As I wrote earlier, the Furuno TZT14 MFD has an issue with serious delamination of the screen and we have been in touch with Furuno to negotiate an exchange under the warranty. This is not quite as simple as it should
be – of course we purchased the unit from a bulk distributor instead of directly from Furuno – and we installed it ourselves and didn’t have it done by a qualified Furuno installer. In addition, the unit is outside of the UK where it was purchased – all of which made the situation more complicated. Of course Furuno have “worldwide warranty” – but there are lots of conditions attached to this.
First of all, for the warranty to be valid, an approved Furuno installer has to commission the system – so this is the first step. After that, the unit will be replaced under warranty – however, there are no units of this type available in Croatia so we need to wait until one can be shipped from the UK. The approved Furuno installers generally work on large ship systems as this type of unit is not common on a small leisure boat, let alone a sailboat so the whole process has taken some time to arrange. Although they haven’t actually SAID it, Furuno are implying that the problem has been caused by us as we can’t possibly have properly installed the equipment.
On 1st August, the local Furuno technician came on board – we had gone specifically to Opatija as this is the only installer in the area. I have to say he did an excellent job of commissioning the system checking out all the cabling from end to end as well as the configuration of the all the devices and the integration of the network in terms of how they all communicated with each other. The engineer was impressed with the installation and offered Ed a job working for them! He made some tweaks to the system which improved the integration – especially in terms of calibrating the digital radar and improving the setup of the PC based Maxsea system.
We took the boat out for a sea-trial to test everything worked and to complete the calibration – he also gave us a lot of useful tips about using the digital radar to it’s best advantage and we discovered how much more powerful and accurate it is than our old Raymarine one on the motorboat!
We received our commissioning report in which it was confirmed the fault was not down to a wrong installation – and a new TZT unit has been ordered. When it arrives, the engineer will come back to wherever we are (as long as it is in Northern Croatia!) to complete the exchange. This is where the other condition of the worldwide warranty comes in to play ….. the warranty covers the labour and the equipment but does NOT cover travel time or costs to the location as they will only cover one hour travel time! So we will be getting a bill for this when the unit is finally exchanged. Mmmmm.