We have a service contract with a local heating oil company. It includes 1 tune up per year. I asked him a couple of questions and he was nice and answered them. One of the parts he was replacing had stripped threads and he had to wait for the parts truck to deliver a new one, but it’s covered by the service contract.
Right now he’s in his truck, doing paperwork I assume.
What services come with your tune up? I’m always wary of such things.
For actual machine equipment it’s a good idea to have someone look at all the pieces-parts regularly - they know when something “looks wrong” although that can become the “you need a new this/that” so obviously it varies.
For electronic components I think it’s just an on/off type of situation, I wouldn’t think a “checkup” would do much the system isn’t already doing by itself regularly.
They inspect the heat exchanger for signs of leaking water, test the efficiency to make sure it’s not going to shit (using a special instrument that gets inserted into the flue), replace the filter if it needs it, replace the injector nozzle which is a consumable part, supposed to be changed every year, etc.
This boiler is about 35 years old from what we can tell. Over the past few years the fuel pump failed, the combustion fan failed, and now the part they’re waiting on failed (it just got here, by the way). That stuff was covered under the service contract, so we’ve come out ahead, or at least broke even.
Like anything you can probably just let this type of thing run until it dies, pay for repairs as you go, and hope for the best, but if I’m out of town and my wife has to deal with it, it’s game over. This way we just call and it’s done.
I wonder too as I had a bad experience with the home alarm/security setup. Turned out it was a yearly bill for them doing nothing.
In my mind it’s not always a scam, but it can be. Like getting a car maintenance package at the dealership. I need to understand exactly what services and how many am I buying. I don’t understand servicing a boiler though.
We have a whole house generator and were paying like $350 a year for a maintenance contract for that. After watching the guys show up, poke around for 5 minutes and leave, and do 1 oil change a year, I decided to do it myself this year. That contract was so dumb. It didn’t even cover anything if it broke – just “service”.
