Gas fire problem

I service at the same time, as part of the job as 90% of the safety checks are already done.
Oxy pilots are factory set and should not be messed with. They are complete units with thermocouple and spark electrode.

I feel you've been had there TBH...£83 sounds like daylight robbery to me. Even £60 is steep! Did you try ringing any local independent heating engineers?

A fair few stories have been heard here of BG saying they can't get parts when they are actually still available - not seen any in relation to gas fires ..YET! Personally I won't have anything to do with BG anymore - ...they are now just one big sales machine now.
There should be at least a 7-day cooling off period.. i would use it.

This fixed price breakdown cover (like any insurance) must rely on a proportion of the customers overpaying to fund a proportion of customers that need parts (the one's BG actually say they can get!)

Example

10 customers pay £84 (up a pound to make calculation simpler) for service/breakdown cover for their gas fires.
Lets assume the service actually costs BG half that (£42) in reality.
Then lets assume only 20% (i.e. 2) of those customers needs new parts&labour worth £75 each ..£150 in total.

For the 8 customers needing only a service..they pay £84 = £672 in total which is £336 more than the £42 servicing cost BG. So BG now have £336 of profit in their money pot.

For the 2 customers needing a service and £75 of parts each they still pay £84 each = £168. But it actually cost BG (£42 + £75) x 2 = £234. That means BG makes £66 loss on these two customers.

So in total BG's money pot now stands at £336 profit from 8 customers less £66 loss from 2 customers = £270 profit on service and parts costing BG £570 . A 47.4% markup in this simple example

Obviously it's not as simple as that and they feed in all their customer data into their system and come out with a price that ensure they always make a sizeable profit by robbing peter to pay paul. It's all a clever numbers game and only a small percentage of customers actually get a good deal out of it!

But what if those 10 customers all paid £60 for a service and then BG charged the 2 needing parts the £75 pound each. In that case the customers pay a total of £750 . BG still make 10 times £60-£42 = £180 on the servicing (31.6% markup on £570 of service and parts) . Nowhere near as lucrative as the £270 they would have made by flogging the service + breakdown cover! So for BG they have incentive to sell their breakdown/service cover rather than just a service! It's all a clever sales scam IMHO!