Plumber Call Out Charge

cjm8888

Update: Company have just confirmed I should'nt pay this.

"Our policy is that we only charge for a call out if the engineer has physically attempted to repair something whilst on site.  As you say, it is necessary for the shower to dry out before we can reseal, therefore there will be no charge for this call out"

Still a learning experience, and I hope this helps other people as I'm sure other people would have just paid this bill.

NSG666

cjm8888 said:

This is no windup post. I have owned a house now for 12 years and never paid a call out charge for someone to look at a job and quote to fix it. We had a new bathroom a few years ago and we had three plumbers quote for the work. They didn't each charge a call out for that, I cant see how this is any different ?

I understand there is a emergency call out charge if your boiler is broken for example but not to quote for a job.
If I had known I was paying for an hours time I would have got them to look at a few other issues.

I have learnt from this and I will now ask every tradesperson if they will charge for coming out to quote for a job which seems strange and rude.

As I said I have have since spoken to Citizen advice and I am correct, they should have told me they were charging for the visit.
They are going to raise a case with Trading Standards.
In the meantime I offered a good will payment.

I'm glad that you have got a satisfactory resolution.

If you asked them to quote to repair the problem then there's no difference between your bathroom refurb and the current leak but it does depend on what you asked for. From your 1st post it wasn't clear.
When I was asked to quote for a job then there was no charge if a visit was required to quote however, there were some jobs like leaks where it wasn't feasible to quote up front as a lot of the time could be spent diagnosing the problem just to determine what the repair is. In these instances I would explain this to the customer then give my labour rate and let them decide what to do - the majority understood and gave me the go-ahead.

As a sole trader there were occasions that with jobs like yours that were on my way home I'd take a look foc but that was my decision and I wouldn't go out of my way (distance wise) to do that.