We wish to thank all of our new customers and those whom we have the pleasure to serve year upon year. Without you we would be nothing. We work very hard to try and make everyone happy all year long and always try and squeeze in those last minute repairs before everyone breaks for Christmas and New Year.

As always we spent our last week installing cookers that will be cooking family dinners, dishwashers that will allow you to visit with loved ones instead of washing up and we’ve also installed a few heating systems to keep your homes are warm and cosy.

So whether you be Christian or not, whether you celebrate the holiday or not and whether you believe in Sanata or not we hope that you all have a bit of time to reflect on the years highs and lows and make the New Year a happy and prosperous one.

All The Best From Canadian Dave and everyone at Advantis Home Maintenance

I hammer away relentlessly at cowboy builders, electricians, gas fitters and DIYers who attempt, and fail to work to CURRENT Building Regulations. So I have to applaud Plumbfix as well as Wolsely (Plumb Centre and Parts Centre) for their stand on supporting CORGI and CORGI Registered gas installers by limiting the sale of gas related products to the general public. It would be fantastic if more retailers got on the ball and stopped selling certain items such as gas hoses and other fittings used almost exclusively by gas fitters to anyone without an up-to-date CORGI card. continue

Well, Reality Check please!

As a small home maintenance business trying to conduct business in an age of more and more stealth taxes I am not a big supporter of grandiose plans to drive me further out of the market place. The current multi million pound propaganda drive to convince us on how useful congention charging will be to Manchester is a case in point. I personally feel something has to be done to ease congestion, well pollution actually, I’m not sure I agree that charging small businesses to enter the very city the public wish us to keep running is the way forward. continue

Well it looks like we’re going from the frying pan to the fire with the announcement that CORGI has lost in it’s bid to run the gas registration scheme from 2009 to 2014. The HSE has stated that the preferred bidder for the scheme will be CAPITA.

For those of you who don’t know CAPITA please allow me to introduce you. Here are a few links providing some interesting articles: CAPITA and Blackburn Council, CAPITA and the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), CAPITA and Housing Benifits Please feel free to GOOGLE the NET yourself for more articles that are sure to impress.

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We recently placed an ad for builders mate (a helper for one of our field operatives). The job would entail helping the maintenance engineer with day-to-day work in and around the Greater Manchester Area. We were not necessarily looking for any qualifications and hoped that we might get lucky and find someone interested enough to eventually work towards their trade papers.

Two very interesting things emerged from this experience. The first was that we received a great many applications from people who already had there gas papers (A.C.S.) and were looking to get their twenty job portfolio together so they could gain their CORGI/Gas Safe Register card. The opposite end of the scale was that we received many applications that were incomplete, displayed no real interest in working for us or anyone else for that matter. All but a few even mentioned plumbing, heating or electrical references in any context.

I have over the years had to hire and let staff go. It is not an easy job to do either and after having to sift through hundreds of applications or CVs you get fairly fquick at it. There are a few items that need to stand out for any application to make it past a set of experienced eyes.

To see what those items are stay tuned for part 2.

About two months ago Demon Thus made the business decision to cap my service due to what they said was a misuse of my privilages. See my original BLOG on the subject HERE. They can of course make any policy they want and customers like our business will either have to put up with it or move to another supplier. I decided to move away from them as they crippled my company without any way to sort out the problem. What doesn’t make sense is that when I phoned to get a MAC code which is a Migration Code that I can give to my new supplier, who will then move me to their company, I was messed about for about a week! continue

HAPPY NEW YEAR from everyone here at Advantis Home Maintenance. We are dedicated to doing our work to the highest standard without compromising quality or safety. Our BLOG has recently become a place that we can highlight poor workmanship and unsafe situations as well as a place to post the correct procedures for undertaking the type of work we do. Nobody is perfect and everybody makes mistakes at some time. We are not critical of certain small lapses in workmanship. We will never write up a missing earth shield on a double socket when the other twelve were done correctly. Simply put; if a contractor has the basic training and knowledge in the first place then working under the current building regulations, though a minefield at times can be accomplised.

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