Strathead
Senior Member
- Location
- Ocala, Florida, USA
- Occupation
- Electrician/Estimator/Project Manager/Superintendent
Our Company has 6 service trucks. The Service Manager can not be on all of them all the time. We had an incident recently. Residential service call. Lights dimming when other lights are turned on. The service truck spent several hours on site. Our policy is a 2 man truck for safety reasons. At some point during the call, the owner mentioned that the next door neighbor had a meter change by the Power Company just prior to the problem (don't know exactly when this occurred). The problem ended up being a loose (not open) neutral at the Power Company transformer. Long story short, lack of strong theory knowledge caused the service guys to check several different things and chase down dead ends. Since the service department works on time and material, what would you do about billing? My assesment is that Anything over 3 hours to solve the problem might be too much, anything under 1.5 hours would probably be either lucky, experienced or darn good. Do you tell your Boss (owner) he needs to eat the difference? Do you tell your customer, it is what it is? How do you train your guys to do better? Do you set a limit on time spent before "punting". How do you prepare you customer for potential long length troubleshooting.