Last week I helped move my uncle into his new apartment. He moved from kirkhallam in Derbyshire down to Stapleford in Nottinghamshire and if anyone tells you that moving is the most stressful activity you can do try doing it with ageing family! Anyway, all went reasonably according to plan until the morning of the move when I realised that my uncle’s stairlift was still in place (the house had to be returned to ‘normal’ use). However, a quick call to my sister revealed that the men from the stairlift company were coming at ten. Phew! By ten-thirty the stairway was back to its pre-lift glory.
I was less than impressed a few days later when I discovered that my uncle did not get a single penny back for his stairlift which was just a few months old. “Flaming-heck,” thought I, “the b******s were quick enough to get the bloody thing in.” The flashy slicked-back salesman with slicked-back hair and a slicked-back name had swept in oozing meretricious charm and false promises. He was called Carl Pring or something similarly slicked-back (maybe Brent Clever or Steve Silverback) and he insisted that should my uncle ever need to get rid of the device he’d easily get a quick resale. Yeah, right…
The truth of the matter was that my uncle spent a lot of bucks on a device that some four months later he didn’t need. I know, you can argue that moving into a flat was my uncles decision and no manufacturer ever wants to buy their stuff back once sold. Nevertheless it was implied that a resale could be achieved without too much fuss. And this was not the case.
So, I offer this story as a cautionary tale to those of you contemplating the installation of one of these gadgets. The stair lift company, whom I won’t name but I can tell you that from them ‘mighty oaks do grow’, directed our attention to a tiny piece of small print. So small was this small print only a creature with the visual acuity of an eagle would have spotted it. Caveat emptor, I guess. The small print basically sayeth this: that while they’d take the thing away, you can expect to get bugger all for it! They do not buy back - at all.
I laughed a bitter little laugh of irony when I went onto the company’s website, for there amongst the frequently asked questions is: “How much does it cost to run?” Ooh, very little, almost less than your average Christmas tree fairy light if the blurb is to be believed. We’re presented with the following table of comparisons:
‘Calculations are based on the appliance running on 240v.
60w Incandescent Bulb 250 mA
12w Eco Bulb 50 mA
Stairlift 90mA (Trickle Charge) to 420mA (Full Charge)’
So, running costs are somewhere between a low-energy bulb and an old-fashioned gas-guzzling bulb. Hmmm, let’s see, that’s probably about a tenth of one penny per trip. I compared these with how much the running costs have been for my uncle. Right, here are my calculations for his stairlift that cost him over a grand.
He experienced his first elevation on 20th April and made his final descent on 3rd September (that’s 136 days) and on average made three trips up and down per day (he needed it to get upstairs from his downstairs bed to the bathroom). So by my reckoning that’s 408 round trips or 816 single journeys. That works out at £2.45 folks, for every trip. And as ‘what goes up must come down’ that’s £4.90 for every return trip to the loo! Blimey, you can get a East Midlands Daysaver for £4.20 and travel the length and breadth of Derby! At that price travelling to a meet would cost you millions!
The moral of this story is always read all of the small print. Okay folks, I’ve just noticed on the stair lift website that an ‘as new’ model that looks remarkable like my uncles is on offer for nine, nine, five… Hmmm, strange that...
No takers on a meet? Will try to get you going next year till next time ,
Toodle pip Magic
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