Legal Advice For Plumbing Situation

Location: Western Pennsylvania

Chain plumbing franchise screwed and robbed us

About a year and a half ago we woke up to a sewage flood in our unfinished basement early on a Sunday morning. We were new homeowners and at the time had only owned our home for a little over a year. Not having a list of reliable tradesmen my husband called a chain franchise plumbing company. The *Owner* of the individual franchise came out and told us we had a collapsed line and it needed to be replaced. We were quoted approximately 8k and decided we had to do what we had to do so we took out a line of credit and moved forward. Once they were in there they told us it was much worse than they thought and they needed to replace a much longer portion than initially anticipated and that it would cost another 10k. We felt we didn’t have a choice based on what they were saying and moved forward with it after once again having lines of credit extended to us. We were charged the full amount up front before they proceeded with any more of the project. So they replaced it all and low and behold within a week we have this same issue again. The technician who came out said he did not agree with what they had said was the issue and we were perplexed. Why would this be happening again with everything newly replaced. Longer story short after much frustration and back and forth we came to find out we have an entirely separate set of plumbing in our house unrelated to the line that was replaced and all it needed was 10 minutes of hydrojetting a clog out to remedy the issue. They “missed“ seeing it when they camera‘d outside the house the first time and “got lucky” when they found it after all was said and done. Now here are the issues

We paid $18k + interest for something to be fixed that was not the issue we called them for. We have since had 2 plumbers come to the house who told us if they had asked a simple question like “are your toilets backing up?” which they were not, then they would have known the entire line needing replaced wasn’t the issue. Now don’t get me wrong, that line would’ve probably needed replaced in due time…cracks and old terracotta piping wouldn’t have lasted forever but it was clearly not our issue at the time.

We were also charged up front to have our entire concrete patio torn out and repoured as they said they would have had to replace the line underneath it, however THEY DID NOT END UP DOING THAT. Our patio never ended up being touched and they have not reimbursed us for that and are refusing to return our calls or make it right.

We expressed that we were extremely unhappy and frustrated with them doing this while they were still on our property and the only solution they offered us at the time was to charge us ANOTHER $5k to tie the newly found line into the main line and we turned them away because at that point we did not trust them with anything else.

We have called and called with no response, had lawyers send them letters with no response, and most recently the attorney general but judging by the response we received back from that they completely misunderstood the situation and basically said “whatever current issues the homeowners are dealing with have nothing to do with the lines we replaced”

We are not having a current plumbing issue, the issue is that we were charged for work that was never performed and we were also charged for work that didn’t need done to fix the problem we called and trusted them to fix. We feel we were robbed by them and taken advantage of and we want them to make it right. We will still have to deal with tying those other plumbing lines into the main line at some point and we could’ve spent the money on that from the start had they done a proper and thorough inspection.

I am looking for any input, similar experiences, guidance on where to go from here, suggestions on attorneys who would handle a case like this as we are looking to retain a lawyer. Thank you in advance.