Exterior Water Service Line Coverage
$7.95/mo
$23.85/qtr
$95.40/yr
Cindy had a terrible problem. The cellar of her Wichita home was filling with sewage.
Fortunately for her, she also had help. She called HomeServe.
Cindy had been a long-time HomeServe customer and had already saved thousands of dollars with a plan to help protect her from the cost of sewer line repairs. Three years prior, she had a clean out installed, which would have cost her $3,500 without a HomeServe plan and two years before, her line had been cleared with hydrojetting which would have cost $1,200.
This time, she once again needed help with her sewer line – not only was it clay tile, vulnerable to tree roots, but she guessed it was somewhere around 110 to 120 years old like many other homes in her neighborhood. Plus, her home had been built on the bones of a much larger building, dating back to the late 1800s, and her sewer line was a massive eight inches in diameter, twice the size of the average four-inch diameter sewer service line. It required equipment intended for industrial or commercial property.
Cindy was on a fixed budget and didn’t have the money or bandwidth to deal with major home repair projects. That was why her plan from HomeServe stood her in such good stead. Her husband had known that the plan would be helpful to Cindy and cautioned her to maintain and prioritize her enrollment.
Cindy appreciated being able to rely on the contractor sent to her home for her latest sewer line issue – Bowers Plumbing, Heating and Air, which has been serving the greater Wichita area since 1955 and a HomeServe contractor since 2010. Bowers was the very same contractor that addressed her earlier issues, and Kendall, the owner, provided Cindy with his own personal brand of white-glove customer service.
“Bowers Plumbing is skilled at what they do,” she said. “I’ve known the company for years and years – they’ve been around for about 50 years, as long as I’ve been in the neighborhood. The owner, Kendall, came out himself several times to see what was going on. He was very proactive for the owner of a company of that size, and he was very, very nice to me. I really appreciated it.”
“(HomeServe) is very easy to work with. I used to be a realtor and I’ve dealt with a lot of home warranty companies, some for things in my home, and some will fight you on everything. HomeServe saw what needed to be done and did it. Also, they hang on to the same contractors.”
“Kendall handled everything. All my life, I’ve helped other people when they needed it, and I wasn’t used to having to ask for help for myself. I was so overwhelmed, I didn’t know what to do and I had sewage everywhere. I was almost in tears. He just took charge of everything. He was just very kind and not condescending or judgmental at all. He was very professional and you could tell his crew respected him, never a word against him.”
“Bowers was very nice to work with, even the office manager, Brooke, was phenomenal. Everyone was very respectful and on top of what they were doing. It was just exceptional.”
Having a solid contractor like Bowers on her side made all the difference for Cindy, because the news about her sewer line was about as bad as it could be – the line had “offset,” or shifted so much that it was no longer connected to the city’s main sewer line. This meant that everything going down Cindy’s drains was just pooling in her plumbing. In fact, if her drains had not been so very outsized, she probably would have starting having problems even earlier. Cindy now second-guessed even flushing her toilet, afraid the water would just come back up in her cellar.
“I was carrying my dishwater outside and dumping it,” she said. “I was going over to my sister’s house to shower.”
The repair was going to be massive. Cindy’s line, in addition to being very large, was eight feet below ground – most sewer lines were no deeper than five or six feet down. Since it was so deep, it would require specialized equipment to stabilize the sides of the trench walls to prevent them from collapsing on Kendall’s crew. Her large yard also posed a problem – there was 120 feet between her home and the sewer main. Then there was the matter of having to evacuate under the city street, requiring traffic control and patching the road.
The cost was staggering, just under $14,000. Cindy stated she would never have been able to afford it without her plan from HomeServe. She noted that, if she had been unable to have the sewer line repaired, she was faced with the prospect of having to live with family until she could raise the funds to fix it.
But Cindy had taken her husband’s advice to heart and kept her plan from HomeServe, and she didn’t have to pay a penny towards the repairs. HomeServe contracted and paid Bowers Plumbing directly and, between her plan from HomeServe and Bowers Plumbing’s dedicated service, Cindy didn’t have to worry.
“You have no idea how much I appreciate this,” she said. “HomeServe came through. It was a very bad experience that was handled well by HomeServe and Bowers and I really appreciated that. As bad as the cellar flooding was, it could have been much worse.”
Published Aug 26, 2024