Bernie Gage Plumbing & Heating

Bernie Gage Plumbing & Heating has been our plumbing and heating services provider for a long time. We own many properties and cannot settle for anything but the best possible service. Bernie, Melissa and their team give us expert service. They are reliable, friendly, and a pleasure to do business with.

Update a year later:
I continue to get exemplary service from the folks at Bernie Gage Plumbing. Bernie, Melissa, Rebecca, Stephen, and all the others on the team are simply terrific.

In mid-July 2023, I emailed to arrange for some plumbing work as part of home renovation projects. I immediately received a response from Melissa to set up an appointment for an initial site visit. Unfortunately, on the day of the visit, I had to respond to a medical emergency for someone needing CPR, so I missed the service tech. Melissa was understanding and graciously re-scheduled for the following week (end of July).

The service tech, Stephen, came out and did a thorough job, took pictures of all of the work I wanted done, even found some problems-waiting-to-happen. He's a super-nice guy, even gave me some advice on raising chickens. When he was leaving he said, "It'll be a while before we can get back to you." I didn't ask what that meant, but it did seem like a weird statement...

I reached back out to Melissa 11 days after Stephen's visit (early August now), just to ask for an estimated timeline. We were going to be going on a two week vacation in September and I wanted to make sure there wouldn't be an unexpected "We can be there tomorrow" call when I was away. I never heard anything back.

And I still haven't heard anything back. Even if Melissa somehow missed my follow-up email, they still had Stephen's site visit info/photos to work with, which should have triggered some kind of re-connection...maybe?

Anyway, a lovely experience until they "ghosted" on me. Pretty discouraging...even an email saying, "Sorry, we're not going to be able to do that work for you" would have been helpful communication. It delayed me in searching for another plumbing company.

I had been a loyal customer of Bernie Gage for several years, but I can no longer recommend their services. Be aware that they bill travel time for all of their service calls—not an unusual practice, perhaps. But their billing begins, not from their headquarters, but from whereever their technician happens to be. If you live locally and you are lucky to be the first service call of the day, you will pay little extra. If they schedule you after a customer in Essex, as they did with me, you will be charged an extra hour of labor ($120) for travel, on top of any work that is done. Their technician even showed me his log. While he had spent 54 minutes at my house, I was billed for two hours of labor. Why should I be responsible for another customer’s location? This is an unfair and arbitrary practice, made worse by the fact that it took four visits to fix the problem I was having with my furnance. None of this was ever disclosed to me until the bill arrived in the mail, and the bill was adjusted only after several phone calls to complain. Needless to say, I will not do business with them again.