The Electrician & Trading Standards.

I am glad I have retired.


Fortunately I have never been caught like this and I have never informed a customer of their right to cancel. It only takes one awkward customer and you get caught up in a quagmire of administration and loss. Your customer obviously thought that they could get away without paying your invoice by reporting you. Chase them ruthlessly for every penny.  ?

have you considered a £40 callout fee including the first hour onsite?


Andy

Many emergency lock smiths , mechanics , plumbers now charge ‘upfront’ over the phone or on arrival to the job.


BG take £60 upfront before they will even come out (unless you pay extra each month for free call out)


the locksmith I used when I locked myself out at the old house charged me £200 on arrival regardless of if he got us in or not , we had to sign a 4 or 5 page contract covering him for things like not being responsible for any scratches or damage to the door etc


i do hope you chase up your payment , non payment is one thing that really grinds my gears especially if you have done your best to help a customer

The consumer cancellation rights are for jobs in excess of £42, if you turn up as requested to deal with an emergency for one hour they don’t have any right to refuse to pay.


If the problem has not been resolved or it needs materials in excess of £2 to sort it out then you really need to be discussing the potential costs of the repair and putting pen to paper to get an agreement as to what to do next.


The only time I have had a real issue was with a husband and wife who were both alcoholics, they were great people in the morning before they went to the pub for lunch, but after lunch they were absolutely foul people.


They came back from the pub and started arguing about the position of a down light that could not go precisely where they wanted it because it meant cutting out the bottom chord of the roof truss above that point, I pointed out it would look silly there anyway as it would be three inches away from a ceiling mounted cooker hood above an island unit in the kitchen and suggested just leaving it out until the kitchen was finished and the hood was in place then deciding what to do. I received a message from the kitchen firm that were paying me that evening to say not to go back as they were getting their own electrician to go and finish my work off as I was “too argumentative”.


I did get paid, had I not it would have been very tempting to ask the police to sit outside their house waiting for them to drive home from the pub after lunch one day, really I should have done that anyway out of public duty, but it could have caused serious problems for the kitchen firm.


A few times over the years I have had serious discussions about what would get blokes working at people’s homes to phone the police and report them for something, one guy I worked for got a customer sent to prison after finding his porn collection in the loft of his house.


There are some mad and bad customers out there!


Andy 

I signed up to it with local trading standards when it first came out, they got me on their safe trader scheme and sold me a book of blank contracts (at a reduced rate) to give to customers. The job starting rate was £35 then. I found that when I issued them to customers and asked `em to sign it some of them were taken aback, I could see them thinking "Oh he is a wide boy, gonna rip me off".

Local TS did tell me of a (honest) trader who went thru proper procedure on a job getting it signed for a couple of hunderd quid and part way thru the customers asked him to do some equal value extra works therefore doubling the price. Naturally he did it but never bothered with all the signed stuff again. They were happy with the job but refused to pay ANY of it, they got TS involved and were pressing TS to prosecute the trader (TS were convinced the customers were trying it on and had probably set out from the start to rip this trader off), they had to warn the trader that if they could not coax the customer to drop their insistence then they might have to proecute the trader even though they were convinced of his honesty. I never did hear the outcome.