Hi
Firstly apologies if this is the wrong forum but I couldn't find any forum for just bt lines.
I recently built a house next door to my old house.
I already had a BT broadband account on the old house and decided to try and get it transfered to my new house.
When i called BT they said i would first need to get a new BT line installed into the new house.
Unfortunately this is where my problems lie.
The builders for my new house added a temporary line that extended from my house to a point outside the house so it could be connected to my old houses phone line. (It was so i could use my old houses broadband in the new house while awaiting the new phone line to be installed.
BT sent an engineer down to install a new line to my new house at a rather expensive charge (over £100, i dont have the exact figures here but will update as soon as i have them).
The charge was for a new line to be run from their box to my new house.
Now the engineer who came did a shoddy job and rather than make a new line to my house they just connected the line to the temporary line my builders left outside the house.
I cannot confirm if the new line worked at all since none of us ever tried it out (I had moved back in the old house since we had to take out the connection from the old house to the new house before the engineer came).
When we finally went back to the new house I plugged in a new set of phones and found the line was not working.
I then called BT who sent another engineer out.
This is when we first found out that the engineer had connected the new line to the temporary line made by our builders.
Apparently the temporary line had a cut in it which meant the phones didnt work. I'm not sure how that happened but the temporary line was exposed and was not meant to be used by the new BT line at all anyway.
The new engineer then made the proper connection to my new house and took out the temporary line.
Now we were angry that the first engineer had done a lousy job and complained.
We were then rewarded with a huge bill of £290 from BT for call out charges for the second engineer.
The bill stated that the damage done to the new line BT added was not from normal wear and tear hence the charges.
However the damage was not on BTs part of the line, it was on a temporary line. A temporary line that BT was not meant to use at all.
We have since argued about this charge by complaining that if the first BT engineer had done a proper job then we would not have had these problems. In fact the first charge BT gave us was to install a 'new line' to the house, which their first engineer failed to do.
After many phone calls they reduced the price to just over £50 and since we were tired of the stress from this issue we decided to accept.
Today (a few months later) i have just recieved another letter from BT saying they have reviewed our case and determined that the charges were accurate and are demanding payment again.
Can anyone suggest what we can do?
It is extremely hard communicating with the people on the phone and most cases they just cut us off after saying they are tranferring us to a different department. I dont really want to go through all the hassle of calling them again.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks