Thursday, March 25, 2010

Stay a While

It was probably 2 years ago when we went to Camping World and bought  a Mr. Heater Stay a While kit.
It is used when camping so that you can hook up an auxiliary propane tank to the motor home. You can use it to hook up a gas grill or light, to your onboard propane tank or if your onboard tank is empty, you can use the propane from an auxiliary tank to supply propane to your motor home.
Anyway, we bought this kit at Camping World , thinking it would come in handy if we got low on propane and didn’t want to have to move the motor home.
Once we got it home, we didn’t really have any use for it and we didn’t know how to hook it up to the motor home.  I finally found the answer on the Rv-Net Forum.  This is one of my very favorite RV sites.  There is so much valuable information there and if you have a question, all you do is ask! 
Al got it hooked up correctly and found that it leaked.  He could not get the leak to stop and finally discovered there was a burr in the metal that was allowing propane to escape.
He called Mr. Heater, which is the manufacturer and they asked that he send them the old kit.  He did that and in about 10 days, we had a brand new kit.  He has not installed it yet, but we’re hoping it won’t leak!
We are learning that sometimes if you have problems getting things to work, or if they break sooner than you think you should, there may be another solution besides throwing the item out.
Two other times lately we have called the manufacturer and were sent new parts to fix the item.
One was a Gilmour Sprayer that Al uses around the yard and house and RV.  He had purchased the unit a few months ago and a part broke.  He was not able to repair it, so called to try to order the new part.  They asked him to take a photo  of the sprayer and damaged part. He emailed it to them, and within just a few days we received the new part…free of charge!  Good customer service!!
So yesterday, he decided to try his luck again.  We had bought three different BB type air guns from our local Wal-Mart.  We use them around here to scare away the hawks and Crows, because they eat our birds.  The 3 guns have all quit working long before they should have. He called Daisy Products and told them of his problem.  He was told there is a seal that goes bad and they would send him a new seal….free of charge!
The point of this post is that if you have a product that malfunctions long before it should, call the company and ask them about it.  You might be pleasantly surprised, like we were!

2 comments:

  1. Great on your customer service!

    We did that too on some Hopkins tire pressure monitor sensors. One bulged out funny and we called them. They had us take a photo to email them, and 2 days later we got the new sensor!

    ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
    Karen and Steve
    (Blog) http://kareninthewoods-kareninthewoods.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's a great reminder. I hadn't thought about the email option - great idea if a company accepts it. So much easier than returning a broken part.

    You're just a bundle of knowledge and good ideas!

    ReplyDelete

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