed for you had an unusually large amount of metal that was not visible within the trunk from nails, bolts, or other hardware pounded into the tree in many different areas, which we ran into eight times with our saws. Besides the damage to our saws, this makes the removal much more time consuming. If we considered this a cost of doing business we would have to increase our pricing on all of our jobs to cover this cost. We do not feel it is fair that our customers should have to pay higher prices for the unusual possibility that there might be metal in their tree. This is why we have included the following sentence in our Terms and Conditions that is given with each Proposal: "Concealed Contingencies: Any additional work or equipment required to complete the work, caused by the authorizing party’s failure to make known or caused by previously unknown foreign material in the trunk, the branches, underground, or any other condition not apparent in estimating the work specified, shall be paid for by the customer on a time and material basis."