Home warranty

[mmardini]

So we have owned our home now for 2 years and our home warranty is coming up for renewal. The first year we had a terrible company who were very hard to deal with, although they did replace quite a few things around the house including a brand new hot water heater. This past year we changed to a much better company, however we have only had to use them twice all year for minor things. We do have our pool equipment under warranty. We are trying to figure out if we should renew this year or just save the money ourselves for if something happens.
In your experiences....have the home warranty’s been worth it? The company wanted 880$ to renew and I talked them down to 715$ plus a 75$ service fee for every call for service. We have a brand new (single speed unfortunately, sellers put it in) pump, however the filter and heater are very old it seems....but they won’t die!!!

please share any experiences (positive or negative) with your own home warranties! Thank you!!!

 

[Dirk]

It really depends on the contract details. You need to watch out for what they say they can replace with. Like kind/value? Or "contractor grade?" Big difference if you have nice things in your home. I've been through two companies, both equally bad. Or rather the contractors they assign are. The warranty companies low-ball contractors, so decent contractors can't profit from warranty jobs. So you get lower-tier guys, that make up their profit margins by installing the cheapest parts and will often either short-cut the labor in some way, or pad the invoice with additional items, often unneeded, often over priced. It's kind of a racket. Like trying to sell me a $60 water heater stand (which wasn't covered) for $400. That kind of thing. Same guy wanted to charge me $100 to replace the water heater supply lines and another $100 for the gas line, neither covered, all about $15 each at Lowes.

I still carry policies on two rentals I own that are too far away for me to service myself. A policy on another rental that is 10 minutes away I cancelled, after too many shoddy jobs and a couple of blatant rip-offs (like to the tune of $1800, which I just happen to catch, when they tried to charge me for a Title 24 engineering fee that never actually occurred!). Who does that?

Now, I do a lot of my own repair work, so I can get away without a warranty. I write off the labor and I'm able to use quality materials, and I do high-quality work. For those that can't DIY, and have to hire out, the math is different.

On the flip side, I've had two rooftop HVAC units replaced under warranty, that were each about $8K. I had to pay about 25% for non-cover costs, but that saved me upwards of $12K. A heater replacement in another unit probably saved me $3K. So for big ticket items, they can make sense. For small items, you usually don't make out, and end up with low-quality.

Not sure how helpful that all is. Like I said, I'm ahead of the game so far, but I've cancelled two policies and kept two. I'm sort of playing the odds.

I pay less than $500 per year for 1300-ish square foot single-family homes. $880 sounds high, but maybe a chunk of that is the pool? I don't have a policy for my pool.

 

[AweForLife]

I just bought our home that came with a nice pool but the equipments are old. Our realtor paid for home warranty including pool coverage with Home Guard. The home warranty sent a repair company to check out leak at the booster pump and leak at old Pentax DE Filter. Turns out DE Filter disintegrating and needs replacement. The warranty approved the booster pump repair and okayed replacement to a Waterway Crystal 425 Cartridge Filter (seeing online material price of $800-$1,000 for this filter) at no out of pocket to us. They have not done the installation yet and I just posted on the forum to see if folks have experience with the Waterway cartridge filters if it's any good or should we go with a different brand and pay some out of pocket. Anyway, my realtor paid $650 for the entire warranty policy and with this replacement alone, it's paid for itself. We pay $75 for the service call.

 

[Texas Splash]

Like the others, we are pleased with our warranty provider. I did a LOT of research comparing about a dozen of the most popular companies in the country. I compared every factor I could think of like monthly amount, service call fee, and what is covered for each scenario (electrical, A/C, plumbing, appliances, etc). Our house has two A/C units and those get expensive really fast to service. Many companies do not cover all the integral parts of an A/C system or get ridiculous about Freon. That's just one example, so do your research. But in the past 3 years of so, we've had the A/C units repairs twice, got a new double oven, dishwasher computer board repair among others. If there's something small or reasonable for me to fix myself I will, but for the other stuff the warranty has been good to us. Don't let the commercials fool you. They don't show-up immediately unless perhaps you have medical justification or something, and sometimes you have to have more than one service call for an issue, but they can be beneficial.

 

[JJ_Tex]

I'm not sure any of them really make sense, but my brakes would fail if saw an executive from American Home Shield crossing the street.

We had a brand new baby in the August Texas heat and our AC went out. It was a circuit board that everyone local carried and could have installed that day, but American Home Shield forced us to go through their low cost supplier that had to wait for the part. After 3 days of waiting in a tent in our backyard and no ETA on the part, we just paid for it out of pocket and had it fixed that day. I got a good picture of my 1 month old daughter in her crib and the thermometer next to her reading 90 degrees and sent that to all of the local news stations. I did a phone interview with NBC and magically American Home Shield refunded our money for the part we paid for out of pocket.

 

[Dirk]

Mine will let me cash out instead of using their preferred vendor, if I want. It's never enough to pay for the repair, but it's not nothing...

 

[imrodee]

Realtors are well aware of warranty companies that try to skirt around the claims. We stop using them. Many warranty companies will try to replace (an example only) a Pentair pump with a generic pump. Also be aware that the installer is probably not your master plumber or electrician. When we moved out in the country, my favorite warranty company wouldn’t sell me a policy. The reason..? They didn’t have great installers here in my area they would stake their reputation on. I TOALLY respected that.

 

[mmardini]

Thank you all for the replies! We decided to renew our policy for another year and see how it goes. The company we are using has been great! We just haven’t used them enough to make us want to keep them. Here’s to hoping the pump or heater goes out this year!

 

[mmardini]

I'm not sure any of them really make sense, but my brakes would fail if saw an executive from American Home Shield crossing the street.

We had a brand new baby in the August Texas heat and our AC went out. It was a circuit board that everyone local carried and could have installed that day, but American Home Shield forced us to go through their low cost supplier that had to wait for the part. After 3 days of waiting in a tent in our backyard and no ETA on the part, we just paid for it out of pocket and had it fixed that day. I got a good picture of my 1 month old daughter in her crib and the thermometer next to her reading 90 degrees and sent that to all of the local news stations. I did a phone interview with NBC and magically American Home Shield refunded our money for the part we paid for out of pocket.

We had American home shield our first year. Never again. We are using old republic now and MUCH better