When claiming Sears ' water heater warranty (after the first year that covers labor), Sears will not honor it without sending a technician to check this is the case, and charge the customer $79 (plus tax) for the visit, regardless if the problem was indeed a faulty product. This sum is not even deductible if you decide to have sears do the exchange (don't, they are expensive).
Practically this means that in order for Sears to honor the warranty, the customer needs to pay an additional $79 tax.
Nowhere in the warranty or anywhere it states that there is an additional cost in order to get the warranty honored by sears. There is no other option - they will not take the word of a certified plumber, nor accept the faulty water heater delivered to the store (they want to inspect it in place, still installed).in my case, there was no technician available to do this until the next day's afternoon, so I couldn't get it fixed. The tech arrived after 4pm, bent down a bit to look at the bottom of the water heater, said "yep, it's broken" and charged me. Then Sears wanted two hours (!!!) to "process it and notify the store". Only being very loud at that point shortened it to about an hour. Luckily my plumber was willing to do this late, and a day and a half later after spending $79 tax ($84.53) and hours on the phone, I got hot water again at 7:30pm.
For some more details you can check my blog post at www.OpineAway.com.
Sears gave me the worst customer service, charged me for no reason, and instead of fixing this withing a couple of hours, I was for almost two days without hot water.
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