Water Purifier Philips WP 3890. Review on Phillips WP3890 Water Purifier

Research:

Since ours is soft water connection, hence we chose UV filteration over RO system. RO(Reverse Osmosis) is generally best suited for hard water connection. We studied and compared its stages of purification with Eureka Aquafresh. After understanding the meaning of the terms, we found that Philips has its own company UV lamp. Secondly, the purification stages seemed much better. Guess, still the quality might not differ much between the two products.

Second important thing offered by Philips is the independence provided to the consumer as far as cleaning and changing of candle is concerned.

The candle needs to be changed every 3000 liters and it gives a warning when 2700 liters are over. The best part about it is that at all times, only pure water will be released from the purifier, i.e. if 3000 liters are reached and the candle not changed, then the purifier stops releasing water, unlike Eureka which will still keep pouring impure water. Now some may find this inconvenient, but we found this a very good feature as a purifier must only provide pure water and not impure water.

The candles are now easily available in the market and can be seamlessly changed by the consumer. Each candle costs around 550/-. We roughly calculated in a year, we may need a change of one candle for a family of 3. Compare this with the cost of AMC with Eureka which is yearly around 990. Hence, this was another value for money factor in choosing Philips over Eureka.

Purchase:

We finally purchased the product from HomeTown Hyderabad, Punjagutta. We visited TMC Begumpet and Bajaj at Punjagutta, both offered the purifier at 7000, while HomeTown offered at 6495.

Installation:

We booked on Monday and were given an appointment on Wednesday evening and the same was confirmed via an SMS. The company claims to install the product within 48 hours of your booking.

One drawback is that they have only one Delhi based customer care number for whole of India. Thus, we need to be very specific while providing the address with landmarks as they are not familiar with other states geography.

Wednesday comes and no call from any technician to confirm the appointment or take directions to our house, which is generally the case. So, we call the customer care again and they confirm that a person will come as already confirmed. And as soon as we kept down the phone, we receive an SMS that our appointment is pushed to next Wednesday, that is a week later. Imagine our shock and dismay!

So, we call the customer care again and this time a new guy attends the call and says that our system confirms appointment of next wednesday as there are no available slots before that. We asked him how were we given an appointment earlier. And he answers blah! blah! blah to add to our consternation. Well, there is no point talking logic to customer care people as they are trained to answer only one thing for all questions, "We apologise for the inconvenience but there are no available slots!" At that time, we realised we will not get any meaningful response from them.

Then, we visited the Philips website and sent an email stating our complaint to them with very little hope of any action being taken.

To our surprise, the next day the grievance cell person calls up and explains the situation to us that there was a total goof up at the request handling and that we will see that the process is expedited.

Anyway, the call itself cooled us down that at least there is someone reading our complaints and taking them seriously. Well, that was not all. In an hour, we receive a call from a technician that he will be visiting our place for installation the same day.

He came 2 hours earlier than the appointment time and did a fine job at installation.

We just could not believe it. Thus, Philips did keep up its promise and the next day we received another call from them confirming about the installation. It was a follow-up call.

Now, you may call us lucky or whatever but guess it just showed better professionalism on the company's part.

Performance:

The product has been working fine till now. The installation was done neatly thus, no leakage or shoddy work whatsoever. Since its a new purchase, we got to see what happens when it reaches its 3000 liters limit.

Hope you get a similar service and a good product!

Continuation of good performance after four and a half months:

Last week of december,  we faced a funny problem. Whenever we would switch on the purifier, the water started flushing instead of getting purified. The purification process got by-passed and would flush the water out. Obviously, this water is not potable. We were wondering how can the purifier got faulty right after 4.5 months.

Finally, we registered a complaint with the customer care(Delhi) and immediately the service engineer was sent. Always remember to call the Delhi customer care number instead of the local city numbers for instant attention. Also, the complaint form of the website is more useful than the local city number. Atleast the hyderabad local number was not at all helpful, I am not sure about other cities.

The service engineer came the next day and explained the problem. Firstly, the purifier was not faulty! We had pressed the dispense water switch a little more harder or frequently than required. This hard pressing caused blockage of the system inside, which is behind the door when opened. As soon as the back door panel was opened the system reset immediately and functioned properly.

It was a big relief that our choice of the product was not wrong and also taught a lesson that "Not all switches need hard handling, a delicate push of the little finger is enough!"

Philips - kudos to your service!:)