Posted By Sk1dm4rk on 08/29/2008 3:56 PM
Not apples to apples, I know, but I purchased an extended warranty on my FHP AquariusII that I had installed in early July. The original period was 5 years, I got an additional 5 years for $600.
Your warranty is proably just an extension on the equipment, not the equipment/labor warranty, however it's very unusual for a vendor to offer a extended warranty that includes labor. My guess would be that the warranty is offered by the contractor, not the manufacture. The contractor pays $600 to climatemaster to extend the warranty on the equipment and the contractor pockets the different.
Extended warranties are a major money maker for stores, they offer it with everything, its rare they have to honor it. If items fails within the warranty period often the store can get the manufacture to cover the repairs with the standard "FREE" Warranty that all products have. And it's uncommon for people to collect on an extended warranty, most of the time the electronic gadget that warranty was covering has been replaced with something newer or it breaks, but they forget they purchased it in the first place. Come on, how many people save important paper work like warranties? I would guess not many. It's pure profit for stores.
$3,500 does sound really high, Lets take a minute to puzzle this out, If installation cost $25k and they are charging you $3,500 to extend the warranty, that would mean that they expect roughly one out of 7 installs to require some type of service within the specified period. That's an awfully high failure rate, it's highly unlikely that they have more than a 5% failure rate, for 10 year old systems.
If your still concerned about your system failing, perhaps you should consider a house warranty, they generally run from $250 to $600 a year and cover a lot more than just the Geo system, $3500 spent on a house warranty can buy you from anywhere from 5 to 14 years coverage. But do some research first, insurance companies are not all the same.