Changing or calling off an appointment

Three business hours, counted back from the start of your window. Where a visit is booked for noon to four, a call placed before nine that morning releases the slot.

Two things make a cancellation valid, and both are required: you speak to a live agent, and that agent reads you a cancellation code. A message left on an answering service outside office hours cancels nothing at all, so please do not treat one as sufficient.

Capacity is deliberately held back in each day's diary for urgent calls. Early word from you usually means somebody down the road with a warm refrigerator gets seen that same afternoon.

Phone in, wait for an agent, and note the cancellation code somewhere you will find it. That code is what demonstrates the booking was released properly.

Where an appointment is dropped or shifted without the procedure above being followed, a reduced service call fee of $125 becomes payable. It falls due within twenty-four hours of the hour the original appointment was due to begin.

The identical fee applies in two further situations: the technician arrives and nobody answers, or the technician arrives and the appliance has been built in, blocked or buried such that it cannot be reached. Both are usually avoided by a single sentence at booking describing where the machine sits, together with any entry code, lobby instruction, or animal that needs shutting away.

Every so often the job before yours overruns. You will hear from us the moment it becomes clear, and you take first choice of the next open slot.

Nothing whatever is charged where the change came from our side.

Components brought in specially — for premium machines, or for models no longer in production — may have to be paid for before anybody places the order. You hear about that requirement in advance, never once the part has arrived.

A special-order component cannot be returned once it has been bought in. Please treat that as final before approving the order.

You are entirely free to hear the figure and decide against the repair. Nobody will try to talk you round.

What remains payable is the diagnostic fee, which is not refunded. What it buys is the trip out and the hour spent working out what had gone wrong. Go ahead with the repair instead and that same fee is subtracted from the total.