Broken AIS + Raymarine repair charge

laika

laika

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[EDIT: Orginally I said this was 3 years old. Turns out time is going past quicker than I thought]
My 4 year old Raymarine AIS 500 just stopped working. Worked fine a month ago. Since then haven't connected up any other equipment, haven't even been sailing. Turned it on yesterday...no LED. There's power right to the board (it gets warm and I took the back off and checked that there's 13.6v to the internal connector). Plotter can't see it. Attaching a serial cable to the serial line it emits the string "AIS NMEA0183-NMEA2000 Application V1.90"" when power is applied but that's it. It used to have quite extensive boot-up messages IIRC.

Any ideas?

Talked to Raymarine. They say bring it in. Fixed fee of £360 to repair whatever is wrong with it.

Having a cap on repair costs is one thing. Having a *minimum* repair cost of £360 on a 4 year old bit of electronics which would cost less than twice that to replace doesn't really seem to be encouraging repeat custom. I'm now re-evaluating the autopilot upgrade I had been planning.

I note that there are 3rd party repair services including these people in wareham:
http://www.marineelectronicservice.com/Marine%20Electronic%20Service%20S1.htm
Can anyone recommend any 3rd party repairers (or tell us any to avoid)?
 
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prv said:
(though Piplers are listing it at over £1000?) is not a reasonable length of time.
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I noticed that too but I definitely paid nowhere near that but it certainly wasn't cheap: Can't find an emailed invoice (and paper records all in storage) but from some correspondence it seems it was actually 4 years ago I bought it. Apologies for the mis-representation. But I still think that fixed repair cost of £360 is ridiculous.
 
Update. Had a chat with Hudson marine who'd originally sold me the AIS500 and reckoned that in general these units are very reliable (but they weren't able to suggest a course of action against Raymarine). Decided to try the Service Centre who quoted me 7-10 days for an estimate (cost: £65.94 including return carriage, deductible if further work agreed to). Estimate came after 10 days (8 working days but apparently they're very busy at the moment). Bad news. Based on the observation that the system powers up but the processor is not running the software (which I knew) they've suggested a PCB replacement which (as Raymaine apparently don't supply the parts) involves sending the unit to Raymarine for the fixed-price repair. Should I have just bought a new one? Well Hudson reminded me that the AIS 500, unlike the later AIS650 and many cheapies, has an integrated splitter so replacement cost is not *just* the AIS unit. Should I have just sent it to Raymarine? No. I've been happy with the communication I've had from the Service Centre. They are dealing with sending the unit to Raymarine who will then deliver it back to me directly. But most interestingly the total price I will end up paying them for initial diagnosis then sending to Raymarine to be fixed and returned will be £28.07 *less* including VAT than what I would have had to pay Raymarine directly to look at and repair it. So unless circumstances require me to update this thread otherwise, a positive experience with the Service Centre (although sadly no miracles) and pretty much nothing positive to say about Raymarine's aftersales care.
 
laika said:
Update. Had a chat with Hudson marine who'd originally sold me the AIS500 and reckoned that in general these units are very reliable (but they weren't able to suggest a course of action against Raymarine).
Click to expand...

Sounds like you have things in hand, but for what it's worth if you had decided to go the legal route, you wouldn't be taking action against Raymarine. Your contract was with the company you bought from, it's up to them to supply the working kit you paid them for. Whether they're able in turn to extract some kind of restitution from Raymarine is not your problem. Might seem unfair on them since they didn't make the faulty kit, but the SoGA is quite clear, and fulfilling their obligations under it is just part of the cost of doing business (and is part of what the retail markup is for).

Pete
 
I didn't mean "course of action" in the legal sense. I really don't know what my chances would be with the SoGA. Certainly it'd be a lot of hours and I wouldn't get my AIS unit back before my next cross channel. As you say, it'd be Hudson I'd actually be "fighting", I've had a good relationship with them in the past and despite expressing surprise that the unit had failed they didn't seem overly sympathetic to a 4 year old out-of-warranty failure. So will chalk this one up to another mark on the Raymarine "naughty" list.
 
laika said:
Update. Had a chat with Hudson marine who'd originally sold me the AIS500 and reckoned that in general these units are very reliable (but they weren't able to suggest a course of action against Raymarine). Decided to try the Service Centre who quoted me 7-10 days for an estimate (cost: £65.94 including return carriage, deductible if further work agreed to). Estimate came after 10 days (8 working days but apparently they're very busy at the moment). Bad news. Based on the observation that the system powers up but the processor is not running the software (which I knew) they've suggested a PCB replacement which (as Raymaine apparently don't supply the parts) involves sending the unit to Raymarine for the fixed-price repair. Should I have just bought a new one? Well Hudson reminded me that the AIS 500, unlike the later AIS650 and many cheapies, has an integrated splitter so replacement cost is not *just* the AIS unit. Should I have just sent it to Raymarine? No. I've been happy with the communication I've had from the Service Centre. They are dealing with sending the unit to Raymarine who will then deliver it back to me directly. But most interestingly the total price I will end up paying them for initial diagnosis then sending to Raymarine to be fixed and returned will be £28.07 *less* including VAT than what I would have had to pay Raymarine directly to look at and repair it. So unless circumstances require me to update this thread otherwise, a positive experience with the Service Centre (although sadly no miracles) and pretty much nothing positive to say about Raymarine's aftersales care.
Click to expand...

So much for the often praised Raymarine after sales service and wide availability of spares.
Just a (marketing) myth?

Your experience of the Service Centre is similar to mine.
First class service every time I dealt with them.
 
Just to finish this off...

AIS now back and working. Raymarine actually delivered back to The Service Centre who then delivered on to me which turned out to be convenient: I was away for a week and the nice service centre people delayed (at my request) sending it back to avoid Premier's £1 per day "handling charge" for packages. Took longer than I expected, especially since they've just sent me an entirely new unit (not just switched the motherboard) so needed to re-crimp pins and connectors onto the new wires. I've re-checked and yup...£28.07 cheaper than sending directly to Raymarine. Think I might have had a sale of goods act case as it's not unreasonable to expect more than 4 years out of this but I've paid the money now. Spoke to a Raymarine installer who said that there was a lot of trouble with the early examples but most of them failed before the warranty expired.

Thumbs up for the service centre. I took the re-installation as the opportunity for a bit of a rewire and AIS+boat data now more robustly hooked up to the raspberry pi which now has its own shelf and power with dedicated breaker rather than sitting precariously on the chart table.
 
Laika
It is good to hear that The Service Centre did their stuff satisfactorily.
To take you up on your reference to the Sale of Goods Act, it would have been difficult IMHO to win your "case". Read any of the consumer advice sites about the SOGA:
Firstly your action would be against the retailer, not the manufacturer (as correctly pointed out above).
The SOGA then has provision for rejection of goods found to be faulty. If this is done "within reasonable time", usually taken as within 3 to 4 weeks, then the retailer must provide a refund or if you agree a replacement.
Once this immediate rejection period is passed, it is too late to reject the goods, but you can still claim for repair or replacement. The key here is that if the claim is made within 6 months of the sale then the onus is on the retailer to prove that the goods were satisfactory quality at the time of sale. After 6 months the onus switches and the purchaser must prove that the goods were not of reasonable quality at the time of sale. Bit difficult to prove that one for this sort of kit, unless you can find an engineer to report appropriately. The court would look to see evidence that the fault was not simply the result of normal wear and tear. Given the extremes of a small boat environment and usual lack of detailed records, it is hard to see a court siding with a yachtsman, even in respect of kit sold mainly for the boating market, after four years of use.
Finally, you have six years in which you may bring a claim.
I think you have done the right thing in moving on to get the kit repaired and back in use. Mark it up as another cost of enjoying oneself on the water.
 
Resolution said:
Firstly your action would be against the retailer, not the manufacturer (as correctly pointed out above).
Click to expand...

Aware of that and that's mainly why I didn't pursue it. I quite like the people I bought it from and didn't want to cause them grief (especially as I had guessed that it'd be far from straight forward).
Resolution said:
After 6 months the onus switches and the purchaser must prove that the goods were not of reasonable quality at the time of sale. Bit difficult to prove that one for this sort of kit, unless you can find an engineer to report appropriately. The court would look to see evidence that the fault was not simply the result of normal wear and tear. Given the extremes of a small boat environment and usual lack of detailed records, it is hard to see a court siding with a yachtsman, even in respect of kit sold mainly for the boating market, after four years of use.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that: the practice of how this works now I was completely unaware of (though obviously would have investigated before going down that route). Given that no-one seems to do component level diagnostics on these things, presumably unless I got a friendly dealer to give evidence of a known design flaw or component defect the SOGA is pretty much useless for electronic goods like this after the initial 6 month period.
 
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