Reclaiming electrician charges from BT

ameiklejohn

And so begins a saga.

Over the last 2 years we have had crackling and dropouts of both phone and broadband connection. About one year ago we phoned BT and they accepted that it was a problem with their line, external to our property and so sent engineers without charge. Problem solved, or so we thought.

Fast forward to March this year and the crackling returned, as did the dropouts in both phone and broadband connection. Ringing both our ISP provider (The Post Office) and BT, both said that the problem was not on the line but with our internal equipment and quoted over £100 if an engineer was to visit and find the problem was with our equipment.

Not wanting to incur this charge, we understandably payed for a local electrician to check for the problem. Twice we called him out, but to our despair, the problems persisted. In total, we paid around £160 we would later find to have been unnecessary. In addition, the lifeline that my elderly Father-in-law relies upon was cut off from its phone connection making it inoperable.

We rang BT again, now this time after some mixed messages, they reported that the problem was external and that BT would send engineers to fix the fault. We are now in the process of having the fault mended but feel extremely annoyed that we had to spend so much when BT could have solved the problem months ago.

Does anyone have any advice on how to reclaim the costs of both the electricians and the loss of lifeline connection?

Thanks

iniltous

BT and all other providers simply give a warning that if a fault is found to be on the end users own wiring or equipment then they could be charged for the engineers visit, usually, if the end user has a NTE5 type master socket, its straight forward to check if the problem is internal or on the line, and there is plenty of info online and in the BT phonebook on how to do this..
If you decide rather than risk calling the engineer out to employ a third party to check the internal wiring, then why do it twice ?, and pay an amount greater than what you may have been charged by BT if the problem were proved to be on what Openreach are not responsible for...sorry but I don't think they will consider they did anything wrong