Questions and answers

Most visits carry a two hour arrival window, and roofing and construction visits carry three. We quote a window rather than an exact time because a trades crew genuinely cannot promise a minute, and we would rather be accurate than optimistic. We text you when the crew is on the way.

Yes. The diagnostic fee covers the technician's time and a written fault report, and it is waived when you approve the repair. Installation and replacement quotes carry no diagnostic fee at all, because nothing is being diagnosed on an estimate visit.

Not quite. A request is not a held slot. We confirm within 30 minutes during dispatch hours, and first thing the next dispatch day if you request outside them. The availability shown on the site reflects how full a day usually is rather than a live view of the dispatch board.

We accept Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, ACH bank transfer, and financing on qualifying projects. Payment is due on completion for service work, and on a staged schedule set out in the quote for larger projects. There are two payment methods we cannot take, which are covered in our billing questions.

Give us 24 hours notice and there is no charge. One call or one text is enough to reschedule, and we would much rather move you than charge you. Cancelling inside that window, or nobody being home when the crew arrives, carries a no-show fee.

There is a no-show fee, and it is the same figure as the late cancellation fee. It covers the slot another customer could have used and the crew's drive. If you are running late rather than absent, call us and we will usually wait or come back later the same day at no charge.

A technician arrives inside the arrival window, diagnoses the fault, tells you the repair price before touching anything, and completes the work if you approve it. You get a written report either way. Nothing is added to the invoice without your approval first, and we do not carry out extra work while you are out of the room.

The office is open Monday to Friday from 07:30, and Saturday mornings. Crews dispatch on a wider window, from 07:00 to 19:00 on weekdays and 08:00 to 16:00 on Saturday. There is no scheduled dispatch on Sunday. Emergency coverage runs 24 hours a day, every day, including holidays.

We cover Raleigh, Durham, Cary and the wider Triangle, with coverage recorded city by city because it is not uniform. Most cities have every trade and no travel fee, two have a limited set of trades and a travel fee, one is emergency coverage only, and some adjacent zip codes are outside the service radius entirely. Enter your zip code on our service areas page for a definitive answer.

No. We are residential only, including multifamily buildings up to four units. A four-unit building is the ceiling and it is a real one rather than a preference: our crews, our insurance and our licences are all sized for residential work. For anything larger, or for any commercial or industrial property, you need a commercial general contractor.

No to all three, and we will point you at the right trade for each. Pool and spa equipment sits under a separate licence, so you need a pool service company. Septic systems need a licensed septic contractor, and Wake County keeps a list of permitted installers. Solar needs a solar installer, though we will happily reroof around an existing array. We publish the full list of work we do not take on rather than making you ask.

Yes, Monday through Friday. We do not staff Spanish-speaking crews at weekends. If you need one, ask when you book and we will schedule you on a weekday rather than send someone who cannot explain the work to you.

Yes. We hold five North Carolina licences covering HVAC, general contracting, roofing, plumbing and electrical, and every licence number is published on our site rather than available on request. We carry general liability cover and workers compensation cover, and we are bonded. Certificates go to your adjuster or your HOA the same day you ask.

Twelve months on labour and parts is the standard, and several services carry considerably longer. Roof replacements carry ten years on workmanship, repiping ten years, structural repair five years, and cabinetry five years. Manufacturer warranties on equipment run separately and are often longer still, and we register them in your name before we leave.

We come back and put it right at no charge. There is no time limit on a workmanship complaint about a repair we performed. Call the office rather than the crew directly, so it gets logged and scheduled rather than depending on one person remembering.

Secure them away from the work area before we arrive. This is genuinely for their safety rather than ours: crews prop doors open, carry sharp and heavy things through the house, and use tools that frighten animals. Tell us when you book if you have a dog that needs handling carefully, and we will note it on the job.

For most visits, no, provided we can get in and reach the work. Inspections, maintenance visits and outdoor work frequently happen with nobody home. You do need to be there for anything where we will be quoting work, making decisions with you, or entering occupied rooms. We will tell you which yours is when you book.

A clear path to the work area, clear parking for a van near the house, and unlocked side gates where the job is round the back. Roofing and outdoor work need the driveway, sometimes for a skip. If parking is difficult where you are, tell us when you book, because a crew circling for twenty minutes is time on your job.

Two separate operations with separate rules. Scheduled work runs inside published dispatch hours, is booked into an arrival window, and carries the ordinary diagnostic fee. Emergency work runs around the clock on a fixed shortlist of eight services, targets a 90 minute response, and carries a call-out fee on top. Ringing the emergency line about something outside that shortlist does not upgrade it; you get booked into the next ordinary window instead. Our emergency questions list exactly which eight services qualify and set out what to do while you wait.

Thirty days from the date on it. Beyond that we will re-price rather than honour a figure that no longer covers the materials, and material prices on roofing and lumber in particular move enough that a quarter-old quote is not meaningful. Re-pricing an expired quote is quick, because the survey work is already done.

It depends on how much work you expect to need. The plans bundle seasonal visits with priority dispatch and a standing discount on repairs, billed monthly, and the discount alone pays for the cheapest tier if you have one significant repair a year. If you rarely call anyone out, paying per visit is the better arithmetic and we will say so.

No. Cedarline Home Services is a fictional company used for demos. Every price, policy, licence number and phone number on this site is invented for that purpose, and none of it should be relied on as a real quotation or a real business record.

Yes, with limits worth understanding. R-22 has not been produced since 2020, so every pound now comes from reclaimed stock and costs several times what R-410A does. We will recharge an R-22 system, but if it has a leak it will leak again, and on an older unit the arithmetic usually favours replacement within a season or two. We will tell you which situation you are in rather than sell you the same recharge every summer.

A repair is for a system that has stopped working properly, and it starts with a diagnostic visit. A tune-up is scheduled maintenance on a system that is still working, and it is flat-priced with no diagnostic fee. If your air conditioning has already failed, book the repair. Booking a tune-up on a failed system only delays the actual fix by a visit.

That is usually normal. A heat pump delivers air at around 90 to 100F, which is warmer than the room but cooler than your hand, so it feels cool if you are used to a gas furnace at around 130F. As long as the house is holding its temperature, nothing is wrong. If the house is not holding temperature, or the outdoor unit is encased in ice that never clears, that is a fault and worth a call.

No. We do not offer it and we rarely recommend it. For most homes there is no good evidence it improves air quality or system performance, and it is widely oversold. If you have a specific contamination problem, after a fire or a rodent infestation for example, that is a remediation specialist rather than us. What we do offer is duct sealing, which measurably reduces the conditioned air you lose into a loft.

No. Ductwork is HVAC but it is not emergency-eligible, and we will not dispatch a crew overnight for it. A duct problem makes a house uncomfortable; it does not leave you with no cooling in a heatwave or no heat in a freeze, which is what emergency cover exists for. If you have no heating or cooling at all, that is a repair and it is covered around the clock.

Eight to fifteen years for most equipment in this climate, and Triangle systems land at the lower end of national figures because they run most of the year. A well-maintained heat pump reaching twelve years has done well. What shortens it most is being oversized, which makes the system cycle on and off rather than run steadily, and skipping maintenance so the coils stay dirty.

Usually not, and frequently the correctly sized replacement is smaller. Oversizing is the most common fault we find in Triangle homes: the system cools the air quickly, satisfies the thermostat, and shuts off before it has removed the humidity, leaving a house that is cold and clammy. We run a Manual J load calculation on every replacement rather than matching what was there, and we will show you the numbers.

That is a humidity problem rather than a cooling problem, and it is the most common comfort complaint in the Triangle. Air conditioning removes moisture as a side effect of running, so on a mild humid day when the system barely runs, the moisture stays. A whole-home dehumidifier controls humidity independently of whether the AC is running, and it is the single most effective comfort improvement available on most Triangle homes.

Every one to three months for a standard one-inch filter, and every six to twelve months for a four or five inch media filter. In a house with pets or during heavy pollen weeks, closer to monthly. A blocked filter starves the system of airflow, which on a cooling system can freeze the coil and looks exactly like a refrigerant fault, so it is worth checking before you call anyone.

Late March through May for cooling, and September through October for heating. Two reasons: the dispatch board is not yet full of emergency no-cooling or no-heat calls, and a fault found in April is a scheduled repair rather than a miserable July evening. If you are on a maintenance plan we text you when a visit is due rather than leaving you to remember.

We shut the furnace down and red-tag it, because a cracked exchanger is a carbon monoxide risk and it cannot be safely repaired. That is not an upsell: a cracked exchanger on a furnace still under manufacturer warranty may be replaced free, and we will tell you if yours qualifies. If it does not, replacement is the only safe answer and we will quote it honestly, including the option of waiting until spring with temporary heat if the budget needs it.

A mini-split is the right answer for a garage conversion, a sunroom, an addition or a room the ducts never reached, and it is frequently cheaper than extending ductwork through a finished house. It is the wrong answer for replacing a working ducted system throughout a house purely to save money, because you end up with a head on the wall of every room. Extending the existing system only works if that system has spare capacity, which after a conversion it usually does not.

On a heat pump, that usually means the heat pump itself has failed quietly and the electric auxiliary heat strips have been carrying the house. They work, and they are expensive to run, so the house feels fine while the bill climbs. It is worth booking a heat pump service if your bill has risen without weather to explain it, because the fault has probably been there for weeks.

It depends on whether the rest of the roof has the life to justify the repair. A sound roof with one failed detail, a cracked pipe boot or failed step flashing, is a repair measured in hundreds. A roof with general granule loss and shingles that crack when lifted is at the end of its life, and patching it buys months rather than years. A roof inspection produces a written report that answers this properly, and we quote a good many repairs for people who expected to be told they needed a replacement.

Because nobody can price one honestly without standing on the roof. Four things move the number by thousands and none are visible from an address: the area in squares and how steep it is, how many planes and valleys there are, how many existing layers have to come off, and how much decking has rotted underneath. Book a roof inspection instead, which is bookable online and flat-priced, and the replacement quote is built from it.

Flashing, not shingles. Flashing is the sheet metal sealing every place the roof meets something else: a chimney, a wall, a valley, a vent pipe or a skylight. On the roofs we inspect across the Triangle, failed flashing and cracked plastic pipe boots account for the large majority of active leaks, and field shingle failure is well down the list. That is good news, because a flashing repair is far cheaper than a roof.

Almost certainly not directly above it. Water enters at a failed detail, runs along a rafter or a decking seam, and drops somewhere else entirely, often several feet away and sometimes a floor down. That is why tracing the leak is a real piece of work rather than a formality, and why we water test when the source is not obvious rather than opening holes until one is in the right place.

Yes, on the first visit. Stopping more water getting in comes before the repair itself, because tarping buys you a dry night and stops a ceiling collapsing while we wait for weather good enough to work in. An active leak into the house is emergency-eligible and covered around the clock, so call the emergency line rather than booking online.

We do not, and we would advise against anyone who offers to. Roofing over an existing layer is legal in some circumstances and it is always a false economy: you cannot inspect the decking underneath, the new shingles sit on an uneven surface, and the whole assembly runs hotter, which shortens its life. Every replacement we do is a full tear-off.

Our quote states a decking allowance, and anything beyond it is itemised at cost rather than absorbed or hidden. How much of the deck has rotted is genuinely not fully knowable until the old roof is off, so a quote that promises a fixed total with no allowance is either padded or about to be revised. We show you the rotten sheets before they go in the skip.

Yes, and it is the part most often missed. Air should enter at the soffit, travel under the deck, and leave at the ridge vent. If the soffit has no vents, or they were painted shut, or insulation has blocked the eaves, the ridge vent has nothing to pull and the system does not work. The result is an attic that cooks in August, shingles ageing early from underneath, and condensation on the deck in winter that people mistake for a leak. Most manufacturer warranties are void without adequate ventilation.

Usually yes, and it costs less than doing it later. The crew and the access are already there, the drip edge and the gutter interact, and fascia rot found behind an old gutter is much cheaper to address while the roof edge is open. Gutters are quoted separately rather than bundled invisibly, so you can see what each part costs and decline one.

Six inch if you have a spot that sheets over the front edge in a heavy downpour, five inch is fine otherwise. Six inch carries roughly forty percent more water and pairs with a larger downspout. On a house with a steep roof, a large single plane, or valleys dumping into one run, five inch simply overflows no matter how clean it is, and cleaning will never fix a capacity problem.

They reduce cleaning; they do not eliminate it, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. Under Triangle pines in particular, needles bridge most guard designs and shingle grit still settles. A good guard turns an annual clean into a check every few years, which is genuinely worth paying for on a three-storey where getting a ladder up is difficult, and less compelling on a single-storey ranch you can reach with a step ladder.

Call a certified arborist first and us second. We do not remove trees or limbs, and nothing can be assessed or repaired while the load is still on the structure. Once the tree is off we will tarp the opening to stop further water getting in, then survey the damage. If this is a storm event you intend to claim for, document everything before any repair beyond emergency tarping.

Ten to twelve weeks from signature to a finished kitchen: three to five weeks of design and permitting, then four to seven weeks on site. Anyone quoting four weeks in total is either not pulling a permit or has not counted the design phase. You are without a kitchen for the on-site portion, so plan a temporary setup with a microwave and a kettle somewhere else in the house.

Because a remodel price depends on what is behind your walls, what the county will permit, what you choose to put back, and how much of the existing structure is worth keeping. Two identical-looking 1990s kitchens in Cary can differ by tens of thousands once the cabinets come off. Every project starts with a free design and survey visit that produces a fixed written quote with every allowance stated.

An allowance is the sum we have budgeted for something you have not chosen yet, such as tile, fixtures or cabinetry. Every quote states its allowances plainly. Choose above one and the difference is itemised; choose below it and you get the difference back. Quotes without stated allowances are how a fixed price turns into a moving one.

Whether the layout changes, more than anything else. Moving a sink means moving a drain, and a drain needs fall, which on a slab-on-grade house can mean cutting concrete. Keeping the wet wall where it is saves more money than any other decision available to you. After that it is cabinetry level, whether a wall is load bearing, and whether your electrical panel can carry a modern kitchen.

No. A contractor who offers to start before the permit is issued is offering to do unpermitted work, which becomes your problem when you sell the house. Wake and Durham counties both run one to two weeks for a residential kitchen at present, longer after a storm event when the permit desk is loaded with roof work. We pull the permit, book the inspections, and meet the inspector on site.

For most projects yes, and most clients do. On an addition the majority of the work happens outside your walls, with two disruptive phases: excavation week, when you lose the driveway, and the tie-in, when we open the existing exterior wall. On a kitchen or bathroom you lose that room for the on-site phase. Water and power stay on throughout, with brief planned interruptions we tell you about the day before.

No, and three site constraints decide what is buildable. Setbacks are required distances from every boundary, and in much of Wake and Durham County the side setback is the binding one, which frequently pushes an addition to the back rather than the side you wanted. Lot coverage caps the proportion of the lot under roof and hard standing, and an existing patio counts toward it. Utility and drainage easements cannot be built over at all. All three are on your plot survey.

In most Triangle subdivisions, yes, for anything visible from the street or from a neighbour. The architectural review committee meets on its own schedule and it is frequently the single longest wait in an addition project, so start it early. We prepare and submit the package, but we cannot make the committee meet sooner.

No. Framing over a moisture problem is the most expensive mistake in basement finishing, because drywall and insulation in a below-grade room that takes water is not a room that needs repair later, it is a room that has to be demolished and rebuilt. We assess moisture first and put the findings in writing before anything is designed. Sometimes the answer is nothing at all, because plenty of Triangle basements are genuinely dry.

Only if it has a compliant egress window: minimum opening size, maximum sill height, and a window well big enough to climb out of. In a poured or block foundation that means cutting and shoring the wall and excavating outside, and it is one of the larger single line items on a basement quote. Without it the room can be an office or a den, but it cannot be called a bedroom, and calling it one anyway causes problems at sale.

Not always, and it is worth checking before you pay for drawings. Some Triangle subdivisions restrict garage conversions outright through HOA covenants, and some counties require a minimum number of off-street or covered parking spaces per dwelling, which losing your garage can put you below. If the plan involves its own entrance, kitchen and bathroom, that is an accessory dwelling unit rather than a conversion, with different rules that in much of the Triangle do not permit it.

Whenever a project removes or alters a load-bearing element, and for most structural repair work. The engineer writes the specification and we build to it, which matters because a contractor who diagnoses a structural problem and then sells you the repair has an obvious conflict of interest. We coordinate the engineer, their fee is separate and paid to them directly so nobody is marking it up, and you get both documents.

Usually not, but the way to find out is to measure it rather than guess. Draw a pencil line across each end of the crack, write the date beside it, and photograph it with a coin for scale. A crack that has not moved in three months is very different from one that has moved in three weeks. Most Triangle cracking is historic, because clay soils swell and shrink seasonally and a great many cracks opened years ago and stopped. What does need attention is horizontal cracking, stair-step cracking in block, and anything actively widening.

Six to ten weeks of shop fabrication after you sign off the design, then two to five days on site to fit. From first visit to finished cabinetry is three to four months. There is no version of this where cabinetry appears in three weeks: the timber has to be selected and milled, carcasses and doors built, and the finish sprayed and properly cured before anything leaves the shop. If your date is genuinely immovable, stock or semi-custom cabinetry through a kitchen remodel is the faster route and we will say so.

Timber species first, then whether the doors are inset or overlay. Painted poplar is the value option and a genuinely good one, because paint does not care what is underneath as long as it is stable; white oak and walnut are several times the cost. Inset doors sit flush within the frame, which looks considerably better and demands tolerances measured in fractions of a millimetre across a run that will move seasonally, so it costs more than overlay.

No. Where the carcasses are sound, refacing can be good value, but it runs on a different supply chain from the one we work in and we would be the wrong company to do it. We build new cabinetry in our shop and fit it, or we fit stock and semi-custom units as part of a kitchen remodel.

Almost always because the material was cut and fitted straight off the van rather than acclimatised first. Trim arrives at whatever moisture content the warehouse had, and your house is drier in January and more humid in August, so timber shrinks as it equalises. We deliver material several days before we cut it and let it sit in the room it is going into. It costs nothing except a corner of a dry room and it is the difference between joints that stay closed and joints you notice every time you walk past.

A coped inside corner has one piece run into the corner and the other cut to its profile with a coping saw, so the joint closes rather than opening as the timber moves. A mitred inside corner looks identical on the day and opens up by the following summer. Mitring is faster, which is why plenty of installers do it. We cope every inside corner on crown, and price tracks corner count far more closely than it tracks linear feet.

Usually yes, either with a stock profile close enough or by having knives ground to run the original. The second costs more and is often worth it in a house with any architectural character. Bring us a short offcut of the original if you have one anywhere; a piece from the back of a cupboard is enough to copy from, and it is far more useful than a photograph.

No. That is timber doing exactly what it should in North Carolina humidity, and planing it in summer gives you a door with a visible gap by winter. The usual real fixes are a longer hinge screw driven into the stud rather than just the jamb, a strike plate moved a few millimetres, or a hinge shimmed. That is a short visit and it is much cheaper than a replacement, and we will always try it first.

An insert if the existing frame and sill are sound, full-frame if they are not. An insert fits inside the existing frame: quicker, cheaper, less disruptive, keeps your trim inside and out, and loses a little glass area. A full-frame replacement takes everything back to the rough opening, costs more and means new trim, and it is the only way to get the flashing detail properly right. If the sill is soft, an insert is a way of hiding a problem rather than fixing one.

It is genuinely a gamble, and worth knowing before you commit. In many Triangle houses, particularly builder-grade ones from the 1980s onward, the treads under carpet were never intended to be seen: construction-grade softwood, often with a plywood riser, held down with staples and adhesive, and gouged. Sometimes what comes up is beautiful and needs sanding and finishing; often it needs new treads. We survey first and price both outcomes separately so you can decide with the information.

Usually smaller than it feels, and the cause is nearly always the newel post rather than the balusters. A newel fixed only to the tread has nothing to resist a sideways push, and once it moves the whole run feels unsafe. Fixing it properly means anchoring into the framing, which sometimes means opening the skirt board or working from below. That fixing is what our five year joinery warranty is really about, because a balustrade that feels solid on handover and loose in two years was fixed to the wrong thing.

Three options, and choosing between them is most of the skill. A splice cuts the rotten section back to sound timber and scarfs a new piece in, which is cheaper than replacement and keeps the original profile. Epoxy consolidation hardens softened fibre and is right for something irreplaceable like an original turned column, and wrong for a length of stock casing. Full replacement is right when more than about a third has gone or the piece carries load.

It will if the water is still getting in, which is why our quote names the cause rather than just the repair. Timber does not rot on its own: something is keeping it wet, usually a gutter overflowing or discharging behind a fascia, a roof detail with no flashing, a sill with no drip edge, or a paint film that failed years ago. Where the cause is ours to fix we quote it alongside. Our two year warranty assumes the water has been dealt with, and we will not warrant a splice under a still-leaking gutter.

The test is the frame. If the joists, beams, posts and ledger are sound, failed boards and a wobbly railing are a repair, and it is a fraction of the cost of rebuilding. If the frame is failing, no amount of new decking fixes it and putting fresh boards on it is money you will spend twice. Our survey tells you which in writing, and we quote a good many repairs for people who arrived expecting to be told they needed a rebuild.

The ledger connection where the deck attaches to the house, and it is invisible once built. It has to be through-bolted or fixed with structural screws into the rim joist, never nailed, and it has to be flashed so water running down the wall goes over it rather than behind it. An unflashed ledger rots the rim joist of your house, not just the deck, and by then it is a structural repair. It is the single most common point of catastrophic deck failure.

Over about fifteen years, usually yes. Composite costs roughly three times pressure-treated in material and needs essentially no refinishing, where pressure-treated needs sealing every couple of years and in this climate that is a real commitment. Two honest caveats: composite gets noticeably hot underfoot in full Triangle sun, and the frame underneath is still timber, so the structure still ages even when the surface does not.

Because timber has to be dry before sealing, and after washing that is typically two to three days in Triangle humidity. Sealing damp timber traps the moisture and the coating fails within a season, so the waiting is the job rather than a delay. Most of the labour is removing what is already there: a film-forming solid stain peels rather than fades and every flake has to come off before anything new goes on.

No, and nobody should. Composite is not refinished: it does not take a stain and it does not need one. If someone has offered to reseal your composite deck they are selling you something that will not adhere. What composite decks do occasionally need is board replacement after impact damage, fastener correction and railing repair, all of which we do.

Almost always the base, which is the part you never see and the part that decides whether the patio is still flat in ten years. Piedmont clay holds water, swells when saturated and shrinks hard in an August drought. A patio laid on a shallow bed of sand over clay will dip, pool water in the dips, and open its joints through freeze-thaw. Doing it properly means excavating deeper than looks necessary and compacting aggregate in lifts, and most of the labour in an honest quote is that work.

Not if it is built with fall away from the building, which every patio we build is. A patio is an impermeable surface, so every square foot sheds water that used to soak in, and if the fall runs toward the house you have built a device for delivering rain to your foundation. Where a site cannot achieve fall by grading alone we include a drainage detail, a channel drain at the house edge or a French drain to daylight, and it is in the quote rather than discovered later.

No, it is efflorescence, which is salts migrating out of the concrete. It is normal on new concrete pavers, it weathers off over a season or two, and it is not covered as a defect because it is a material property rather than a fault. Clay brick does not do it, and natural stone rarely does, which is one small reason people choose them.

Only once we know the old positions were right. Fencing generates more disputes than any other outdoor work, and almost all of them trace to nobody checking the boundary. Old fences were frequently built a foot inside the line or a foot over it, and rebuilding on the same posts perpetuates whichever it was. The plot survey is the record. If you do not have one and the line is not obvious, you need a surveyor before you need us, because we do not establish boundaries and will not guess at one.

The posts, essentially always, and rarely the panels. In Piedmont clay a post has to go below the frost line and resist the leverage of a tall privacy panel acting as a sail in a storm. Set too shallow and clay that swells and shrinks seasonally will heave and lean it. Corner and gate posts take loads the line posts do not, so they need to be larger, deeper and braced. A gate that drops within a year is a gate post treated like a line post.

No. The program covers treatments, aeration and overseeding across seven visits a year; the mowing is yours or your mowing service's. There is a practical reason as well as a commercial one: treatments work best on a lawn mowed two to three days before rather than on the day, and coordinating that is easier when the two are separate.

You can, but you will miss the most valuable application of the year. The February visit puts down pre-emergent, and crabgrass is either stopped before it germinates or it is not stopped at all. By the time you can see it in June the window has closed until next year. A program starting in April is a program missing its most important visit, and we will tell you that rather than take the money quietly.

Because Triangle oaks do not finish dropping until well into November, and some hold leaves into December. Willow oaks and pin oaks, planted through half the older neighbourhoods around Raleigh, are among the last to go, and pines drop needles on their own schedule entirely. A cleanup booked for early October is one you will need again a fortnight later. If you want the lawn clear for a specific event we will schedule an extra visit rather than move your included one.

Yes, and it is the one genuinely time-critical thing we do outdoors. Water left in the lines and in the backflow preventer through a Triangle cold snap freezes, expands and splits things, and the backflow preventer is the expensive casualty because it is brass, above ground, and a regulated fitting that has to be replaced like for like and retested. Winterisation takes under an hour, and freeze damage to a system we were not asked to winterise is not covered by any warranty.

Usually where the supply enters the house: a crawlspace, a garage, a basement or a utility closet. On a slab house it is sometimes only at the street meter, which needs a meter key. Find it now, turn it to check it actually moves, and turn it back. A seized shutoff discovered during a burst pipe is the difference between a wet floor and a flooded house, and we will point yours out on any visit if you ask.

No, and the difference tells us where the blockage is. One slow fixture means the problem is local, in that trap or the branch behind it. Several fixtures on the same side of the house means the branch line serving them. Everything backing up, with the lowest fixture worst, means the main line out to the sewer. If flushing an upstairs toilet makes a downstairs shower gurgle, that is a main line blockage.

Tree roots, almost certainly, and it is very common in older Raleigh and Durham neighbourhoods. Clay and cast iron laterals have joints, roots find the joints because that is where the moisture is, and they grow into the pipe as a fine mat that catches everything passing. Cutting them restores flow immediately but does not remove them, so it recurs on a cycle of a year or two. A camera inspection tells you whether the pipe itself has failed, which is the difference between an annual clearing you can live with and a lateral replacement you should plan for.

Please do not. Consumer drain cleaner is caustic, it rarely clears anything more than a partial soap blockage, and it sits in the trap waiting for whoever opens it. It also makes our job more dangerous, so if you have used it, tell us when we arrive rather than after we have opened the trap. Enzyme-based maintenance products are a different thing and are genuinely useful on a kitchen line, used regularly rather than as a rescue.

If the tank itself is leaking, no, and not by anyone. A steel tank has a glass lining; when that lining fails the steel corrodes from the inside, and by the time water appears the wall has gone. There is no patch, no sealant and no weld that is safe on a vessel holding hot water under mains pressure. Water at the base is usually the tank. Water at a fitting on top, at the relief valve or at the drain valve is usually not, and those are all repairable.

Photograph the label on the side of the tank and send it to us. It carries the model, the serial, and encoded in the serial the date of manufacture. Most tanks carry six to twelve years, and we replace a good number of tanks free under a warranty the owner did not know they had. That photograph also tells us which parts to bring, which is the difference between a same-day fix and a second appointment.

It is the better long-term product and the wrong emergency purchase. Tankless never runs out, lasts roughly twice as long as a tank and takes a fraction of the space, but it needs new venting because it is a condensing appliance, and usually a larger gas supply line because it fires at several times the BTU. On electric, the load is frequently beyond what a domestic panel can carry. Replacing a failed tank on a Tuesday afternoon is not the moment; a planned replacement is.

Yes, annual descaling, and it is routine maintenance rather than a defect. A tankless heat exchanger runs water through narrow passages and Triangle water will scale them up over a few years. A unit that has never been descaled will underperform and eventually error out. Tankless units report error codes, so read the display and tell us the code when you book.

It is a supply line leaking in or under the concrete slab, which is how many Triangle houses are built. The signs are indirect: a warm patch on the floor, an unexplained jump in the water bill, the sound of running water with everything off, or damp appearing at the edge of a room. By the time flooring lifts it has usually been leaking a while. We locate it acoustically before opening anything, because the alternative is a series of holes until one is in the right place.

If it is polybutylene, yes, eventually. It was installed widely between the late 1970s and mid 1990s and is common in Triangle housing of that era. It becomes brittle from the inside and fails at the fittings, so one failure means others are coming, and insurers are increasingly unwilling to cover a house that still has it. If you have had two or three supply leaks in a couple of years, the pattern is the diagnosis and repiping is the answer rather than a fourth repair.

No. Three to six days on site for a typical Triangle house, with water off during the working day and back on every evening, so you can stay throughout. We tell you the morning we will shut it off. Running new PEX from a crawlspace or a loft reaches most fixtures without touching a wall, and a good layout cuts the access holes by more than half. We patch the drywall ready for paint but we do not paint.

An ordinary outdoor tap holds water in the pipe right at the wall, and a hard Triangle freeze splits it. You usually find out in spring, when you turn it on and water appears inside the crawlspace. A frost-free sillcock puts the valve seat well inside the heated envelope so the exposed section drains, and replacing one is the cheapest burst-pipe prevention available. Disconnect the hose in winter either way, because a connected hose defeats even a frost-free tap.

The gas meter is the dividing line. Everything on the house side of it is ours; everything on the utility side, including the meter itself and the service line from the street, belongs to the gas company and they will attend it free of charge. If the smell is outside near the meter or in the street, that is the utility and only the utility. Whatever the location, leave the building and call the gas utility first; the safety procedure is the same and it is set out in full in our emergency questions.

Find every GFCI in the house and check whether one has tripped, then check the breaker properly. GFCI outlets protect other outlets downstream of them, and those can be in completely different rooms, so a dead dining room outlet is regularly caused by a tripped GFCI in a garage or bathroom. A tripped breaker often does not look obviously off; push it fully off first, then back on. If the GFCI will not reset or the breaker trips straight back, stop and call, because both are telling you something.

Yes, and it should be treated as urgent. Electrical devices should be at room temperature. Warmth means resistance, resistance means heat, and heat at a connection is how fires start. The same goes for a burning smell, brown or black discolouration around a socket, or sparking beyond the tiny momentary arc normal with a heavy load. Switch that circuit off at the panel and tell us when you call, because it gets escalated to a person rather than into a booking queue.

Almost always one failed connection upstream, and usually a back-stab. Most receptacles allow the conductor to be pushed into a hole in the back rather than wrapped around the screw terminal; it is faster to install, it is a worse connection, and after twenty years of thermal cycling it loosens. Outlets are daisy-chained, so a failure at one box kills everything downstream. Telling us which outlets are affected turns an hour of hunting into ten minutes.

Often not, and it is very common in older Triangle houses where someone replaced a two-prong receptacle with a three-prong one without a ground being present. It looks safe and it is not: anything relying on that ground has none. The correct fixes are running a ground where a route exists, or fitting GFCI protection and labelling it as code requires. Swapping in another three-prong outlet is not one of them.

Yes, and it should be replaced. Both brands were installed widely across the Triangle from the 1950s through the 1980s, and both have documented failure modes where a breaker fails to trip under fault conditions, which means the protection you are relying on may not operate. There are no reliable replacement breakers for either, so replacing the panel is the only fix. Insurers increasingly ask about them.

Six to eight hours, on one day. The work has to be scheduled around a utility disconnect, which we book with the power company rather than choose, and the county has to inspect before the utility will reconnect. We sequence both so the panel is signed off and the power comes back the same day. Expect two to four weeks from accepting the quote to the work happening, driven by the permit and the disconnect appointment.

No, and it is one of the most dangerous things a homeowner can do. The breaker is sized to protect the cable behind it, not the appliance in front of it. Fit a 30 amp breaker on cable rated for 20 and you have not solved anything, you have removed the protection and left the cable free to overheat inside a wall where nobody will see it. A breaker that trips is doing its job and reporting a fault: an overloaded circuit, a failing appliance, a short, or a genuinely undersized circuit that needs a new one run. Which of those it is takes twenty minutes to establish. A total loss of power is a different question and is answered in our emergency set.

That is the first thing we work out, and the answer changes the whole job. A Level 2 charger is one of the largest continuous loads in a house, so it is not about whether there is a spare slot but whether the service has headroom once your existing loads are counted. With plenty of headroom it is a straightforward circuit. Tight but workable means a load management device, which throttles the charger when the house is busy and is far cheaper than an upgrade. No headroom means a panel upgrade first.

For most Triangle households, no. If you drive a normal commute and charge overnight, a 32 amp charger replaces your entire daily range several times over while you sleep, and a 48 amp unit needs heavier cable, a larger breaker and more panel headroom at every step. The faster unit earns its cost for high-mileage drivers and two-EV households. There is also a hard limit: your car's onboard charger caps what it can accept, so a bigger circuit on a car that cannot use it buys nothing.

No, never. That backfeeds power out onto the utility lines, where it can electrocute the line worker restoring your street, and it is what a transfer switch exists to prevent. Portable generators also produce carbon monoxide in quantities that kill, so they must run outdoors only, well away from the house, never in a garage even with the door open, and never near a window or air intake.

Usually not, and choosing essential circuits instead is frequently half the cost. An essential-circuits system feeds a subpanel carrying what you actually need in an outage, which in the Triangle is typically the fridge, the freezer, some lighting, internet, a well or sump pump, and one HVAC system. The difference in lived experience during a two-day outage is small. Air conditioning is the decision point, because a heat pump is a large starting load that often pushes you into the next generator size.

Almost never a faulty fitting. It is a dimmer designed for incandescent bulbs driving an LED load: old dimmers expect a resistive load of a few hundred watts, and a room of LEDs might draw thirty, so the dimmer cannot regulate that low and you get flicker at the bottom of the range. The fix is an LED-compatible dimmer matched to the specific fittings, which manufacturers publish compatibility lists for.

Only on a fan-rated brace, and a standard ceiling box is not one. A fan weighs a good deal and, unlike a light, it moves. A standard box is rated to hold a static fixture, and a fan hung from one works the box loose over months of vibration until the whole fan comes down. A fan already hanging from an unrated box is the most common unsafe thing we find in this category, usually where a previous owner swapped a light for a fan themselves.

Leave the building first. Call the gas utility from outside. Then call us. Do not operate light switches, do not touch any appliance or control, and do not go looking for the source. The gas utility makes the property safe; we deal with the equipment afterwards. Our phone agents escalate any report of a gas smell to a person immediately and will not attempt a diagnosis while you are still in the house.

Eight services qualify, and they are the ones where waiting until morning does real damage. In HVAC: AC repair, furnace repair and heat pump service. In roofing: roof repair where a leak is active. In plumbing: leak detection and repair, sump pump service and gas line service. In electrical: a panel upgrade where power has been lost entirely. Nothing else on our catalogue is emergency-eligible at any hour.

No. Neither is emergency work and we will not dispatch a crew overnight for either. Emergency cover exists for eight specific services: AC repair, furnace repair, heat pump service, roof repair with an active leak, leak detection and repair, sump pump service, gas line service, and a panel upgrade with total loss of power. Cabinetry, fencing, decking, remodeling, lawn and patio work, and all cosmetic work are never emergency work, whatever time you call. We will book you into the next ordinary dispatch window instead, and we would rather say that plainly than charge you an emergency rate for a job that can wait.

When we dispatch outside dispatch hours there is a call-out fee on top of the repair itself, and our target is to be with you within 90 minutes. That call-out fee is separate from the after-hours surcharge that applies to work carried out between 19:00 and 07:00 or on a Sunday. Both figures are published on our hours and pricing pages rather than left for the invoice, and both can apply to the same visit.

Yes, for emergencies. Emergency coverage runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including every holiday on which the office and ordinary dispatch are closed. Scheduled work does not run on those dates, and our holiday closures are published in full with their dates so you can see exactly which days are affected.

Our target is 90 minutes for an emergency, and it is a target rather than a guarantee. Response times stretch during widespread events: a regional hailstorm or a hard freeze puts every crew in the region under the same demand at the same time. When that happens we tell you the realistic window rather than repeating the target, and we prioritise by severity rather than by call order.

Leave the building, call the gas utility from outside, and call us second. Treat it exactly as you would a gas smell: do not go looking for the source and do not assume it is a faulty alarm. Carbon monoxide has no smell, which is the whole reason the alarm exists. Once the property is safe we will find the cause, which is most often a cracked heat exchanger or a venting fault.

Close the main water shutoff, usually where the supply enters the house, turning it clockwise until it stops. If you cannot find it or it will not move, tell us when you call and that report goes straight to a person while a crew is already moving. If water is reaching a light fitting or a distribution board, switch that circuit off at the consumer unit if you can do so safely, and tell us that too.

Yes, if it is active. Water actively entering the house, a ceiling bulging with water above it, the roof torn open to the sky, or water reaching anything electrical are all emergency-eligible and covered around the clock. A stain that appeared last month and has not grown is not, and we will book that into an ordinary window rather than charge you an emergency rate. Put a bucket under the drip and move furniture out from under the stain before we arrive.

Below 40F outdoors is the threshold we use for no heat, and above 85F indoors for no cooling. Those are the points at which a failure stops being uncomfortable and starts being a health risk, particularly for very young, elderly or unwell people in the house. Tell us if anyone in the household is vulnerable, because that changes how we prioritise regardless of the thermometer.

The utility, if your street is out too. Look at whether your neighbours are dark: if they are, only the power company can restore it and they will be faster than anyone, because there is nothing on your side of the meter to fix. If your neighbours have power and you do not, the fault is on your side, it is emergency-eligible, and it is ours.

Then we make it safe and come back. An overnight visit is about stopping the harm: isolating a circuit, capping a line, tarping an opening, getting the water off. A permanent repair needing a part nobody stocks at two in the morning waits for the supplier to open, and we book the return visit before we leave rather than asking you to ring again. You are told at the time which of the two you are getting, and you are not charged an emergency rate twice for the same fault.

It means we will come out to you for the eight emergency-eligible services around the clock, but we do not schedule ordinary work there. Chapel Hill is our one emergency-only city. You get the same 90 minute response target and the same call-out fee as anywhere else in the coverage area; what you cannot book is a routine repair, a maintenance visit or a project. Enter your zip code on our service areas page for a definitive answer on your address.

No, and we cannot take cash payments above $500 either. Both limits are firm and they apply to every job regardless of size. Everything else is open to you: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, ACH bank transfer, and financing on qualifying projects. If neither of those excluded methods being unavailable works for you, tell us before the crew arrives rather than at the door.

No. The diagnostic fee is not refundable, and it is a distinct thing from being waived. If you approve the repair, the fee is waived and does not appear on your invoice. If you decline, the fee is what you pay and it is all you pay, and the written fault report is yours to keep and to take to another contractor for a second quote. You are paying for the diagnosis and the report, and you receive both either way.

Only if the total is $3,000 or above, which most repairs are not. Financing starts at $3,000 and below that neither lender will write the paper, so a service call, a tune-up, an inspection or a diagnostic visit cannot be financed at any price. It applies to installation, replacement, remodeling, additions, roof replacement, and panel upgrades and generator installation. If your repair comes in under the minimum, the card and ACH options are the practical route.

Two options through two lenders: 0% APR over 12 months, and 6.99% APR fixed over 60 months. The 0% offer is genuinely 0% if you clear the balance inside 12 months, but if a balance remains after month 12, interest is charged from the original purchase date rather than from month 13. That is how deferred-interest financing works everywhere and it is worth knowing before you choose it. The 60 month option is a plain fixed-rate loan with no early settlement penalty.

No. The application runs a soft credit check, which does not affect your score, and it returns a decision in minutes. You can apply before you commit to the work, so the monthly figure is part of the decision rather than something you work out afterwards. Bring the quote reference and a photo ID; we can do the application with you at the kitchen table or over the phone.

On completion for service work, and on a staged schedule set out in the quote for larger projects. We do not ask for payment before work starts on a service call. On a project, the stages are written into the quote before you sign, and the final payment is due after the snag list is cleared rather than before it, so you are never paying for work that is not finished.

They are passed through at cost and itemised separately on your invoice, so you can see what went to the county and what came to us. We pull the permit, book the inspection and meet the inspector on site as part of the work. We do not mark permit fees up.

No, and be careful of anyone who says they will. We are not public adjusters and we are not licensed to act for you in a claim. What we do is document the damage properly, meet your adjuster on the roof, answer technical questions about what failed and why, and carry out the work your insurer approves. The claim itself stays between you and your insurer. If you want somebody to argue the claim for you, hire a licensed public adjuster, which is a real and regulated profession in North Carolina.

No. Your deductible is yours to pay and it is due to us on completion. We will not absorb it, discount it, or inflate the scope to cover it. Contractors who offer to waive your deductible are committing insurance fraud and exposing you to it too, because the homeowner signs the claim, and it is straightforwardly illegal in North Carolina. If the approved scope comes in below your deductible there is no point claiming at all, and we will say so.

Most policies here settle on a replacement cost basis in two payments: an initial actual cash value payment, then the recoverable depreciation once the work is complete and invoiced. That second payment is why the paperwork at the end matters as much as the paperwork at the start. We provide the final invoice and completion documentation your insurer needs to release it, and financing can bridge the gap between starting the work and the depreciation arriving.

It depends on whether the cause was sudden or gradual, and structural claims are refused more often than any other kind we see. Standard policies generally cover a sudden event: a tree through the roof, a vehicle into the wall, a burst pipe that soaked the framing over a weekend. They generally exclude gradual causes: long-term water ingress, rot, termites, settlement and earth movement. Most of what we find in Triangle crawlspaces falls in the second category, and filing anyway usually produces a denial that sits on your claims history.

Read it very carefully and consider not signing. It hands the contractor the right to deal with your insurer directly and to be paid directly, and it can leave you liable for the difference if the claim settles low. We never ask for one. After a significant hail event, out-of-state crews arrive, knock doors and press for a signature that day, and this is one of the documents they press for.

Billed monthly by card or ACH, and you can cancel any time with 30 days notice, with no exit fee. Visits already delivered in the plan year are not refunded. There is no minimum term and no automatic price escalation written into the plan.