Elevation Mechanical

Elaina, I feel your pain. Here's my experience a few months ago with Vy Le of Residential Electric, LLC. I've also submitted this review with Home Advisor/Angi:

On Aug. 2, 2023, I hired Vy Le for two electrical projects. That same day, I gave him two separate checks for half the amount of each project, and he cashed both checks within 1-2 hours. The first project was installation of a hard-wired Ring doorbell. (When Vy first called me via Home Advisor referral, I had asked him how many Ring doorbell installations he had done. He said he had installed more than 100.) The next day, Aug. 3, Vy arrived on time with a coworker. It so happened that Vy was "busy" that day, so the coworker was going to do the doorbell-transformer installation instead. Vy had specified the transformer I was to buy for the installation. When the coworker appeared to be confused about an hour into the installation, I asked him how many Ring doorbell installations he had done, he replied, "This is my first." Nice. He finished about 2.5 hours in. Vy stopped by to complete the software side of the installation. Everything worked, but only for a few hours (connectivity problems? wiring problems?). I called Vy, and he told me he would come over the next day, Aug. 4, to check things out. Coincidentally, two drywall repair guys had already been scheduled to patch two holes that the coworker had made in the interior wall, in addition to the hole that housed the transformer for the doorbell, which the coworker had covered with a plastic cover. (Why he cut the additional two holes, I don't know.) The drywall guys almost immediately alerted me to the very hot-to-the-touch plastic transformer cover on the wall, on the interior side of the exterior Ring doorbell. I called Vy right away, and he got to the house fairly quickly. He downplayed any electrical fire danger, but I insisted that he remove the transformer and the hot transformer cover immediately. (Thank you, drywall guys, for the alert!) I then verbally cancelled the second project (electrical panel upgrade) due to start Aug. 9, and told Vy that I needed time to think about how to proceed. I called Vy on Aug. 9 and again verbally cancelled the possibility of any other electrical work. Vy and I both agreed on a refund amount--$2,902.93--the same day. (This amount reflects the down payment for the second project, which was never even started because I cancelled it.) Vy told me that I would receive a certified bank check in the mail soon after. After making multiple phone calls and leaving multiple voicemail messages over a 2-week period, I gave him a deadline of August 23 to receive the refund check. I offered to stop by his "office" to pick it up, but he never got back to me about that. I filed a small-claims lawsuit on Sept. 20, opting for a county sheriff's deputy to serve him the papers. According to the sheriff's office, Vy was difficult to make contact with at his address on his business card. When the deputy sheriff was able to make phone contact, Vy was a no-show (more than once) when he was supposed to meet at an assigned place and time with the deputy sheriff to receive the papers. Yeah, this isn't his first rodeo. I'm on to the next legal step. Check out the story of another customer he screwed last year on the BuildZoom website, reference Residential Home Electric, LLC. I can't imagine how many other people might have been on the receiving end of Vy Le's disappearing act but did nothing to expose him. Home Advisor needs to drop him ... like yesterday. There's no nice way to put this; Vy Le is a two-bit thief with no conscience.

Five months ago, we hired Vy Le at Residential Home Electric, LLC, who we found on Home Advisor/ Angi to complete a panel/service upgrade as well as some other various electrical work in our house.

After several visits by electricians, over the course of two months, and a bill paid to Vy Le that totaled about $10,000, we discovered that the panel upgrade was not entirely completed and the part that was completed was done incorrectly. In addition, his team had done a significant amount of unnecessary drywall damage that has cost over $1000 to repair, and all the electrical work that had been done by Residential Home Electric did not meet any of the electrical codes, and was extremely unsafe.

A few examples of this are:
In our attic, they left over 7 junction boxes open with live wires in them-a huge fire hazard.
They stripped the big wires that fed the electricity to our house down to about half their capacity and left it all exposed and jammed into the exterior box in such a messy way that the box couldn't even close properly, and the entire thing wasn't grounded at all.
The inside panel had neutrals and grounds all intermixed together on the panel bars inside the panel.
They installed the wrong size panel
Nothing in the panel was pigtailed, even though they were aware that the house has all aluminum wiring.
Their apprentice took a sawzall and cut a floor to ceiling trench in the drywall of our garage and cut part of the wiring that fed the inside of the house, and didn't fix the wiring.
The 3 way switches in our hallway were wired in such a way that they didn't function properly, and they had to be turned on to get our bathroom fan to work.

These examples are just a small portion of the horrible job they did in our house. The safety code violations list is very very long.

After realizing the severity of the situation, we contacted Vy multiple times trying to get our money back since he did not fulfill his contract and the work that was completed was done incorrectly and was very unsafe. He responded by asking us to get a detailed list of everything that was wrong.

Since we aren't electricians, we decided to call the city to get an inspection of the work they performed. The city informed us that no permit was pulled for this job, so they couldn't do any inspection. So we had to call a private electrician to inspect the work Residential Home Electric performed and give us a detailed list and an estimate of what it would cost to fix all the problems Residential Home Electric caused. 

We contacted Vy, and we invited him back into our house to let him look at the damage that had been caused, and he sat at our dining table and admitted that some of the things were incorrect, but lied to our faces and said that the panel was fine. It was not fine. I had three separate electricians look at it and tell me that nothing about it was fine. However, we did get him to agree to reimburse us for the needed repairs.

Because the electrical situation was a safety issue, we went ahead and hired another electrical company to fix all these problems caused by Residential Home Electric. The total bill was close to $13,000.

After we had Vy over to our house to see the damage, we did not hear back from him. We have been attempting to contact him several times per week since that meeting and he does not answer or return our calls. Even the main business line will not pick up when we call. We eventually decided to use a friend's phone to call and he answered. He said he would reimburse us half our money, and when we told him that half wasn't good enough, and that we wanted all the money we paid him back, he said he would try, and then we never heard from him again.

I'm writing this to warn the general public: DO NOT hire Residential Home Electric, LLC and do not trust anything Vy Le says. Home Advisor should be ashamed of itself for recommending this company to people. DORA should revoke their electrical license. The amount of danger this company put my family in is horrifying, and this should never happen to anyone else.