Unclog the kitchen sink

My kitchen sink was clogged. I used plunger first without success. Then, I pulled out the P trap and it was OK in the P trap. The blockage was definitely in the pipe. I used a 25-feet snake without success as well. I began to call plumbers to fix it as I was reluctant to rent a machine at $150 hourly rate from Home depot which might be unsuccessful as well. I usually used D.Young but they did not have the resource to dispatch within these weeks.

I found GHP from Yelp as they had some good reviews on Yelp. Moreover, this is almost the only plumbing company that is OK they do not charge anything if their onsite estimate exceeded my expectation. Other companies would charge $29 to $75 as long as they sent the persons to your house.

The man came to house the next morning as promised. He called me before he came. After he took a look at the kitchen, he gave me the estimate price and I accepted it. (There is one thing I was confused is that almost all onsite plumbing persons could give you a price without looking at the actual issue inside. Not sure why they are not able to give me the price over the phone.). There is a coupon I printed from their web site and he accepted it.

He put down P trap and used the automatic snake to snake in. Of course, his snake is much more powerful than the one I owned. He used up the whole 75ft snake and pulled it back. He said he felt something blocked around the 20ft. After he put the P trap back, he found the strainer was leaked during the testing. He asked for additional charge on that and I argued with him that it was good before. He replaced a new strainer for free finally. The first testing did not run well. The water backed up after two minutes. He used snake to snake it again. We tested it again after that and it seems to be resolved. We tested this several times to confirm this. His suspicion is the block might be just fully penetrated but not smashed.

I used hot water to flush several times and it seemed to be OK. I asked if we need to use the jetter if the problem happens next time. He said the price they provided now is only for the in-house snake. With jetter, the price would be $450 for 50ft. (This is a pretty high price compared to other companies.) He said if the problem happened shortly, jetter might be an option. He also suggested us to use hot water to flush more.

He accepted the check.

He seemed not be very confident of the long-term result. I just hope the best will come.

We have a sump pump that stopped working. One of the pipes was clogged and the automatic switch cannot be triggered.

They responded very quickly. We found the problem at late night so we called them. They came right in the morning the next day.

They have a fixed price for estimation, around $400. After that, they found one pipe needs to be replaced (the material costs roughly $20). And they charged another couple hundred dollars for the labor.

After that, the pump worked but the automatic switch could not be triggered. They said they have no idea and it could be better for us to hire an electrician to do that part. So they left and we paid them around $900 with the issue half solved. (At last, we hired another plumber and the problem was the float. They solved the problem for less than $300).