Surewav, Inc. (A GE company)

This Service Contract came with my Optoma HD73. In fact, it was the deciding factor as I compared vendors. At the time, it was offered by Visual Apex.

It covered a term of 3 years beyond the manufacturers warranty and it covered pretty much anything that might was likely to bring the Optoma to its knees and make it unusable. It also included the bulb.

Since Visual Apex threw in an extra bulb, I didn't think I would ever get to the point of needing a warranty replacement, but when the original bulb went south, I realized that the warranty covered the original bulb and the extra bulb from Visual Apex wasn't in the equation, so I sought to get a new bulb under the contract.

In addition, a few months ago, the Optoma remote simply stopped working and when I called Optoma, they mentioned that their remotes sometimes just "stop working". In fact, Optoma recently reduced their own warranty coverage for their remotes from 1 year to 30 days.

Back to the bulb. I read the contract carefully and then called Surewav. Inc. They were pleasant and got to work on my claim quickly. They referred me to Global Tech Services to set up an appointment to deliver and install a new bulb. I pointed out that it seemed a waste of service time to deliver (I live 50 miles from their service provider) and install (I can do it with my eyes closed), but they told me that was the way they did it.

I called Global Tech Services and sought to arrange for the service call and they told me that they didn't do service calls for bulbs. I went back to Surewav and they seemed a bit stumped. They said they would call me back.

In the meantime, I called Visual Apex and told them my tale. They decided to intervene for me and called Surewav. They also told me that they would simply send me a bulb and then go to Surewav for coverage so I didn't have to stay caught in any confusion loop. They sent the bulb and later called me stating that Surewav was going to cover the bulb and revise their protocol for responding to bulb replacement.

Then came the remote. I called Surewav and they said that they did indeed cover the remote, but that I would have to call Global Tech Services to arrange for a service tech to come and "install the remote". I told them the story of the bulb and showed them the 8X10 color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and they told me I still had to pick up the garbage (apologies to Arlo Guthrie).

So I called Global Tech Services and they told me they didn't scheduled service calls to deliver remotes and, that they didn't have any Optoma remotes anyway. Back to Visual Apex.

I called V/A and they did pretty much the same thing that they did for the bulb. In the end, I got everything I was entitled to under the terms of the extended warranty. The process was a bit convoluted, though.

If there is a lesson here, it's develop a good relationship with whoever sold you the extended warranty in the first place.