DON’T LET THIRD-PARTY REPAIRS PUT A STOP TO YOUR CLAIM
MANY products, such as electrical goods, are sold with a manufacturer’s warranties or guarantees, for typically between one to five years depending on the goods.
A warranty is a contract between the consumer and the manufacturer, and the manufacturer must do whatever it promises it will do in the warranty.
However, claiming under a warranty is not always straightforward or easy and many people find that they can’t claim due some rule written into the terms and conditions.
One common theme I hear is that the manufacturer has claimed that the warranty is void as a third party has effected a repair.
For example, Chad Gold wrote to me in December and said that Apple had refused to fix his iPhone claiming that the warranty was void due to the fact that he had his screen repaired by a third party.
Lisa Comerford wrote to me in February and said that Sony had refused to repair her television as the warranty was void due to a third party replacing the sealed plug.
John Wilks wrote to me this week and said that the manufacturer of his fridge (whom he did not name) had rejected his claim under the manufacturer’s warranty as he had used a third-party engineer to replace a part.
In some cases, this will be a fair and reasonable approach. For example, if a third party replaces a motherboard in a laptop and you then claim that other parts that attach to the motherboard are ‘faulty’ it would be legitimate for the manufacturer to reject the claim.
They therefore may not be able to establish if it was a genuine manufacturer’s fault or something caused by the work of the third-party repairer.
However, the position is very different if the third-party repair has no relation to the fault which is subject of the manufacturer’s warranty claim.
A good example is Chad’s claim about the iPhone. The fault he was complaining about had nothing to do with the cracked screen that had been repaired.
The good news for Chad is that it appears Apple seem to now agree with this concept as in March this year it told its employees to accept warranty claims, even if the screen had been previously repaired by a third party. Of course, Apple has limited this to claims where the fault isn’t linked to the third-party screen repair.
In conclusion, just because you use a third party to repair goods it does not mean that your warranty is automatically void and certainly does not take away your consumer rights.
Dean Dunham is a lawyer and consumer rights expert. Dean is also the Retail Ombudsman.