Always Plumbing & Heating Ltd

We had our hot water tank fail in March and because of the good reviews that I read online, I chose to call Always Plumbing & Heating to help us. It was one of the two best-rated plumbing companies in all of Edmonton. Right from the phone call, I should have trusted my instincts and chose the other company. The person I spoke to sounded like a young careless out-sourced call center rep who sounded bored and not interested in helping me. She wouldn't talk loudly enough on the phone for me to hear her. Surprisingly it turned out that she was the service manager. I described my situation, explained that we have in-floor heating in our basement and a larger size hot water tank and needed help because it had sprung a leak underneath. She sent out their "top guy" in dealing with in-floor heating systems. He came out, had a quick look at our hot water tank and told us we needed a new one. It was at that point that we asked about tankless water heaters because we had heard they were good and would save us money and up the value of our home. He recommended a Navien 240E and assured us that it would do the job and provide both direct hot water to all our taps and in-floor heating to our basement floor. He gave us a rough price of about $5000 including installation and said that there's a $1000 rebate that we would receive for choosing an energy efficient alternative to a hot water tank. It was only a little more than just getting a hot water tank, so we were excited and chose to go with it. The regret came quickly as it took a lot longer than was promised to finish the job, and there were constant issues. We were told that we would need to run an outdoor exhaust vent for the new Navien and that it would be small and not an eyesore. That was not true. It's huge and ugly and if we had known, we probably wouldn't have gone with a tankless heater at all. He kept forgetting things, like to reconnect the house grounding cables to the pipes, and he didn't have all the equipment he needed to finish the job properly so he had to come back something like four times to do everything as he was constantly promising he would do. He promised to look at other problems that we were mentioning, instead of just to tell us that it's not something their company does. He kept saying he did something a certain way, and that it wasn't the best way, but that he'd be back to correct it. He never came back. We had to call again and again. By the end we just wanted him gone and started to consider having another company come and finish the job for us properly. He left a bunch of plastic piping all over our driveway which we had to take away to dispose of ourselves. Thanks for that waste of time. It took the company several visits just to take away the faulty old hot water tank after repeated requests to complete the work that they had originally promised. After all was said and done, we can't run two showers at the same time because the Navien tankless heater can't handle the hot water demand. We also have a bathtub that does not provide hot water with the hot water tap on at full. We have to open the hot water tap halfway to get hot water. Otherwise it's lukewarm at full. We complained to the service manager. She sent someone else out to come and evaluate the problem, they made a suggestion of installing an interim hot water tank that wouldn't be too expensive and that it would effectively solve our problem. We would have been okay with spending a little more to do everything right. They came back with a quote for about $4000 for this interim hot water tank that "wouldn't be too expensive". We respectfully declined their offer and decided to just bite the bullet and keep our crappy new tankless hot water system. We now take turns taking showers in the morning, when before we used to use two showers simultaneously, it takes half as long to fill up our bath tub, and any natural gas savings that we may have had because of the tankless water heater is offset by the extra water that we need to run just to actually get hot water at the taps. We've said goodbye to washing our hands with hot water, because it takes over a full minute to get hot water at every tap in the house. To make matters worse, I've been trying to contact their customer service to inquire on the status of our $1000 Navien rebate refund and they simply refuse to return my emails. I'm ignored, which is an insult. It says to us that they've had enough dealing with us, that they're biting the bullet and are ignoring our complaints because there's nothing they can do, or that there's a problem with this particular customer somehow, when really we're the ones that were misled, we paid over $5000 for a service that they promised would be to a certain quality and standard, and we were told that they would do everything to make us happy customers and that their online ratings and reviews were very important to them. If I could give Always Plumbing & Heating less than one star, I would, if anything to hit their rating and discourage a prospective customer to go with the other company. We regret choosing this company very much and have given up on receiving any Navien rebate, and on them ever making anything right.