Montpellier cooker faulty

emjay1970

Hi all. This is hurting my head so any practical ideas would be great. Long post. Stay with me.

I bought a Montpellier range in December 2022 when we moved to our new place - it comes with a two year guarantee and I’d heard good things about them, decent reviews etc.

I noticed once installed the oven was running a bit cool. I got an engineer out on two occasions who kept taking the temp from the back of the oven, He insisted it was hot enough. I decided to put up with it. 

A few months later we had a small gas leak at the property and our gas man checked the cooker. It wasn’t leaking but he said “Someone has been under her already.”

As I hadn’t had the best experience I assumed it was too late to do anything and we’d have to put up with it, the ignition also stopped working on the stove and I had to use lighters. 

Roll forward to a week before Christmas and our oven makes horrendous noises, to the point the electrics tripped so we had to turn it off. We could not get a Montpellier engineer in and could tell it wouldn’t be a straightforward fix. We had people over for Christmas so had to order a new oven that would be delivered before Christmas, get the Montpellier uninstalled and the new one installed - at our cost. In the interim the Montpellier engineer came and said it looked like the oven had been dropped. The fan was buckled and it was almost certainly damage in transit. Enamel was peeling away from the inside of the oven and it was unrepairable. 

I called Montpellier twice as I’d heard nothing from them. They were chasing the engineer for the report apparently but I didn’t get a response until two days ago. 

I’ve been offered an exchange from the original company. No information on how to complain, how to get compensation, whether I disagree with the decision. Nothing at all. 

I was given an email address to discuss it but don’t know where to begin. Any suggestions? 

ArbitraryRandom

I'm assuming you bought directly from Montpellier as you've not mentioned anyone else being involved? 

Your rights under the guarantee depend on the wording of the guarantee - unfortunately I can't read it from here, but you can take a look and see if it gives you a choice of resolution and in what circumstances (I expect it says they can choose to repair, replace or refund). 

Your consumer rights are separate from any rights you have under the guarantee - they allow the seller to attempt to repair or replace one fault before you are entitled to demand a partial refund - and unfortunately as they did not find an issue when you had them out previously and you accepted this at the time, this would seem to be the first 'official' fault. 

If you think of it this way, while your actions are understandable, from their perspective, they are offering to give you a new cooker - it's not their fault that you decided to purchase a new cooker before they had chance to come and look at the faulty one. 

That said, your best argument would be the seller is required to arrange any repair "within a reasonable time and without significant inconvenience to the consumer". I would struggle to point to any authority on what a 'reasonable time' is for an engineer visit in the Christmas/New Year period... 

Aylesbury_Duck

ArbitraryRandom is correct, it sounds like you've been offered a resolution as provided for in the manufacturer's guarantee, or perhaps by the retailer via consumer rights, it's not completely clear which.  

All you can do is to speak to them to see if they'll change the solution, but they have a right to choose whether to repair, refund or replace.  The timing and circumstances around Christmas were unfortunate, but a better decision would have been to ask someone else to host rather than rush a solution that might leave you with two ovens.