[kwlug-disc] (off topic) Water heater recommendation

[CrankyOldBugger]

Well Doug certainly explained it better than I could, but, yeah, avoid
Reliance at all costs.


On Tue, 3 Mar 2026 at 02:09, Doug Moen <doug at moens.org> wrote:

> Reliance is an evil sleazeball company.
>
> My water softener (that we owned) broke down, so I tried to get quotes
> from a few companies for a replacement. One of the numbers I called was
> Reliance. I was told I can't talk about to anybody about water softeners on
> the phone, they had to send a saleman to my house. Ok fine. The sales guy
> was a total manipulative sleazeball. Although Reliance does sell water
> softeners (according to their web site), he refused to talk about a sale,
> other than to warn me against it, using various lies to back up his story.
> His goal was to sell me the most expensive monthly rental available from
> the company. We have 2 people in the house. There was a model sized for a 4
> person family, he insisted that this was too small, and that I needed the 6
> person model.
>
> I did not sign a contract during the visit. Told him I'd think about it
> and got him out of the house. I looked up their BBB record, and found a
> massive number of complaints against them. The web site showed 20
> complaints for the last week, but that was just a subset, as the web site
> was filtering most of the complaints out due to volume. I checked cbc.ca
> and found multiple investigative reports against Reliance based on
> malpractice. The contract you sign gives them the right to take out a lien
> on your house if you don't pay them whatever they decide you owe, and the
> CBC investigations involved Reliance attempting to extract money that
> wasn't owed to them long after a contract had terminated. I'd be concerned
> about the process of getting out of one of their contracts.
>
> Doug.
>
> On Mon, Mar 2, 2026, at 6:22 PM, Chris Frey wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 02, 2026 at 05:01:25PM +0000, CrankyOldBugger wrote:
> >> I agree with your last line in particular:  Don't rent water heaters.
> >> Reliance Electric, in particular, is a horrible company to deal with.
> >
> > I've heard rumours of this from others, and I'm curious.  What was
> > your experience?
> >
> > I've been a Reliance Home Comfort customer for about 20 years
> > and every interaction with them (about 3 tanks replaced by now I
> > think) has been nothing short of stellar.
> >
> > - Chris
> >
> >
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