by noelford » Wed Dec 09, 2009 4:57 pm
For everyone who has ever been ripped off with regard to the price of spare parts, here's a story to gladden your hearts.
When we moved to our house here in Wales, we bought a Rangemaster double oven cooker, priced around £1400. We don't normally take out extended warranties but, on this occasion, we did. A few years ago, the rubber seal around one of the oven doors broke and we contacted Mastercare and asked them to come out and replace it, under the warranty. Despite several calls, the engineer failed to arrive and, six months later, we still had no replacement seal. Something rang a bell in my memory and I re-read the warranty agreement and discovered that my memory was correct: the warranty stated that if they failed to repair an appliance within six months, Mastercare would replace the appliance with a brand new one!
We held them to it. At first they tried to fob us off with a replacement to the maximum value of £850, but our local Currys manager backed us up and eventually we received a replacement Rangemaster cooker, now valued at £1500+. There was nothing wrong with the old one, apart from the faulty oven door seal, and we were able to sell it for a tidy sum.
I'm not sure how much that seal would have cost, but even at the inflated cost of spares, surely no more than a tenner!
