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Re: new w/m – which to choose
No problem Jon, we just see ’em when they break not when they’re all nice and shiny under bright lights. 😉
If it’s on a wooden floor then then the only thing you can do really is get a decent bit of chipboard or worktop and screw it securely to the deck underneath the machine. It won’t totally eliminate the vibration but it will help a lot.
K.
Point taken, but a Hotpoint is built in the UK, still Italian junk inside it though. 😆
Seriously though, you’ll not see the real difference till it hits about 3-5 years old and bearings fail, something, which at that age on a proper German built machine, just wouldn’t happen IMO.
K.
Re: employment with merloni
You know Mike, that post has been preying on my mind all day and there’s no way that I’d ever expect an engineer to cope with that workload.
The result speaks for itself, I need add no more.
No doubt no blame was laid on the stress of the job though.
K.
Well we don’t get paid enough to have a built in redundancy or backup (to steal some IT terminology) and therefore when it hits the fan, there’s no safety net. And having 50{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} or your staff go ill I doubt many companies in the world, irrespective of their size, could cope with.
But then we do not price contracts properly in this industry by a long way, not because we’re thick or anything like that, just because most don’t realise what is being asked of them and the true cost to provide that with no downtime.
For example, in the IT industry you can get web services with 99{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} uptime no problem for a hypothetical £20 a month. As soon as you ask for guaranteed 100{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} availability and uptime that means building in redundant systems to provide it, therefore the same product could easily cost four or five times that due to the stuff sitting doing nothing 99{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of the time and the staff to support and maintain it as well.
The simple lesson in it is, if you can’t guarantee it, don’t offer it or agree to provide it especially if there are financial penalties in not meeting the SLA.
In this industry if we have a chap sitting about waiting on the phone to ring we see it as a waste, in other industries which are far richer than ours, it’s called customer service. On the payment levels for this industry we will never, ever achieve that level of service as we simply cannot carry any dead weight at all.
K.
I wasn’t having a dig as such Martin but it is still a rip-off regardless of how you want to slice it. Whilst I agree that there is an element of supply and demand as you rightly point out, most spares are obscenely overpriced and carbons are no exception to that rule, merely an example.
Where the demand on a particular spare is high the cost is lowered to combat the “patten” trade more than doing us all a favour.
I’m working on a full reply to this one Martin as well as a the reasons for the pricing, I’ll get that done in time. But I will tell you that you may not like the article, but then neither will some others. 😉
K.
I would agree that the trade, in so far as the sole trader with no agencies is concerned, is having a tough time right now and in many ways it’s sorting the good from the bad. But much the same is and has been happening to the ones that employ and do contract work for many years now with quite a few casualties along the way sadly.
What I do think is that the trade is evolving, just how remains at this point in time, to be seen just what it’s evolving into though.
K.
Just another thought on this after a while….
Has anyone even asked if this is possible to guarantee, especially the larger agents for the larger manufacturers?
My guess is that the answer will be either “no” or “we were told we had to do it”, both of which are pretty typical, you’ll just be expected to comply. Fun! 😕
K.
Re: employment with merloni
Martin wrote:Merloni could offer a good deal to many who are able to put up with the workload. Very often 10 calls a day (minimum) and if you fail to complete any of those, you will get another 10 tomorrow on top. Day in day out the pressure is on.
Welcome to the site Der.
And, just imagine the pressure that these guys will be under if this “2 day” service promise comes into effect from DSG (see The Rumour Mill), my guess is that it won’t be a whole lotta fun. 😕
K.
Re: ADVISE ON NEW WASHER/DRYER
Hi BMC,
Don’t worry about the hot fill it’s a non-starter. In most house with a modern machine all you’ll do on a hot fill is take the cold water from between the pipe and the tank/boiler and fill the machine with that, wasting the hot water by filling the pipes in between with the hot water you thought was in the machine.
Most hot fills are only on the first fill after a pre-wash on a boil wash as well and, since we’re about the only country in the EU that even asks for it, it’s not well catered for.
In addition it costs about the same to boil the kettle these days as do a 40C wash in terms of energy useage, so hardly a concern.
I have had customers telling me in the past that they run the hot tap till they get hot water out before putting the machines on, I simply ask them how eco-friendly and wasteful that is!
If I were you I’d stick with the Bosch or, if you can run to it, Miele. 😉
K.
Re: “New” Coverplan
Ah, the memories…
Of same day service, timed slots down to a three hour period, next day service, guaranteed call back times with spares, attempts to invoice the agent for an exchanged appliance and more besides…
The common denominator in all this… Dixons Stores Group (DSG) also known to us all as Currys!
You want to know where this comes from? Sit back and I’ll tell you a story as it was recounted to me…
Long ago sometime in the early to mid-eighties DSG realised that the independent retailers were beating them, primarily on the provision of service and after sales care as, at that point, many serviced what they sold. This included many members of the CIH (Combined Independent Holdings) Group which still does the same to this very day. And, of course, also at that point Comet (Kingfisher controlled at the time) had their own service department. Currys was out in the cold and couldn’t control the service side.
So they dabbled with the Mastercare operation and that didn’t work out with whitegoods, but went okay with brown which had been traditionally their area for service anyways. That got bumped.
So next they forced the manufacturers to sign up to providing same day/next day calls, compensation payments, out of hours service and I honestly can’t remember what all else. Make no mistake if DSG had or have their way you’d be working, or have engineers on the road, seven days a week (you might get public holidays off, but maybe not) and you’d have guys on shift patterns. Trust me, I know.
Then into the nineties a masterplan was hatched, use the independents to form their own repair network as the forcing of the manufacturers was met with little real success and lots of things were dropped. I shouldn’t need to explain to a lot of you just what a debacle that little lot turned out to be.
Fast forward to the new millenium and, lo and behold, another inituative on service provision and, lo and behold, it’s been instigated by DSG, what a surprise! And, lo and behold the wrong partner (in NESN) is chosen and it collapses after a year although the bell was tolling long before then.
Now, two years down the line, lo and behold, yet another inituative aimed at forcing a standard that, frankly, in the current climate is unachievable with the troops on the ground that are out there. And again instigated by someone in DSG that has probably never picked up a screwdriver in their life let alone knows how a service operation works in reality. Spreadsheets and ideals are fine, putting them into practise however is an entirely different matter.
And yet again the pressure will be on for service organisations and manufacturers to prioritise Currys customers, hardly fair.
What staggers me is that manufacturers consistently give in to the demands, especially when they underfund service something sever as it stands now. We all are too acutely aware of the shortage of engineers, we are all to aware of the long lead times to first and return visits and we’re all (contract work bods) under pressure to meet the targets as things stand. Without a serious injection of cash and time to train up engineers I’m sorry, but I just can’t see this working at all.
But then, there will (as usual) probably be little exposure for DSG as they’ll have sealed a deal whereby the manufacturers will most likely be picking up the tab for any exchanges that need doing due the targets not being met.
I wonder how happy RETRA and CIH will be when this one comes into force?
Bitter through experience, no… not me. 😉
K.
Simon,
Take a look at the bottom right hand side below the BBC news feed. 😉
There was another thread on this the other day as well.
K.
Re: new w/m – which to choose
Jon
AEG is owned by Electrolux and, so far as I know, all laundry product or the vast bulk of it will be exactly the same as a Tricity Bendix, Electrolux or Zanussi washing machine with a fancy facsia on it. To my knowledge there are no AEG washers now made in Germany so you’re not buying what you think you are.
Adding features costs money. The more features and the lower the price would have to make me wonder at that quality of components used in construction to achieve the price with the extra bells and whistles on it, which most people will never use anyway.
And don’t always believe what you read in Which, it’s not unusual for them to not bother taking the lid off to see what’s inside and they’ve gotten it wrong on more than one occasion. We’re engineers, we kinda have to have a poke about inside. 😉
K.
