Due to a few recent incidents that have occurred at the dealership I thought I would just give everyone a bit of a heads up as to why it is important to have a caravan serviced.
There seams to be a few reasons why customers think it is okay not to have an annual service done on their pride and joy. Where I can agree that the reasons may seam valid I wanted to point out some of the pit falls so that an informed decision can be made.
The first and probably the main reason for customers not having a service is that they have not used the caravan much or at all since the last service.
This may mean that the brake system will not need adjusting again and the likelihood of having a gas leak or an electrical problem is low, it will not guard against an ongoing water ingress problem getting worse.
A water ingress problem could have started in the previous year and skipping a service will mean that you could miss the opportunity to stop it before it has the chance to do any significant damage.
We have had an instance recently where I had to inform a customer that the caravan had three thousand pounds worth of water ingress only to find out that a service had been missed the previous year so a small water ingress issue had the time to get a lot worse.
The other reason is because on the face of it we charge a good chunk of money and sometimes to the customer it looks like we don't do a lot and they think they can do the work themselves.
Again, this may seam to be the case, but the money paid to the dealer covers much more that just the amount of time it takes to do the service. We have experience and have invested time and money into training and acquiring the correct tools to carry out the work, and more importantly, if anything were to go wrong in the future as the service was done buy a professional company, you have a legal leg to stand on..
But the most damaging time to not keep your service record up to date is when the caravan still has manufactures warrantee to run.
They have a right to refuse any subsequent claims after a service has been missed, in most cases that won't happen unless the lack of the service has directly contributed to the claim being more costly, or more than one service has been missed, but it isn't worth the risk as we have seen some serious issues with materials a few years down the line who's repair can run into the thousands.
So my advice would be, have a service once a year, or at least have a water ingress check to avoid a costly bill later down the line.
