I had a spigot on the outside of the house that froze over the winter. When I turned it on a couple of days ago, water started spouting inside the house. I turned it off and it stopped. Turns out part of the valve, just inside the wall, had frozen and ruptured. I wasn't sure of the "construction" required to access it and get it fixed, so I called Any Hour. They quoted me a $38 fee, just to come look at it, but promised it would be applied to the cost of any repair. Jesse showed up. He was really nice. Quickly identified the problem and sat down to write up some quotes. He gave me three, ranging from about $440-$740! I figured there must be a lot more labor involved than I had thought, and made the gross mistake of not making him break down the costs. The part costs about $30 or less at any hardware store. I reluctantly agreed to the cheapest option as I didn't see $300 added value to the highest quote, but $440 still seemed extremely high, but I assumed the repair must be more labor intensive. IT WASN'T. The repair itself took him about 15 minutes, tops. Clean up and paper work may have taken another 15 minutes. Assuming they marked up the cost of parts THREE TIMES ($90) because they can (and to include misc. part costs), what the heck was the extra $340 in labor for? Assuming the entire visit, from start to finish, lasted 45 minutes (at the most), that means Jesse was charging me $453/hour labor? WTF?!! And that's already factoring in the cost of parts being ridiculously inflated! Then, to add insult to injury, he tried to charge me an additional $38 trip fee (when I mentioned that it had been explained to me that it would be applied to the cost of the repair, he just told me I was responsible to tell him that. Shady, shady, shady.) Yes, they fixed the problem. The repair was a simple one. However, their arbitrary pricing seems to be based on profiteering from people's plumbing insecurity, rather than reasonable set rates. I will not be calling Any Hour ever again, nor would I refer them.
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