Yearly Archives: 2007

Cancelling Our Bell Cell Phone Service

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The time has come for us to cancel our Bell cell phone service. We’ve been on a 3 year contract that is almost at the end now, just over a month left. The service has been pretty decent for the most part. We have good coverage in most areas (one of the reasons we switch to Bell for cell phones 3 years ago) and overall it’s been a relatively good experience.

Now, we’ve drastically changed our usage patterns over the three years and we no longer really need to have two phones. Our total usage is probably less than 10 minutes a month now as we only use the phones on a random occasion and all calls between the two phones are free. With the contract we were locked into having service on two phones with Bell. Unfortunately, that’s one aspect of the contracts that can be a pain in the ass. At $50 a month for the two, it’s been annoying since my phone has been dead most of the last 6 months as the battery is shot.

So I called Bell up the other day as I wanted to find out our actual contract expiry date. After getting that, I chatted with the agent for a bit and she said that it was possible to setup my cancel now, even though I still had more than 30 days (bnut less than 60) left in my contract. She said it wasn’t an issue and I wouldn’t have to pay any cancellation charges. Hey, fantastic. Of course, she couldn’t actually setup the cancel, I had to talk to a Custom Retention Representative. Oh yeah, woo-hoo! Deal time! ;)

Anyhoo, I waited on hold for a few minutes and got the second rep. She was quite pleasant and asked a few questions about why we wanted to cancel. Then she said she had an offer because we were such good customers (damn straight, other than my mortgage and car payments, Bell gets the most money out of me every month). So, she goes into her spiel. For only $35 a month she’ll give me basically the same service I have, plus call display on both phones. Oooo, Ahhh. That’s not a bad deal. $35 instead of $50. OK, keep talking but wait a sec, is that $35 for each cell phone or $35 for both? She goes on and explains the deal and I sort of tune out for a second but tune back in when she says: “…for a total of $54.40 a month before taxes”. Huh? Where did the $54.40 come from? I thought is was $35? Turns out it’s the $9+ system access fee, for each damn phone! I quickly ask why I would pay more than my current rate and she can only come up with “well, you’re getting call display for free”. Wait a sec, I don’t care if I get call display, I’m still paying more for service I don’t really want to keep.

Anyhoo, needless to say I ended up telling her, no, just setup my account cancellation. Uh-oh, nope, can’t do that. If I cancel now I’ll pay $299 cancellation fee for each phone because my contract hasn’t expired. WTF? Anyhoo, after I re-iterate what the first agent stated, she just keeps saying they can’t cancel more than 30 days before the end of the contract. Blah Blah Blah.

So, I said, fine, I’ll call back in 12 days and cancel (12 freaking days) to which she then asked, “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”. So I told her “Yes, you can set it up to cancel my service 43 days from today.” Nope, no such luck. She kept pleading that the system couldn’t do it, etc., etc.

One more reason on the growing list of why I am getting rid of Bell Canada services and taking my money elsewhere.

EcoWater Water Softener to Replace Kenmore Water Softener

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Since we had a ruptured resin tank on our Kenmore water softener, I started looking around at our options on how we could replace the unit. Well, most important before that was to fix the broken bypass valve that was leaking.

After pricing out the cost of repairing the Kenmore water softener, I realized that a new water softener was going to be a better idea. Repair was coming in to almost the same price as buying a new tank. There are a lot of water softeners out there to choose from and a lot of places you can buy. In the end, I was looking at about $1200 to buy a comparable water softener. On top of that, I’d have to get it installed and deal with removal of the old one.

So, what did I do? I opted to get a local Kemptville company to come in and install a new EcoWater water softener. Brian from B. Baird Water Conditioning came by and took a look at our problem. He offered to install a new bypass valve as a temporary solution to our leaking water. In the end, I just had him install a new two tank EcoWater water softener. The total cost was $1802 and included everything, even the taxes. Now, I’m sure I could have saved a bit if I had installed a softener myself but I’ve never done plumbing before and I didn’t really want to learn doing something that could potentially leave me without water in the house. In the end it was just much easier to pay a couple more bucks and have it done properly.

The best part about the EcoWater water softener? It has a lifetime warranty on the resin tank.

One More Satisfied Customer of the Ivany Free Relocation Program

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One more satisfied customer of the Ivany Free Relocation program. So far we have relocated three customers, all of whom were more than satisfied with the free service that we offer.

There’s nothing worse than having to rummage up some food once you get to your new home. That’s why the Ivany Free Relocation program includes a free meal once you accept the relocation offer and we even include food for when you reach your destination. Just enough to get you past that moving-in stage.

If you want to be relocated for free, just take us up on our offer. Once it has been determined that you are suitable for relocation, we’ll take care of everything else.

Ruptured Resin Tank on Kemore Water Softener

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The Boss came home yesterday to discover that there was a lot of water coming out of our Kenmore water softener onto the basement floor. Luckily, the majority of the water had made it into the sump hole and was being contained but it was past the point of overflowing. Water was starting to creep across the basement floor. The Boss quickly shut the bypass valve and the water stopped flowing out of the water softener.

It turns out that the resin tank (can alternatively be called a mineral tank on some models) has ruptured. The Kenmore water softener is a “tank in tank” design. Basically, the resin tank is inside the brine tank. The brine tank is where you add salt. The problem with a cracked resin tank is that all of the water for the house typically goes through the resin tank to get softened before going to any of the faucets. With a cracked resin tank, the water isn’t contained and is freely flowing out into the brine tank and onto the floor (in my case).

To top it all off, the silly little plastic bypass valve is leaking both internally and externally. I’ve got a constant fast drip coming from the valve outside of the tank. Internally the valve is not completely closed as there is still water flowing into the resin tank. This is causing major problems as I can’t leave my household water turned on. Right now I’ve got the whole house water turned off at the water meter until I can get at least the bypass valve replace.

This morning I called Sears Home Central and got pricing on the parts required to fix/replace the resin tank and associated parts. The grand total? Over $700 before tax and that’s just for the parts – installation would be extra and who knows what else might be broken now due to the high pressure water that was spraying the electrical control unit, etc.

Needless to say, I think I’m going to be buying a new water softener by the weekend. I quickly looked online at both sears.ca and sears.com to get an idea of what an equivalent softener would cost. I can definitely buy a new one for not much more than $700 + labour + tax. Thanks to the strong Canadian dollar I may be better of buying one from the US though. As with many products right now, the Canadian versions all appear to be much higher cost that their equivalent US version.

There are two other things I’m installing this weekend because of this. The first is a true copper bypass system. I’m going to put in a couple valves so that I can bypass the water softener completely without having to rely on a flimsy plastic valve. The second is a sump pump. I’ve never had a water problem before that required me having a sump pump but I don’t want to have to deal with another flood caused by a ruptured resin tank. I can only imagine how much water could have accumulated in the basement if we had been away for a couple days. *shudder*

Save Money When Buying From Amazon.com

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Do you want to save money when buying from Amazon.com? One of the easiest ways to save money when buying from Amazon.com is to make use of their 30 day post-order price guarantee. Basically, if the price of an item you have purchased is lowered within 30 days of the item being shipped to you, you quality for a refund of the difference.

There are some conditions you need to be aware of though. The main condition is that the items you purchase must be directly from Amazon.com and not a third party that is selling via the Amazon.com website. It is usually easy to tell if the item you are purchasing is coming directly from Amazon.com. The downside is that the Amazon.com pricing isn’t always the cheapest so you may pay a little more up front for the possibility of saving more in the end.

Recently I purchased a new camera from Amazon.com and I made sure to buy it directly from Amazon and not a third party. The reason for this was I actually had some Amazon.com gift card balance I wanted to use up so the final price to me wasn’t much more than the lowest price available at the time. The camera was approximately $278 at the time of my order. Within a week of the camera shipping, the price had dropped substantially – down to approximately $245. I hadn’t even taken the camera out of the box and I had already “over paid” by $30.

Now, the trick with claiming a refund is you need to know that your item has dropped in price. There are many automated ways to do this, just Google for “amazon price watch” or “amazon product watch” and you should find many. I opted for the slightly more work approach. After I completed my order I went back and added the exact same items to my cart. This way I could quickly login to Amazon.com and check my cart to see if there was a price change. Amazon.com is very good at placing a nice notification at the top of the page when you view your cart if there has been a price drop. They even include the dollar amounts for you.

If you have a price drop, send a message to the Amazon.com customer service. As long as it has been less than 30 days, when you sign into the customer service area, it should find your recent orders. Select the item(s) you want to claim a refund on and provide explicit detail in your email as to what you want. I found it was best to take the extra time and be explicit, including the exact dollar amount in refund you are requesting. If you don’t remember how much you originally paid, you can look-up your original order through the your account inteface.

The turn around time for a refund authorization is quite quick. I had both of mine within a day. The refund showed up on my credit card within a couple days.

Oh, and don’t think you can only get one refund. You can get a refund for any drop within 30 days. I actually got two refunds on my camera. The first was for the amount I mentioned above and the second was for a subsequent drop just before my 30 days expired. The second time I requested the refund, I was explicit about how much I had received already and how much additional I was looking for. Again, the turnaround time was very quick.

One last thing to note – I mention being explicit about what you are requesting. The reason for this is the first refund I received wasn’t actually correct and at the time I didn’t notice. It was off by a few dollars, and not in my favour. In my second request, I showed my math and how I got to the amount of refund I was looking for. This is probably a better approach if you only plan on submitting one refund request.

In the end, had I bought the camera from a third party through the Amazon.com site I would have paid almost $50 more for the camera. I wouldn’t have been able to get the benefit of the price drops that occurred after the camera was shipped to me. Sounds like a great way to save money when buying from Amazon.com.