Complain against Bosch Water Heater

We purchased our tankless waterheater AquaStar FX240 2 years back(June 2004). It stopped working on 01/02/2007. It has a 10 years warrantee and we are still under warrantee period. I called BOSCH and they are supposed to send me the new water heater and I am still waiting for it and haven't received it yet(01/17/07). Its been 3 weeks now.

Please note that we are without hot water for more than 3 weeks now and with two elderly people (over 80) and two young children, (one baby and one toddler) this gets very hard for us to continue with no hot water in the house in this cold winter. And I suppose this year its very cold in California(San Francisco bay area).

We have been calling BOSCH almost every other day. The policy they have is not very customer friendly. They have the general customer support phone number in their website which has a wait period of 20-30 minutes. And their policy is that if your water heater is not working. Its your responsibility to call a licenced plumber and diagnosed the problem and the plumber need to give them a call and tell them whats the problem is(And note that the changes made by the plumber is not reimburshed by the company, Bosch). In bay area a plumber charge $100-$150/hour to give you a visit which includes their travel time. We called a certified technician/plumber on 01/03/2007 who inspected our heater and diagnosed that

“ Checked out unit and found that Heat Exchanger leaking and shutting out the ignition and tripping the Reset”. He called the Bosch customer support line on 01/04/2007 and 01/05/2007 and was on hold for more than 25 minutes and couldn’t get anybody. Its not possible for him to be on hold for such a long time. In the meantime I was constanly calling Bosch customer support to make them understand that no plumber will wait on the phone for 25-30 minutes. I was talking with Kim, Renne and the supervisor Matt but nobody tried to understand the situation and after calling repeatly for 2-3 days one of them felt pitty on me and directed me to call the technical support people of Bosch (again this was the general technical support line where the wait was more than 20 minutes, i guess thats their standard wait time).

But I was lucky to wait for 20 minutes and get a change to talk with one of the technacian named Jonathan who helped me a lot. He gave the direct phone number of the technical suppport line where the wait period is no more than 2 minutes. And he helped me to speed up the process. My heater was shipped finally on 01/11/2007. I haven't received it yet which is another thing I have to figure out ...

As of today we are still without hot water in the house with two elerly people(80+) and two kids(6months and 2 and 1/2 toddler).

thanks,

Monima

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