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David
 
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I'm the unfortunate owner of a Sharp R-653M microwave oven which cost me

80
quid.

Last year I switched it off for two weeks to go on holiday,and when I got
back home and switched it on again,the LCD display didn't work correctly,
though the machine did function if you pressed the right buttons and

ignored
the jumbled up display. The machine was 15 months old at the time, and

after
complaining to Sharp UK I eventually managed to wring a free repair out of
them. The repair took six weeks as the repairer said that there was a
shortage of the displaysas Sharp had been having problems with them and

was
unofficially extending the guarantee period to 18 monhs or so.

I've just got back from this years two week holiday, and guess what - the
bloody LCD display has packed up again! What is it with these displays

that
they fail while they're not actually switched on!!!

I think this *MUST* be a design fault, and I don't want Sharp to get away
with it, so before I complain to them yet again, does anyone have any info

I
can use as ammo?

Thanks in advance


In my previous job (just been made redundant), one of the products I
repaired were microwaves, and I did have to change the displays
occasionally. Some of them were easy, as they were plug in, the others had
to be wired to the control board which always meant replacing the two.

We did sell them by the bucket load, and the numbers we saw to repair were
not excessive. I can't give you any statistics unfortunately. We did not
experience any problems in getting spares.

Classifying something as a design fault is difficult. For that to be the
case, the manufacturer would have to have a higher failure rate than normal
for specific faults on that product. I don't personally believe that this
was our experience with these. Even though I did fix a few, the number
involved didn't warrant keeping the parts in stock. Therefore the failure
rate of these is probably not particularly high.

In my experience, when manufacturers have a problem, they usually look upon
customers complaints in a favourable way if out of warranty - often agreeing
to provide the spares for free, and paying the retailer for fitting. We are
talking about major brands here of course.

Bearing in mind that you have personally had it go twice now, both under the
same circumstances, their customer service department might be willing to
help, or maybe the retailer you got it from. The usual practice in these
disputes with most manufacturers was for them to provide the spares free,
but the customer would have to pay to have them fitted. However, a lot of
this depended on if the customer shouted or not, and if the person on the
end of the shouting felt sympathetic with the customer, or wanted to take
revenge for being shouted at!!

Good luck with it.