BG might not be the worst?

st999

I have gas warm air heating and pay BG £16.43 a month for a maintenance contract. Service and repairs. It has slowly been creeping up year by year so I thought I would enquire elsewhere and contacted a local company for a quote.

They don't do maintenance contracts, just service and repair when necessary.

I got a quote from them and this is what they would charge

For services and repairs we are £84.60 inc vat for the first 2 hours and time starts from base and if he is longer than that its £36 per hour + vat.

This is for one off services and repairs not a contract. Plus any parts required.

Base is at least a half hour drive from my house. If it is rush hour it could be as much as an hour. I never asked if I had to pay for him to return to base.

I think I will just stick with my BG contract.

Stan

Premier_2

You're paying almost £200 a year for what exactly?

I've little experience of warm air heating, but did have it for a year in one property I rented. It essentially was a gas fire at the base of a hot air duct that went up the centre of the house with manual vents from that duct in each room. Not much to go wrong ... and I didn't experience any problems in the year I was there.

Currently I have full gas central heating via radiators. Not been touched for about 20 years. That would be the equivalent of £4000 in todays money if we had purchased an annual contract (perhaps more since it is a much more complicated system than warm air heating)

Yes I may be lucky, but a typical failure in modern central heating systems is the pcb board failing after about 5 years. That costs about £150 for the part or about £300 -£500 for a fitter to diagnose & replace. A lot less than the £1000 you would have paid in the same time frame.

If you prefer to pay £200 per year as insurance, that's fine, but check what the insurance covers. Will it for example pay for a complete new heating system should yours be declared uneconomical, or even just unviable due to lack of parts, to repair.

As for maintenance, I'm a keen believer in the notion that if it's not broke, don't fix it.

pramsay13

As Premier says you're paying an insurance policy. As with all service contracts it's a gamble whether you will actually need it during the year and worth weighing up complexity of system, age, potential for things going wrong as well as what is actually covered if things do go wrong.
If you're keen on regular payments and confident it covers everything then a service contract is fine. If you can take a bit of a risk just put the money in a savings account, and use it if needed.