Manufacturer Contact

Can I contact the manufacturer myself about a denied warranty claim?

When a manufacturer denies covering a repair under warranty, customers sometimes ask if they can contact the manufacturer themselves. It depends on the manufacturer and how hard they want to be to reach. If you have the time, then there is no harm in trying. We stand ready to perform work that they authorize. Some contact numbers are listed at the bottom of this page.

First, it may help to understand the warranty process.

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Warranty Words vs Actions: The way most power equipment warranties are written, they state that they cover defects in materials & workmanship found during a certain period of time. In which case, if no such defect is found, the manufacturer can essentially say, you just broke it, or it just wore out, but that there was no defect in material or workmanship that caused the failure. Fortunately, the actions of most manufacturers exceed this low bar of warranty wording. In fact, they more often take an approach that if the customer’s actions or inactions did not likely cause the failure, then they provide a remedy during the warranty period, even when no specific defect is found. "Inaction" meaning not maintaining the machine and the materials it naturally consumes. It needs fresh fuel, oil changes, filters, belts, tires, etc. Maintenance is a basic necessity that is the equipment owner's responsibility.

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The easy cases: There are some types of failures that manufacturers will typically pay to be repaired without any questions. That is usually because there is not much chance the customer could have done anything to cause these items to fail. Examples would include things like pulleys, sealed bearings, cables & items whose premature failure is just not apt to be caused by abuse or lack of maintenance. 

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The conditional cases: Sometimes, the manufacturer wants evidence that the customer performed scheduled maintenance that could have helped prevent the failure. A good example of this is a failed hydrostatic transmission. The manufacturer will typically ask for receipts or service records showing that scheduled maintenance was performed. 

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The usually impossible cases: Sometimes, the circumstances clearly point to a failure being caused by abuse or lack of maintenance. The most common example of this is failed carburetors. Manufacturing defects in carburetors are extremely rare, and poor fuel maintenance by equipment owners is very common. Stale fuel corrodes and clogs carburetors. Manufacturers recommend that gasoline be consumed (burned) within 30 days of purchase from the gas station, and if not, then to add fuel stabilizer to the stored fuel. This direction is often not followed and is the routine cause of carburetor failure. For these reasons, it is extremely unusual to get manufacturer authorization to replace a carburetor, because the odds are overwhelming that the issue was caused by the user’s lack of fuel maintenance and had nothing to do with manufacturing.

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The Dealer / Service center: We are the eyes and hands of the manufacturer, to gather the information they need, and to perform repairs that they authorize. The manufacturer asks us questions about the equipment and may have us send them pictures, sometimes using a scope to take pictures inside the combustion cylinder, crank case, fuel tank or wherever may be relevant to the failure.

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Does the Dealer / Service center have to pay for warranty parts & service? If we are able to find a failure that is covered by warranty, then the manufacturer will pay us for our time and materials. If we find nothing covered by warranty, then the manufacturer pays us nothing for the time spent. We are very motivated to get warranty work approved for some good reasons: 1) we want happy customers. 2) It is how we get paid by the manufacturer. 3) time spent by our technicians that is not paid for by the manufacturer is charged to the equipment owner. 

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Are warranty decisions made by the Dealer / Service center? On occasion, we will hear from customers that they were told by a manufacturer that warranty decisions are made at the servicing dealer. This is misleading. What they mean is that they have staff who will make a decision based on the information they gather through the dealer. They may have pre-approved solutions for some common problems, which allows us to repair the unit and send them the bill without having to ask for permission. But we assure you, no manufacturer gives us a blank signed check to do whatever it takes to resolve all failures.

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Will it make a difference if I go to a different Service center? When we request warranty service approval, that typically includes us providing the model and serial number of the unit to the manufacturer. So if a second service center makes a request on the same unit, then an organized claims department will be able to see that they have already denied the request and why. So unless there is new information, the decision probably won’t change.

If we have informed you that the manufacturer denied warranty coverage for your equipment’s failure, and you find this to be unreasonable, then we welcome you to reach out to the manufacturer to express your dissatisfaction to them, and to request that they change their decision. 

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Below are contact numbers for some of the manufacturers we serve:

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