What we warrant, and for how long

The two halves, and why they are different lengths

A repair is a part and the work of fitting it, and those two things fail in different ways and on different timescales. The parts warranty runs a full year because a component that is going to be faulty out of the box, or that was made on a bad day, will usually declare itself within a heating season. The labor warranty runs ninety days because workmanship problems — a connector not fully seated, a door not squared to the cabinet after a hinge change, a fan wheel not centred — show up almost immediately once the appliance goes back into daily use.

If a part we supplied fails inside 365 days we replace it. If the work we did comes undone inside 90 days we come back and put it right. In either case there is no second diagnostic fee for the same fault.

Genuine OEM parts, and what that buys you

We fit genuine oem parts. On built-in cooking equipment the difference is not brand loyalty, it is fit and calibration. A bake element is a length of resistance wire with a specified wattage and a specified physical shape; a pattern part that is close on both is still not the part the control board was tuned against, and the result is an oven that never quite holds its setpoint. Door gaskets, hinge assemblies and blower wheels are worse, because a few millimetres of difference changes how the appliance seals, closes or moves air.

Fitting original parts is also what lets us warrant the work at all. We are not going to guarantee a repair built on a component whose tolerances nobody publishes.

What the warranty does not cover

It covers the repair we performed. It does not turn into a service contract on the whole appliance, and it is honest to be specific about the edges.

• A different fault, in a different system. On a dual-fuel range especially — the cooktop and the oven are separate machines sharing a fascia, so a burner repair warrants the burner work and not the oven that fails three weeks later.
• Damage from something outside the appliance: a surge, a water leak, a rodent, a cabinet fire, or a supply problem in the house wiring or the gas line.
• The consequences of maintenance the appliance never had. Hood baffles that have not been washed in three years, burner ports left partly blocked, a drain path left to silt up, a mineral load that has been building in a steam generator since the appliance was installed. We will clear it, and we will tell you the interval it actually needs, but the warranty covers the work we performed rather than the condition we found. What that looks like in a steam oven .
• Wear items consumed in normal use, and cosmetic marks that were there before we arrived and are noted on the paperwork.
• Anything a third party has been inside since our visit. Not out of pique — once another set of hands has been in the appliance, nobody can honestly say whose work failed.

How to make a claim

Call, say it is a warranty return, and give us the date of the original visit. We keep the write-up from every job, so you do not need to have kept anything — though if you have the estimate to hand it saves a minute. We book the return visit inside the same working hours as any other call, and there is nothing to pay for a covered return: no $129 diagnostic, no travel.

If the return visit finds a fault that is genuinely a different one — which does happen, particularly on appliances with several tired components — we will tell you that on the spot, in writing, before any new work starts.