Technician Invoice - am I being charged a fair price?

[jaycee]

Hi Everyone,

I would appreciate some advice on an invoice I've received from a technician that recently came to my house earlier this week.

I recently moved into a house which came with 6-8 Hikvision cameras. The technician spent two hours at my house and sent me an invoice for $200.00.

My issue is, I dont feel he actually did anything or solved two issues I was having:
1. Not able to decouple the NVR from the previous owner
2. Getting the Hikvision doorbell/intercom system to work

The technician cut a hole in my wall and determined that there wasnt a network cable running from the doorbell to the tablet (this took close to an hour)

In terms of the NVR, the technician spent an hour on this.. He claimed that he updated the NVR from 2018 to 2020. The options he gave me from there were to 1. Contact the old owner to unbind ; 2. Take the NVR to a service branch to upgrade. The actual steps to get to this point was to suggest I connect the system to the internet, move the 4G modem to the comms cabinet. This took just over an hour to get to this point.

Would an experienced technician take an hour to upgrade the firmware? Because at that point, it should have been clear that there was nothing more he could do and that I would need to contact the previous owner to unbind the NVR.

 

[JB1970]

Hi Everyone,

I would appreciate some advice on an invoice I've received from a technician that recently came to my house earlier this week.

I recently moved into a house which came with 6-8 Hikvision cameras. The technician spent two hours at my house and sent me an invoice for $200.00.

My issue is, I dont feel he actually did anything or solved two issues I was having:
1. Not able to decouple the NVR from the previous owner
2. Getting the Hikvision doorbell/intercom system to work

The technician cut a hole in my wall and determined that there wasnt a network cable running from the doorbell to the tablet (this took close to an hour)

In terms of the NVR, the technician spent an hour on this.. He claimed that he updated the NVR from 2018 to 2020. The options he gave me from there were to 1. Contact the old owner to unbind ; 2. Take the NVR to a service branch to upgrade. The actual steps to get to this point was to suggest I connect the system to the internet, move the 4G modem to the comms cabinet. This took just over an hour to get to this point.

Would an experienced technician take an hour to upgrade the firmware? Because at that point, it should have been clear that there was nothing more he could do and that I would need to contact the previous owner to unbind the NVR.

It's a difficult one as I don't know what rates are charged in the US. I'd ask:

1 - did you explain the issues you were having prior to the engineer attending? If he was just presented with a list of problems on arrival then that wouldn't help.
2 - Were costs discussed before agreeing the visit. Most trades charge a minimum callout fee for good reason. There are occasions when I could go to a site and identify an issue that needed additional parts or time. If at that point, the customer isn't prepared to pay for the work required, I still need to be paid for my time to diagnose and get to that point.

A single firmware upgrade does not take very long. However if I were to have to bring 6 - 8 cameras and an NVR up to date by two years then an hour is not long at all. I'd have to identify and download the files required for each camera/NVR. They would likely need to be updated through several interim updates rather than just jumping to the latest version. 8 cameras and one NVR could consist of 27 individual updates.

 

[jaycee]

Thanks for that. A measured and reasonable response