B-Dry Waterproofing of Metropolitan Washington, DC

B-​Dry? Beware!
I contacted B-​Dry Waterproofing of Metropolitan Washington, DC, a few days ago when my tenant noticed a small section of the carpet in her basement apartment was slightly damp. The company dispatched a technician a couple days later, who rather pleasantly and professionally contacted me when he arrived at the apartment to begin his assessment. He seemed rather knowledgeable about his trade and was also quite personable over the phone. Less than an hour after he arrived, he phoned to inform me that the cause of the problem was a foundation leak most likely brought about because the previous owners of my property failed to waterproof the basement. I immediately thought this was odd because i had owned the property for over seven (7) years and nothing remotely close to any sort of water damage had occurred. Why did it take 7 years, I thought to myself. I listened patiently as the B-​Dry tech went on to tell me that the carpet in the basement unit was saturated with water and that mold and mildew had begun to form. Again, this assessment went far beyond what I had seen for myself when I was in the apartment less than a week before. The technician concluded by giving me a verbal ballpark estimate for waterproofing the 700 square foot apartment: $ 15,000 (This figure later dropped to $ 6750 in the written proposal I received from the B-​Dry tech a couple of days later.).
In my mind, that’s when the wheels came off the wagon. That’s because nothing the B-​Dry tech told me was true. He completely misrepresented the truth in an effort to get me to spend thousands of dollars, unnecessarily, to «repair» a problem that didn’t exist.
Immediately following his site visit, I decided to have my upstairs tenant (whom the B-​Dry tech came across while making his assessment) check out the apartment. Considering what the B-​Dry tech had told me regarding the water saturation in the basement apartment and the mold and mildew on the carpet, I wanted to get one of my tenant’s assessment of the problem. What she told me directly contradicted his report to me on both counts (i.e., water saturation and mold and mildew) and confirmed what I had already been thinking.
As such, I contacted a second plumber (I had already received an evaluation from an initial plumber) to receive a second opinion. The second plumber visited the apartment the next day, quickly assessed the problem and determined that the dampness (not the level of saturation he had reported to me) in the carpet was coming from a small leak from the waterline attached to the refrigerator, which shares a common wall with the area of the carpet where I noticed the moisture initially. The plumber was able to fix the problem by simply tightening the waterline to the refrigerator. That was it. No waterproofing was needed because the problem didn’t warrant it. The B-​Dry tech may not have known the precise nature of the problem, but he certainly knew, or should have known, that it had nothing to do with waterproofing. Simply put, he lied and sought to take advantage of the fact that I wasn’t physically there to verify what he had told me over the phone. Beware!