Service charge plus labor charges?

I think the service charge should include at least the first hour of labor. I ask them up front what their policy is on this, and if they charge just to show up, and then are on your dime the minute they start working, I look for someone else.

I have a man who fixes my bike once a year. He's awesome. He works and works and works and works, even in the snow or rain, he comes to your house, for 1, 5 hour and lets me pay half an hour or something.

Lämmchen said:

What do you think about companies that charge a Service Charge to their customers along with an hourly labor rate charge?

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I guess it depends on the situation.

If you're asking someone to make a 50 mile round trip to come to my house to do some work it makes sense that they need to cover the cost of travel and their time while traveling. On that basis it would be like a call-out fee and then an hourly rate. If it's someone who is five minutes away wanting me to pay a call-out charge and then an hourly rate on top I'd find someone else.

The plumber I used to use at my last house had a rate for the first hour and then a half-hourly rate. If the plumber was there for 10 minutes or 59 minutes you paid for an hour. One time they cut me some slack because I'd had to call them three times in two weeks for jobs that turned out to be relatively trivial (to them anyway), so the third time I asked if they could charge me for half an hour and they did. I'd used them for just about all my plumbing needs and as far as possible told them they could come by more or less whenever worked for them, on the basis if they could fit me in between other jobs they wouldn't be making a special trip to my house.

Lämmchen said:

We have lived here 2 years and the majority of the people we've hired for any type of service has scammed us. It's disgusting.

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I fear it's fairly widespread, especially with people who don't understand what is involved (which, after all, is often why you pay someone else to do the work).

A family member had an electrician do some work in her house. She was elderly and lived in a big old barn of a house. The electrician put nice new 12-gauge wire in, but then joined it on to the old knob-and-tube cabling. I assume she trusted whoever did it enough to believe he had done the job properly and paid him for the work. In one place he could have completed a circuit with new cable for the sake of about 10 feet of cable. I know cable is cheap, I've got a 250-foot roll of it myself, so there's really no excuse for that kind of shoddy workmanship.

I'd love to know who it was who stitched her up so royally because I'd like to pay him a visit. I can't ask her because she died a couple of years back. Now I get to use my 250-foot roll of cable to do the job I suspect she already paid someone else to do, but do it right this time.

Lämmchen said:

Yikes! He didn't pull the knob and tube???

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Nope. Still got it all over the place.

In fairness it's possible (although unlikely, given this particular person's spending habits) that she told the electrician to just do part of a job. It just seems unlikely that any electrician worth his salt would leave knob and tube and just connect to it.

I know that it's safe as long as you don't overload it. It's been there since, well, since knob and tube was what was available and hasn't caused any problems yet. Most of it powers nothing more than a few light bulbs, although it was interesting when I ran an 8000BTU air conditioning from a knob-and-tube powered socket. It wasn't very long before I dug out my 20A-rated extension cable and plugged it into something a little more - er - capable.

When it cools down my project is to rip out lath-and-plaster walls, replace the knob and tube wiring, and rebuild. That should keep me out of trouble for a while.

Lämmchen said:

That's probably right that the customer was the one in control of the situation! Get rid of it as soon as you can afford to do it though. I've heard it's very dangerous.

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People say that, I don't believe it's dangerous unless you overload it.

If you start running things like hair dryers and air conditioners from it you're likely to overload it. If you're just running a light bulb or two I don't see any reason to worry about it.

I ran a 600W heater on a knob and tube circuit last winter and it was fine. I didn't care to try switching it to 1500W, thankfully I didn't need to. When my air conditioner's compressor cuts in it's pretty obvious that the knob and tube circuit can't cope with the load, which I think spikes somewhere around 1300W. Aside from the surge when the compressor fires up it can cope just fine, it's just a bit tedious when all the lights flicker which is why I moved it to another circuit.