Your Experience with Electronics Repair Costs

[2000SEARAY280SS]

What has been your Experience with Electronics Repair Costs?

My Northstar M121 has died and it looks like the display. I got a RMA and then I thought maybe I should ask about the repair costs. (Thanks to others who have posted their experiences)

The support center told me for 150$ they will bench test it and for a flat fee of $799 they will fix any thing that is wrong with it and give me a 90 day warranty.

I have been going back and forth on this and I think I have decided to get it repaired. I have several thousand dollars invested with the radar, maps, PC software, GPS, transducer, fuel sensors. I could upgrade for $3180 and all my old stuff would still work I think. Still checking into it.

Have you guys dealt with Garmin, Raymarine and others? Have you experienced a flat rate repair fee? If it really is a display then it would seem about right but if it was just the key pad or some power component then may be not so much. It's 3 months out of warranty.:smt021

 

[sbw1]

My experience with all kinds of electronics including products from Raymarine, Furuno, Datamarine and icom has been very good. They have either worked well right out of the box and have never failed or have had issues that showed up right away and were fixed under warranty. I lost my gps a few years back but that was due to a wire that vibrated off and this was was fixed for $90 which was the standard labor rate for an hour's worth of labor. Since it only took the tech 10 minutes to find the problem, he spent the balance of the hour teaching me the finer points of how things worked with my navigation equipment.

 

[northern]

I know nothing about boat electronics but have had experience with industrial electronics. The repair tech find the problem and put in a new module or board. The test equipment tends to lead him to the problem and replacement is put in. It is cheaper than have them repair a module or a board. Does not seem fair but that is how it is. Sort of like printers it is cheaper to buy a new printer than to get the toner chartrages. Based on the work done for me a new module or board should work well. You will feel done in when you pay your money and find it to a few minutes to fix your unit.

 

[David Morgan]

You tell them what the repair price is going to be.

Tell them that a new M121 unit costs around $1800 dollars and that almost half the cost to replace it is not worth the repair price. Tell them that Garmin is making excellent units now with very low failure rates and that you would rather put that same money into a Garmin unit (or whoever). The whole recreational marine electronics industry is hurting badly right now. In fact, Raymarine is close to bankruptcy.

I bet they offer to lower their repair price rather than have you switch to a competitors brand. If they do not want to play ball then switch to a different unit. A repair costing almost half the replacement cost on a unit that has failed once is really not worth repairing. And yes, Garmin right now really does make better stuff than Northstar.

 

[Go Aweigh2452]

All electronics are propritory and even newer units of the same company will/may not work or "play well" together. Had my old raytheon equipment upgraded almost at the price of new but I would have had to install a new Radome to make it work. If I was going that route, I would have switched to the new Garmin HD for really great prices.

 

[2000SEARAY280SS]

Thanks for all the great feed back. Those are kind of the things that have been going through my head also. Will the old stuff work with new stuff from the same vendor? Don't know. Replace a part that failed only to have it fail again bad on me. It just seems to me that if they had a graduated repair pricing scheme I would not feel bad about getting it repaired. It seems like maybe there are only a couple of parts in the thing and they are that expensive. The problem with going to a new vendor is that they own Lowrance and that would be the system I would want to go to. Never cared much for the GARMIN. Guess I will have to make a decision.

Do most places have a graduated repair scale or a one price fix all. Not sure if going to GARMIN would be any different for repairs.

 

[2000SEARAY280SS]

Well I have to give Northstar some good press. I called tech support to find out what other devices would work with my radar and fuel system transducer and gps antenna. They reported what would work and asked me to send in my invoice. After a day or two they gave me a call and said even though the two year warranty had expired they would cover the repair. I am expecting the unit back this week. Good on them.