Share you experience of finding tradespeople - the actual discussion thread.

[KindlySurfiingPlatypus]

I find it very frustrating when a mumsnetHQ promotional survey is disguised in the thread list as if it was an actual thread.

I do want to share my experience but I want to share it with other mumsnetters, not with a SurveyMonkey link asking me which services I have used.

Personally I distrust all the tradesperson-finding websites like CheckAtrade, RatedPeople, TrustAtrader etc since a really bad experience a few years ago where I used one of these sites to find a gas engineer to install a new boiler, and he was absolutely awful and I had to pay another company to rectify some issues, and he had lied on his information about being a brand-certified installer which meant I didn't get the 10 year warranty extension that came with the boiler on condition that it was installed by a brand-certified engineer. I tried to give an honest review of the tradespersin giving factual detail of what had happened and that's when I found that all these websites give the tradespeople the power to veto and censor their reviews so it's easy for a poor quality tradesperson to keep all the poor feedback hidden and only allow a few positive reviews to be seen. My honest review was vetoed.

I don't use any site where tradespeople can pay to be listed and can control what feedback is displayed.

These things are usually labelled as “promoted by Mumsnet” so I’m surprised if this one wasn’t. I’ve used Checkatrade recently and got an excellent tradesman but you have to be careful to avoid being bombarded by unwanted approaches. I would always go by personal recommendation but this isn’t always an option. I treat Facebook pages with massive scepticism.

Yes facebook pages are also unreliable but I have some success with asking for personal recommendations on local facebook groups - you have to ignore some of the responses that are clearly just "my friend is a plumber so I will recommend him" but sometimes a local consensus emerges where several people in the group have had good experiences with a particular tradie. I found an excellent roofer this way.

I google the kind of tradesperson I need and the name of my area. Been lucky so far. Sometimes people don't get back to me but whatever, I just move on to the next person.

Yeah a guy we’ve used for years to service our boiler, and the fit a new one at a new house says the same about checkatrade reviews. He’s on checkatrade, because it’s where he gets most of his work, but he’s told us about the review veto before.

Having said that, we once went through checkatrade and the guy did an absolutely awful job. I raised a complaint, they blocked his account, sent someone round very quickly to assess, and paid us the £1,000 guarantee (it cost a bit more than that to rectify the situation but they only go up to £1,000, which is more than if we’d found him elsewhere)

The only thing I rely on now is personal word of mouth recommendation.
Checkatrade is meaningless.
Facebook full of friends and family promoting.

I go for that as much as possible too. It’s safest.

Personal recommendation is good. For small jobs I will chance someone off Taskrabbit or similar. For major work I used a Which? recommended tradesperson (and they were very good).

I've had better experiences using trades who advertise in those free local directories we seem to get sent every few weeks. I read their reviews online still to help me decide, but everyone we've used we would again. Personal recommendations are obviously the best, but we don't know many people to ask in our area.

I used checkatrade once a few years back and never again. Some of the people who came to quote were pretty sketchy. One kept hassling me for weeks to hire him or pay him compensation for not giving him the job, even though he clearly didn't have a clue what he was doing.

Where I live we have a local discussion board/online forum which is not Facebook. There is a trades and small businesses board and local people post their recommendations there. You get a feel for which are the genuine threads and which are self promotions.

I have recommended our excellent boiler installer/engineer, electrician and a couple of good plumbers very strongly on their threads, as others had recommended them before me.

Otherwise - my best friend lives locally, has loadsamoney and is forever getting work done on her house. I go with her recommendations for trades when I occasionally need repairs or maintenance done!

Thank you! I am struggling with builders too and also kept seeing it pop up.

I had 6 quotes for our current works, only one ever came back. 2 of the quotes were ridiculous, which is apparently what they do when they dont want the job. It is a minefield and not really a "choice" as much as who will actually turn up to quote and do the actual job! Now stuck with someone who has clearly got too much work on and doesnt return for weeks on end...Very unregulated area. Also had a horror story re CheckATrade which is why it took me so long to trust another tradesman -drunk guy had a complete nervous breakdown doing our kitchen, went on a massive bender for months leaving all of his tools at our house! They did take him off their site but he was sending me nasty messages because he had been banned. Horrible situation.

We look at the local village magazine and personal recommendations. We found a carpenter because he did work for neighbours. He got plenty of work from us and other neighbours too.

We had a struggle getting a company to do some driveway work. We must have contacted around 15 companies. One was silly money, one was over the budget and most of the rest either didn’t bother to turn up or didn’t quote. We eventually found someone who turned up, gave a reasonable quote, gave a date to start and turned up on time and worked hard. In the end, he got work form four other houses in the cul de sac.