the "NO SEE UM" Contractor Scam! PULLED & Released w/NEW UPDATES

welcome to the channel you guys my name is stan the dirt monkey if you're not familiar with me in this next one we're going to call the no cm scam i'm a contractor and been a contractor for 30 plus years and i deal day to day with contractors on different types of projects and the scam that i'm going to walk you through today has happened to me personally twice once when i needed this roof repaired and the second time when i needed a well repaired and we're going to dive into exactly what these contractors pull and how they get away with it but today's project that we're going to be working on is my well up at my cabin we call it shangri lodge has ran dry it's basically failed so with that being said we've got to go up there and get it repaired so let's get the equipment ready let's head north then let's search then let's show you what we're talking about with the no cm scam is when a contractor tells you that they did work or installed a par part or material but you have no way of verifying if they actually did it but there is a way to protect yourself against the no cm scam and that's what we're going to cover today we're going to give you examples of how contractors can pull it and also how you can protect yourself we're gonna head north with the mini excavator today to repair the well but we're also going to show you exactly how the no cm scam was pulled on myself and how i figured out how to protect myself from having it happen again down the road oh you you snug that right into the ramps huh hey question how are you still like how do you like this do you still like it do you the diamond see trailer i like it yeah it's heavy but i like a lot heavy i think this extends your extend your overall deck yeah because now you don't have wasted space on the on the ramps yeah we've so plain of sand this space is typically wasted just for a ramp but by being able to fold it up and the way they got it designed we actually use that for there you go so it looks like jack's gonna do the two tie-downs with one chain track i like it hey sounds like they're already getting stuff fired up okay sounds good hey i got a temporary building coming too i know so it's it's here i'm gonna have it on monday so i'll bring it up we can set it up we'll park everything in it yeah we'll hide stuff should we get the you know yeah you got the you got the cars moved okay yeah i saw you telling them that mini loader works just fine yeah i wouldn't like if you would have said oh hey you're gonna fall in love with that machine i would have said you're full it is a christmas turkey that's what my dad would say right but i see you now you use it all the time i use it all the time and then with the turf tires it just it doesn't tear up the grass you have minimal tearing up when you're turning and stuff well it was soaking wet down there on the i put the dock in with it last weekend and there was that much water in my lawn standing from all the rain yeah you can't tell this week where i was at yeah all right well i gotta get the key and get this thing off the reason the mini excavator is brought up north is because the well has been giving us problems this is not the first time the well has given us problems the first time the well gave us problems i hired a different contractor to come in and repair the well and what he told me he did and what i learned later on that he did didn't match up well let me just explain that to you in a few minutes here but let's show you what we're working on so supposedly there is a paint buried under should be straight below just so you know zach right below this conduit pipe right should be a pressure tank but it's going to be eight foot deep the only thing i want to do right now is just make sure that i'm not going to cut any wires okay i'm digging around it digging around all right i'm going to take a couple of wires going that way you know obviously yep yeah it's gonna be underneath it from the bottom of the conduit someplace something i figure i'm gonna do all my digging on this side frankie yeah and then we can cave in to to the hole around it so that we're not not digging through any precious wires [Music] to do this repair we've got to expose the underground buried pressure tank and replace that so the plan is to dig around the well casing because we've got wires all the way around it plus piping around it there's two things happening here one is i'm digging very slowly and cautiously because i'm feeling for any resistance as i'm pulling back on the excavator bucket if i hit a wire or if i hit a pipe i can actually feel that resistance go through the machine and i can instantly stop what i'm doing the second thing that's happening here is i've got a hand dig i can't locate those utilities because a public utility locator does not locate private utilities and the piping from a well into a structure is not a public utility it's private so there's no way for me to possibly locate this other than just being extra cautious as i'm doing the dig [Music] my first question is are you looking for gold anyways i forgot to mention that on these wells now i mean i'm not joe well guy or anything but no there's pipe i don't know how deep you are but they put the pipe down the middle and there's a motor on it that pushes that's where you get your pressures so i don't understand your pressure tank i don't either i don't get it either okay that's why i got the well guy coming out here this afternoon i'm gonna all right guys i'm gonna jump in here because in the original video i pulled down because there was a mistake where one of the local contractors up in the sturgeon lake area was actually being blamed for the one that did this work when actually nothing could be further from the truth my goal with these videos is to enter is to educate you guys while i also entertain you guys and the last thing i want to do is have that come at the expense of some company that has nothing to do with what happened in this video what occurred in this video occurred approximately 10 years ago and the contractor that did it i attempt to track down and he stopped returning my phone calls and then pretty much just disappeared off the map trust me guys if i could locate this guy and name him i would i just don't want some local company being hurt by this video i really want you guys to be able every time you watch one of my videos to be able to pull some kind of some kind of useful information out of them that will help benefit you in some way but not while i bore you to death so i try to make interesting videos that always give you a little bit of a take away but not at someone's expense second thing i want to clear up is that central uh pressure tank being buried right next to the well casing the reason for that is i have two houses on the property and anytime you typically would have a pressure tank in the house but then you have to keep that house heated one of the houses i usually like to take offline not always but sometimes and if i have a pressure tank in each house then i can never take that house off line i've got to heat it year round and so by burying one central pressure tank and getting it below the frost line eight foot deep i'm safe and i don't have to worry about which house i can take offline or online now or if i hit any anything actually but the tank let's probe on this side too frankie and i think what i'm gonna do is i'm going to come around to the other side and dig it out i want to bench it so that it's safe and wide and we got to be switching tanks and everything in there you know answer me so i get the next guy that that's coming out that's sad they don't call you back he won't call me back the next guy comes out that's coming out today aaron he pulls out the pump sets it in my driveway puts a new pump in sets the box for the new pump you know next to it and i look at the old pump that had put in for me the new pump that he put in it was 12 years old really he didn't put a new pump in a used pump in he put a used pump i even call i'm like i couldn't even get him to answer my calls was this a refurbished one because i thought you were putting a new one in i'm going to guess that dude didn't put nothing in because that was some wiring or did something and charged me for a new pub shoddy business you know but that's like that's that what i call the no cm scam well you can't see the work you can't verify what they did because it's you know buried underground you gotta trust them and since i had that original problem i switched well companies and never had a problem again until my buried underground pressure tank failed and that means i've got a lot of digging to do which way does it go well i think i would imagine the tanks here and the one goes around must go to the house that one you know from the tank or whatever so you think the tank might be i'm thinking the tanks are way over here yeah oh sweet oh it's into something right down here you guys aren't familiar with what benching out means creating ledges down in the hole and that helps prevent cave-ins where a guy could get trapped instead of having vertical sidewalls i have ledged sidewalls or stairs stairs stepping down most guys that uh run utility companies or work in utility companies have trench boxes and the trench box is safety uh vertical sidewalls that hold the sides from collapsing in and then they crawl down into the middle a trench box is typically used in street utilities where they can't oversize but when we're just out working in the country we just oversize the holes and stair step down the sides to make sure that they're safe i can't imagine that this underground tank would be much bigger than a one that goes inside of a house what would the benefit be having a brilliant feel you know you think it rust could eventually you think it rust in the ground like that but it doesn't seem like to be whatever coating they put on there i suppose it is they're protected but man you think it would brush away i don't know i don't i i've never heard of pairing a pressure tank underground before i don't mess with the details though yeah must be must be a thing all right guys i'm here with tyler and he was just edumacating me on it's called a bison tyler a bison hand pump so you can actually put a hand pump alongside of a standard well so if you have no power forever you can just keep pumping water yep it's just a hand pump that bypasses the pit list but it's 5 000 bucks just for the pump itself god that's insane but i can i can get you pictures and stuff cool all right i don't know if it works with five inch wells i'm pretty sure it does but i'll have to talk to him huh oh is it here and your dad oh cool that's pretty cool i'm gonna have to swing it over to the side i can't back up there you go to expose that pressure tank challenged the mini excavator it was actually over the maximum digging depth of the machine so to get to the bottom of it i had to actually dig a ramp down into the hole to expose the tank and then use that same ramp to climb the mini excavator back out your dad's aaron right and these are the guys i've used these guys for a long time good people good people so if you're in northern minnesota and you need a well don't use them too much in case i need to use them i can't i can't reach down in there i can't ride right up to it and that's beyond the bottom depth that will go so it is what it is if i drove right up to the edge of the hole i risked collapsing it in and we wanted to have virgin soil below that pressure tank so that meant that that water and any soil we disturbed just had to be hand bucketed out hey mike or tyler there's a lot of really putrid water in the bottom of this is that normal or is that unusual or something else going on with it what's that inside that bathroom yeah so when that's different punches the whole thing acts as like uh just just a tank there's no air pressure pushing it back okay so aerial water will just stay in there so if the tank is bad it's normal to see bad water in it yeah just stacking water yeah but if the tank is good you shouldn't see that shouldn't see as much okay so we've got it cranked up to 80 pounds of pressure because we were compensating trying to get it fixed we're gonna turn it down and tyler's got a pressure gauge in his hand do you gotta run that back on the house again tyler okay so he's gonna hook that up to the outside spigot i'll drain some pressure off from it and then we'll see where we're at what are you seeing turned on at about 43. i shut off at 60. [Music] so we're all set so i'll get this wrapped up i'm gonna shovel some dirt onto it just protect it okay i'm gonna shovel a lot of dirt onto it [Music] i'm not compacting this area because i would rather deal with potential settlement down the road than to deal with any issues by over compacting on the pressure tank [Music] all right guys well let's check out what we've got done we've got everything backfilled everything is graded out well is in and it's operational but the point of this video was the no cm scam and how do you protect yourself from the no cm scam well references go a long way but that doesn't guarantee that you're going to get what you get you as the homeowner have the right to watch and observe the work as it goes in place now i'm going to ask you to not look right over the contractor's shoulders because that's kind of rude and it kind of bugs the heck out of us but you should be able to a if you're buying parts of materials you should be able to see the packages at the very minimum to make sure that they're going in you should be able to before they go in and disappear you should ask for pictures or maybe even a brief video as it's going in place good reputable contractors got no problem doing that we appreciate doing that you know why we appreciate doing that because then we know you're not worried about it later on and it's so simple for us to do we'll gladly do it it's not an imposition and it should be your right and if you have a person and they don't want to let you do that well then maybe you're working with the wrong person i hate to say that but like the guy tyler i was working with he had no problem showing me everything and asking and answering questions and you guys may notice that a lot of the contractors i work with have zero problems talking to me we have no problem as a i mean as a contractor we have no problem talking to you the homeowners the customers we want to make you happy the last thing we want is a bad review all right guys i'm going to jump in here because i think that last part is important enough that it's worth repeating to protect yourself from the no cm scan just simply ask for a picture or even a short video showing that part or piece of material going into place if it happens to be in a spot where you can't easily access it i actually learned this trick from a mechanics shop as they were doing work on my vehicles wherever there was a part going in place that i couldn't see what it was they were taking pictures and videos and automatically sending them to me and it just helped me feel more comfortable with what was going on and it's in my opinion that a good contractor really is there to help take the weight off from your shoulders and will gladly do something as simple as send you a picture or a video to make sure that you're comfortable with the work that you're paying for and so [Music] don't be afraid to ask questions don't be afraid to watch if you're working with the right person you'll be in good hands and i hope you are in good hands i hope you enjoyed today's video that's all we got for you on this one if you have enjoyed it or picked some a bit of wisdom out of it a thumbs up goes a long way and if you know of a scam where you were taken and you know you you felt like you bought something one thing and you didn't get another i would love to hear any scam i just want to hear about it because the no cm scam is more common than you than you would think unfortunately so hope this videos helped you out god bless you guys go get em and we will catch you guys on another one