Sod's Law

[davidgillon]

Watching TV adverts while at folks over Christmas. Special offer on British Gas boiler and central heating repair cover, which I used to have, but didn't bother with after getting a new condenser boiler installed in 2011. I'd always planned to pick it up again once the boiler had a few years on it.
"Must do that once I get home"
Get home.
House is freezing*.
Central heating isn't working, though I do have hot water.
And of course you can't take the cover out in retrospect. You have to opt for either a fixed price repair, plus a year of cover (not at the bargain price) or gamble on it being a quick fix, any more than 30 minutes and you lose out.

The fixed price repair deal isn't actually bad, I had repairs on the old boiler that would have cost three times as much but for cover, but that "Oh, I'll do it when I get home" is going to cost me about £200.

Bah!

 

* It's now up to a reasonable temperature courtesy of a couple of fan heaters.

Comments

[davidgillon]

Double sods law.
You book the whole thing online, get to the final point where it tells you it'll take a couple of minutes to authorise payment, so go to another window.
Come back to it half an hour later to find "Er, our system fell over, could you ring us and go through the whole process again"
Luckily I could still get the same booking.

In brighter news, at least the car started first time (the battery regularly fails when I'm away over Christmas due to low usage and several weeks of not being used). So basically I'm swapped calling out the AA for calling out British Gas.

[yhlee]

Oh man, sympathies.

Separated by two languages

[jesse_the_k]

Is a "cover" a fixed-priced contract to provide any service needed over a set time?

Re: Separated by two languages

[davidgillon]

We use 'cover' for the things any kind of insurance will deal with - eg breakdown cover for your car, household contents cover for an insurance that handles breakages, theft etc, building cover for the structure itself, and so on.

In this case the deal is a yearly contract (paid monthly), providing annual boiler* service, plus any repairs. The standard rate has a £60 excess on any repairs, the rate they're making me pay doesn't have an excess if I need any further repairs after this one. They'll fix the problem however long it takes, whatever parts it needs, plus pay for any work they need to access stuff like gas pipes up to £1000. It's not a bad deal - I used to have it on the old boiler and a couple of times it needed fixes the engineers said would be close to four figures without the policy - it's just annoyingly more expensive than it would have been if I'd taken it out beforehand.

* I think you'd say furnace.

Re: Separated by two languages

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks. The US cognates would be "maintenance contract" or "service contract," and we’d be pressured to buy it after our warranty expired. The unit for insurance, however, is "policy."

Your "excess" is our "deductible," and in health care we have another two terms — co-pay and co-insurance, that nobody needs to know about.

Larger buildings have boilers to produce steam heat. "Furnaces" include hot water, hot air, and coal. Wood-fired furnaces are more often "stoves," even when they are whole house systems with no room for the cast iron kettle.

Turns out I just adore this sort of pedantry. As my email used to trumpet: "I’m not pompous! I’m pedantic—let me tell you all about it."

Re: Separated by two languages

[davidgillon]

The US cognates would be "maintenance contract" or "service contract," and we’d be pressured to buy it after our warranty expired. The unit for insurance, however, is "policy."

All of which we also use ;)