Boiler C/H heating cover - which small company?

[potterton678]

Evening
Looking to get boiler and central heating cover.

Anyone used any of the smaller companies and are they any good:

- warranty people
- corgihomeplan
- heating247rescue
- etc

thanks

 

[CBW]

Do you need boiler cover? Could you not save up in a bank account and use this should there be a problem? You need to be careful with some companies as they may not cover your boiler for long, if at all depending on age.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

Better to put the money in the bank, than pay for an homecare type of cover. They always look for excuses to not do the job, or do the job just as cheaply as possible to maximise their margin. Remember they do have to make a good margin, on what you pay. The margin in better in your bank, earning you interest.

 

[potterton678]

The flip side of the argument
Some tradesman charge an arm and a leg to fix simple things, and would the tradesmen not just do the same thing, minimum cost max profit

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

The flip side of the argument
Some tradesman charge an arm and a leg to fix simple things, and would the tradesmen not just do the same thing, minimum cost max profit

Of course, which is where DIYnot comes in useful for advice. Also keep in mind, with an insurance type deal, there are at least two profit margins to be made - that of the tradesman and that of the insurance company. Then there is the very real risk of the insurance company finding some excuse not to carry out a cost free repair, so you end up paying after all.

Lady friend has appliance cover, for her washer. The drum bearings are shot, it keeps stopping mid-program, so she rang them. The washer is well beyond economical repair, it's a mass of rust. Drum bearing failure means a complete, new, expensive drum for the washer. She was rather expecting they would scrap it, and sensibly offer a new machine to replace it. Nope - they are repairing it.

 

[CBW]

The flip side of the argument
Some tradesman charge an arm and a leg to fix simple things, and would the tradesmen not just do the same thing, minimum cost max profit

Depends on who you get I suppose. You could go insurance route (same logic can apply to sole traders) and they could argue boiler is beyond economical repair, scrap the boiler and you end up paying even more, or you could get a decent repair engineer and have a fixed working boiler, or even consider a fixed price repair from your manufacturer if offered.

 

[ericmark]

My daughter had British Gas some years ago and they were really good, but today it seems they have learnt from their errors and now they are more careful on what they cover.

Father-in-law had a company set up by brother-in-law after his heating went wrong, travelling 100 miles to repair simple faults was not really on, but they wanted to do so much before they would take over the maintenance, they tested water and said it needed a flush first, we had this done, not by them though, and then they came up with another excuse, this went on for around 6 months, then father-in-law died, and they still had not been satisfied to take on the system.

But still wanted us to pay, saying the cover would be passed to new owners, who on buying the house had ripped out the old system and replaced, so clearly did not want cover for a system which no longer existed, we did in the end get the money back.

The use of a local boiler man does seem to work, they do the service, and will respond when there is a fault, but a lot of companies caught a cold with overall cover where people took out cover when there was a known fault, waited a few weeks then claimed, as my daughter did with British Gas all those years ago, and if you consider the cost of a service, which I seem to remember last one cost me around £125 it has to cover that to start with, so has to be at least £200 per year, where I will get boiler serviced around once every 3 years.

It is good for rental property, so you get the gas safe certificates every year, but for private property does not really work out.