GaryG wrote: Generac provided me with the names of 2 companies “near” me who service their products, one of whom I had already spoken to. He’s 28 miles away, was sick last week, and planned to be on vacation for a week after that. The other company is 47 miles away and making noises like they don’t want to serve us. There’s another locality about 45 minutes east of us that might have some service people, so I’ll check on that in the coming week.
.
This is often because doing a warranty service , for the dealer, is a money-losing deal no matter how you slice it. Even *IF* the warranty claim is paid, dealer will never get paid a fair labor & cost rate (Factory flat rate times are based on the time it takes THEIR factory trained technicians following manual procedures, with factory tools on a NEWLY ASSEMBLED stock unit on the bench. Those idealized times are almost never anywhere close to real-world conditions (Rust/Corrosion, Accessibility, having to have all the special tools and lifts/hoists, etc. on hand on the service truck, and a tech that has several years' experience to do the job, plus travel time/mileage - It could be 5 miles, but depending on where and the time of day that 5 miles may take anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour or more.)
Upshot is, a Dealer will never send out their A level tech (They're only profitable in the shop on paying customer jobs) and rarely ever will have all the necessary special service tools to make the job easier, etc... So chances are, dealer stands to lose several hundred dollars out of pocket on any warranty service call, even if they DO get paid by the factory, so it is understandable that they'll make any excuse they possibly can to avoid Service Calls (Less so on Pickup/Delivery situations) under factory warranty. It is just the cold hard truth about factory warranty these days - Sometimes it may even require making lots of noise (daily or every other day phone calls to factory reps/ tech support/ Customer service, get a firm date, and follow up if they miss the date, until eventually just to get you to shut up and stop calling, factory might finally send out one of their own techs, or possibly even just replace the whole thing, or they'll make a "special Claim ID" and have a dealer go handle it, where the dealer will get paid much more than they'd normally get..) and sometimes that noise may get so bad that the factory just offers you a refund (percentage or full) on the defective unit and wash their hands of it all - (Then good luck finding any dealer for that brand to do a new install or repair... unless the dealer is gonna get paid big bucks - What we used to call the PITA Tax..)
