I hope I'm posting this in the right place but I wanted to warn people about Homeserve and the cover it provides for boilers, central heating etc.
Briefly, we moved into our house about six years ago and bought cover with Homeserve for the boiler, central heating, electrics, drains, and plumbing.
We noticed an intermitent fault with our central heating and reported it to Homeserve very shortly after we bought cover with the company. Namely, the boiler would fire at 15 minute intervals for about 90 seconds whether or not the system was calling for heating. Additionally, the pump in the airing cupboard would continue to run and run. But there was certainly nothing wrong with the heating or the hot water; something was obviously wrong with the control mechanism somewhere.
From this point we've just had a saga with Homeserve including the company sending an engineer from Storm Heating in 2008 who recommended a power flush to the system, which I found out after I'd stupidly signed his chitty invalidated my insurance with Homeserve. Following a complaint the insurance was reinstated and I was paid £50 compensation. But the problem was never rectified.
Eventually after may be a dozen workmen had looked at our system one man said that it was an electrical problem and that finding it in the system wasn't part of the cover. As the problem was intermittent we just lived with it but this year the problem became permanent. So I contacted an electrician who came and diagnosed the problem. I then called Homeserve out who sent Storm Heating out again. The engineer said the system needed a power flush, complete rewiring, which isn't covered by the insurance and was too old anyway.
After a fairly pointless conversation with somebody at Homeserve's call centre, I have cancelled our policy with the company. I asked, but did not receive a satisfactory answer, why having complained about this fault for six years none of the engineers the company had sent could find the source of the problem or mend it, how odd it was that Storm Heating's answer to a system control problem was a power flush, and how, having serviced the boiler only last summer, the system was suddenly too old to mend but the company had been taking my insurance premiums each month. I told the operator, you've had six years to mend it and funnily now somebody else has found its source it's too old to mend.
I am writing a letter of complaint and will also be reporting them to Trading Standards as I think this is pretty sharp practice.
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