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Not even sure if this is the right place for this post, but it's the closest forum to what I'm asking about. So, my wife and I went out and bought a 65" 4k TV on Friday. We had a 36" 4k TV sitting on our dry bar (which inexplicably was the place that had all the A/V connections like coax and such when the house was built last year), but it was too small for our living room and we wanted a bigger TV to get mounted above the fireplace. My brother-in-law and his wife suggested using the guy that built their patio and installed their TV out there, so we gave him a call and he came out Saturday to mount the TV. He supplied a mount (mistake 1 on our part) for which he charged us $150, and was there for loving 5 hours doing this poo poo. He charged $95 an hour. Besides the obvious questions we should have asked but didn't (How long was this going to take, etc), we kind of feel like we got taken. The bill when he was finished was $700 (he discounted $50 because he initially hosed up our DirecTV signal). This literally enraged my wife when I told her the damage, but she said just write him a check and get it overwith, so I did. He ran wires up above the ceiling and down beside the mount for power to the TV, and ran two very long HDMI cables, one for the DTV receiver and one for the xbox. He spent a lot of time on an electrical outlet that was already there at the dry bar for some reason and I don't know what he was doing that took him over an hour just working on this outlet. He cut another hole down toward the surface of the dry bar to run cables behind the wall and make it look better. He finally did install the mount and we got the TV up there and then the box wasn't getting a signal from the dish, so that was another hour trying to figure out if it was his connection that was the problem. So long story short, my wife and I feel like he stalled and took more time than was reasonable to do all these things so that he could get more money out of us, and we kind of feel stupid now. I felt especially stupid when he asked for more business from us or people we know. I feel like he did a decent job and we got what we asked for, just not sure if it should have taken that long to do, and we were not expecting to shell out $700 for this--it wasn't in our budget this month, and we really expected to pay maybe half that. We have a friend who had offered to wire and install surround sound speakers in our living room, and we wished we had just used him instead. Is $700 for 5 hours plus the mount and long HDMI cables reasonable? Should it have taken that long and was he charging too much? Any of you A/V savvy goons who do this kind of stuff, would you have charged that much and taken that long?
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Nov 30, 2015 17:24
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| # ? May 5, 2024 11:50 |
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That was pretty painful to read and i feel for you and your wife. What sucks is that you and a buddy plus a couple of youtube tutorials probably could have knocked this out yourself in the same time, and for the price of a new $3 outlet and the TV mount. This is not a high degree of difficulty project. That said, 5 hrs seems a bit long for a pro to do this, but if he was doing it alone, hanging a TV and running new electrical / low voltage does take some time to do right. All said, you definitely got grifted by this guy. $700 for that project is insane and $95 loving dollars an hour? That's outrageous for what essentially was handyman work. Bottom line, you never ever let someone do work like this by the hour. Any contractor, electrician, plumber etc who knows what they are doing should be able to walk in and give you a estimate for the entire job. Again, i'm sorry to hear this happened to you guys. Sointenly fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 18:30
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Sointenly posted:That was pretty painful to read and i feel for you and your wife. What sucks is that you and a buddy plus a couple of youtube tutorials probably could have knocked this out yourself in the same time, and for the price of a new $3 outlet and the TV mount. This is not a high degree of difficulty project. That said, 5 hrs seems a bit long for a pro to do this, but if he was doing it alone, hanging a TV and running new electrical / low voltage does take some time to do right. I agree that it's outrageous. I wish now that I would have called my parents' handyman who charges only a little bit over a quarter of that cost, but I agree in hindsight that we should have gotten someone to do it at a flat rate. We paid someone to do it because I have neither the equipment nor the knowledge to do something like this. He showed up at 11 as agreed, then was not gone until 4 or a little after. Not even sure he was licensed (or if you have to be licensed to do handyman-type work). We went in blind basically because my wife's brother and his wife recommended him, so we felt we could trust him since they didn't seem to indicate that he was untrustworthy, or they wouldn't have recommended him at all. I think we are paying for it in headaches now since we feel stupid and we made an impulsive decision to just use this guy when I should have known better (I am somewhat handy but never did this kind of work before). The guy I should have called might have taken the same amount of time of not more, but at least he charges less, and he takes so much time because he's detail-oriented and very thorough. Lesson learned. We won't be recommending this guy to anyone, and we told my brother-in-law what happened and they were shocked too. If we had just waited for this other guy to be available instead of needing this work done now (I mean, we were excited to be able to see what we were watching), might have been a different story. My wife and I actually fought about this whole deal because she was furious about the cost and we hadn't budgeted for it (though we do have the reserves to cover it), to the point she went into our bedroom and shut the door and I went outside to process it myself because I was mad that she was so enraged by this and we couldn't talk about it without yelling at each other. Stupid thing to have happen over a guy installing a TV and mount for us.
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Nov 30, 2015 18:56
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life is killing me posted:If we had just waited for this other guy to be available instead of needing this work done now (I mean, we were excited to be able to see what we were watching), might have been a different story. My wife and I actually fought about this whole deal because she was furious about the cost and we hadn't budgeted for it (though we do have the reserves to cover it), to the point she went into our bedroom and shut the door and I went outside to process it myself because I was mad that she was so enraged by this and we couldn't talk about it without yelling at each other. Stupid thing to have happen over a guy installing a TV and mount for us. I guess if there's a silver lining it's that $700 in the realm of "I got screwed by a contractor" is relatively light. Ok, i know $700 is $700 but imagine if you were having an addition put on or a kitchen redone... people get bilked for thousands and thousands of dollars everyday. Unfortunately 99% of the time it's because people just don't know how to deal with tradesman. There's a strange psychological phenomena that occurs when people are dealing with contractors and home repair, we want to so badly to believe that the person we're letting into our house cares as much about it as we do. The reality though is that it's no different than having your car worked on. you'd never let a mechanic work on your car by the hour would you? or at least without an estimate first.
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Dec 1, 2015 23:19
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life is killing me posted:I agree that it's outrageous. I wish now that I would have called my parents' handyman who charges only a little bit over a quarter of that cost, but I agree in hindsight that we should have gotten someone to do it at a flat rate. We paid someone to do it because I have neither the equipment nor the knowledge to do something like this. Definitely got taken to the cleaners, but on a pretty small scale. Watch a few episodes of Holmes on Homes if you want to see people really get screwed. For future reference, a few "old work" boxes, a TV mount, your basic screwdrivers/wrenches, a cheap stud finder, a tape measure, and a drywall saw (or lacking that, a steak knife you don't care about) are all you really need to do this stuff. I think I paid about $20 for my stud finder, $15 for my TV mount from Monoprice (non-adjustable), and less than $100 in misc stuff that includes all of the cables, wall jacks, wiring, etc. That's an install that left no wires showing, and I used all of the same tools to run ethernet wiring in the house. If you want to conceal a power outlet behind it, then add some wire strippers and some romex to the list. I can't attest to the legality of my install, but I tapped into the nearest circuit for mine - which wound up being the furnace/attic lighting circuit (there's an outlet right by the attic-mounted furnace, and my TV is about 10 ft away from the furnace if you take the walls out of the equation). He should have been licensed if he did anything electrical - and you said he dug around inside the existing outlet a bit. I assume he installed an outlet behind the TV (for power), and tapped into the existing outlet to feed it. Doing electrical work for money usually requires a license (though that hasn't stopped millions of handymen). Assuming there's attic and/or crawlspace access, it's a much easier job than you think, the hardest part is fishing the wires out of the wall if you didn't drop an extra $20 on some fish tape. IMO he should have run 3 sets of speaker wires at the same time, for future use with a home theater receiver (front left/right/center channels) - TV speakers universally sound pretty terrible, and adding an AV receiver adds much better sound (and several HDMI inputs, inputs it can switch itself - I only use my TV remote to actually turn the TV on/off, and only because the batteries in my universal one are dead). randomidiot fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 12:16
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some texas redneck posted:Definitely got taken to the cleaners, but on a pretty small scale. Watch a few episodes of Holmes on Homes if you want to see people really get screwed. There are very few places to run speaker wires--our ceiling is 18ft high, and only goes down to 8-10 feet high above our master closet, in front of which is the fireplace and dry bar. So I'm kind of stumped as to how I'd ever get wires run through there without scaffolding. It comes back down on the opposite side of the living room over the kitchen, so there's a good 8 feet of wall space between the kitchen ceiling and the living room ceiling where rear speakers could be mounted. After all this, I had very little interest in keeping him around longer to run speaker wires anywhere. A friend of ours had told my wife more than once that he would be happy to install surround speakers for us and that is the same guy I wish we'd called up to do the TV. He's been to our house for social occasions numerous times so I imagine that if he didn't think it could be done, he wouldn't have said anything. Anyway, yeah one day we will do an A/V receiver and surround speakers, but for now at least the speakers on the Vizio are way better than on the TV we had in the living room before. He did install an outlet behind the TV for power. I just don't know what he was doing with the other outlet, it's like he was banging on the box with a screwdriver and hammer and he did that for a good while. Then when he was done he said it was $750, and acted like $50 was some huge discount "to be fair." Whatever. We don't really have attic access, but the closest to it would be from our garage (it's all just filled with insulation for the most part). The crawlspace he used to run the wire was in the ceiling above our second bedroom and our closet. He had said it was tight up there, and if he was right, I can only imagine the headache it would have caused me to do that poo poo myself.
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Dec 3, 2015 15:29
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He overcharged for sure, but it sounds like he did a quality job at least. As far as the other outlet there, sounds like he was running new wires to it. To run wires though he'd have to punch out another knockout, and that can be pretty tough to do once they're in the wall
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Dec 3, 2015 19:14
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life is killing me posted:
The odds are very good he was doing the following: Adding a new outlet for the tv requires he tap into the electrical system of the house. So he found an existing outlet and used that. He would have had to knock out a knockout panel in the outlet to run the new wire , to do this you literally bang a hammer on a scewdriver to knock out the sheet of metal. Then fish the wiring through the wall from the old box to the new box. Install a cable clamp, strip your new wires, pigtial them in with the existing wires, then re install the old outlet and put the coverplate back on. Agreed with other that you got overcharged, but I doubt he was loving around wasting time in the outlet box. Those can be a bitch to work in depending on size, how much and what type of wire is coming through them, and fishing stuff through the walls with only tiny access points can be very tedious.
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Dec 4, 2015 20:06
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emocrat posted:The odds are very good he was doing the following: Good to know, I appreciate the input there. I have no electrical knowledge, but have managed to re-wire a phone socket...but that's about it.
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Dec 4, 2015 23:27
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Tell him your insurance needs his license number. 
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Dec 7, 2015 02:09
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I thank you for keeping the tradesmen of the world employed doing saturday afternoon home projects.
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Dec 7, 2015 02:35
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For reference I paid 600 dollars for a day of work for 2 people and they ran network cable to 13 different places in my house. I suggest you ask your friends if they know a good contractor next time. If you find a good one never ever let them go.
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Dec 7, 2015 14:26
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Think of it as a tax for being one of those people that mounts a TV over a fireplace. I kid...I understand in some rooms, that's the only viable option, so it's a lose/lose situation. Over the fireplace really only works well in some circumstances, like a really big TV (like, 65" +) and far enough back, or maybe a really small fireplace so it's not mounted too high.)
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Dec 7, 2015 19:29
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I have my 46" TV above a fireplace. It's a gas fireplace with an alcove about 2ft deep above the fireplace with the coax output. There is a second coax on the wall beside the fireplace, but it's basically directly below a window so I would have to snake the cable around the wall and find some sort of statue to put in the alcove. The lovely part is the 46" TV just barely fits, my only upgrade option would be a really thin frame 47" if they make such a thing. The one time I felt like my contractor was swindling me was when he wanted $200 to insulate one wall, which cost about $20 in materials and maybe an hour in time. Guy did say I could do it on my own to save money, and I did. But I still felt screwed since I had 8 decora outlets installed, and the contractor said "those decora outlets cost an extra 80 dollars, but I didn't charge you for them." It was at that point I pointed out the drywaller left a horrendously lovely mess in addition to the fact that he and the electrician admitted they but the supplies at home depot, and a package of 10 standards outlets is $10, and a pack of decora is $20. For the privileged of "saving 80 dollars" I was left with a giant drywall mess, stained carpet, and several ruined LED light bulbs. It just kinda pisses me off when the guy thinks I have no idea how much a pack of outlets cost. To that extent, I still don't even have face plates and I am now missing my work shop fan. At least I didn't get screwed out of $700 for wall mounting a TV. Every contractor or handyman I have spoken to has given an estimate or quote before starting any work. Hell I usually discuss the budget before even telling them my address.
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Dec 9, 2015 22:30
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epitome of "if you aren't part of the solution, there is a lot of money to be made in prolonging the problem."
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Dec 10, 2015 06:10
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| # ? May 5, 2024 11:50 |
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Having worked for two A/V companies in the past I can attest to the fact that will try to rip everyone off, including their employees.
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Dec 13, 2015 20:48
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