What a 72-hour fault protocol looks like in practice

Every equipment supplier offers a warranty. Very few can tell you who picks up the phone at seven on a Sunday morning, or which parts are on the shelf when they do.

What the warranty actually says

Every unit we ship carries a twelve-month warranty from the completion of installation. Under normal use, non-human damage is repaired or replaced at our cost. That is the standard promise, and it is worth exactly as much as the response behind it.

The three tiers

1. Year one. Parts and labour covered. Faults logged, diagnosed and closed.
2. Year two onward. Labour covered by KeMuHua; replacement parts charged at cost, with no margin added and no minimum order.
3. Within two years of expiry. Repairs billed at half rate, parts at cost.

Installation is where service starts

Most of the faults we are called to are installation faults wearing a product's clothes: a fan mounted out of plumb, a pen frame anchored to a slab that was never levelled, a slat run laid without expansion allowance.

That is why installation is done by our own people — technicians, team leads and project managers trained inside the company, most of them with more than a decade on site. A subcontractor is paid to finish; an employee is paid to come back.

What the farm should have ready

Response time is decided as much by the caller as by the supplier. A fault report with these four things in it can be diagnosed on the first call instead of the third:

• The serial or batch number from the unit's plate.
• Two photographs — one wide, one close.
• The date the unit went into service, and what changed on site in the days before the fault.
• What the system was doing at the time: load, temperature, feed line state.

The clock starts when the phone is answered, not when the email is read.

Why we publish the numbers

Twenty-four hours and seventy-two hours are not marketing figures. They are the operating targets our service teams are measured against, and publishing them is a way of making ourselves accountable to a number a customer can hold us to.

If a fault cannot be cleared in seventy-two hours, the protocol requires a written plan with a date — not a promise to look into it.