Yes. The "Sale of Goods Act" is your friend and is not limited to any warranty period. Contact the retailer (not the manufacturer) again in writing and tell them you expect a repair or replacement free of charge. You can download sample letters from many web sites such as consumer direct.
How much did they cost and did you buy them with a credit card?
That makes little sense to me. The warranty is nothing to so with the SOGA and it is irrelevent if it did not comply with the SOGA.
Any warranty is in addition to your statutory rights and the manufacturer is quite entitled to put lots of T&Cs on the warranty.
Although you *can* claim on a warranty it rarely makes sense to do so.
I sucks but that's the law. The only chance you would have had is if you paid by credit, which would have made the creditor jointly liable under the Consumer Credit Act.
Personally I think the law should be changed to make the manufacturer have /some/ liability for the products they make.
Well, the manufacturer *does* have liability, but it would be to the supplier rather than to the end customer. So normally you would claim against the supplier, who in turn would have some recourse to the manufacturer or wholesaler as the case may be.
One thing though. It seems to me illogical that the supplier could evade liability simply by ceasing trading. Unless he's actually gone bankrupt, his liability should be unaffected.
In my case the supplier (small heating engineers) just closed down and moved away with no way of tracing him :-( I did ask around among other tradesmen and local merchants, but no one knew where he had gone. There was also no knowledge locally of him leaving with unfinished work or unpaid debts. I did bump into the young lad that had worked for him some months later, but all he knew was that he was moving "back down south" as the work paid better there.
Despite my boiler problem it was a shame he left as he had a reputation for doing very good work and keeping to schedule. I had a motorised valve fail about three months after he did the work. I phoned him, he came that evening and replaced the motor head FOC, and it wasn't even part of the work he did on the system.
So my advise is that if you employ a small firm, no matter how good their reputation. Buy the Boiler (or any other big things) yourself.
Mike
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The company was trying to override SoGA by insisting that I had to deal direct with their supplier and not them using their 'warranty' document (and in fact still do) - I am fully aware of the difference between a warranty and SoGA.
A manufacturers warranty can be next to useless as they determine all the terms and conditions for its use - and they can even refuse to supply any warranty with a product or service.
Cash
You can expect a repair "free of charge" (if there is a latent defect in the item caused by manufacture or materials) [1], but any replacement need not be a brand spanking new one - and they can insist that the item is examined before they even get to that stage.
There is a great deal of misinformation floating about regarding the Sale of Goods Act and the Distance Selling regulations both by the vendors and the buyers and its amazing how each 'camp' tries to 'bend' the act to suit themselves without really having any knowledge about it.
All great fun standing there trying to explain to a vendor or their assistants the intricacies of SoGA, while they keep repeating the mantra that "head off says it cannot be done that way" etc - I'm sure that you have been there.
[1] It's amazing how many people try and get a replacement when they have themselves physically damaged the item through abuse etc.Cash
Equally common is for the vendor to claim the user has trashed an item when they haven't.
Astracast claim that our sink was damaged by us. The heaviest thing that's been in it was a baby of less than a year old. They don't weigh enough to damage a properly made sink.
Should have gone to cetltd.com
(no connection except as a customer)
Andy
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