Warranty and recall checks at intake: model numbers, Magnuson-Moss, CPSC.

If the machine is still under the manufacturer's written warranty, the manufacturer may repair it under its own terms. If the household bought a service contract or a home warranty, that contract's own terms, set by the company that sold it, govern how a covered repair is handled. If the model is under recall, the household should hear the official remedy from the notice itself. The office's job at intake is to find out which of these applies and put it in front of the technician and the owner before the visit is booked.

This guide sets out that check for a US appliance repair office. A Bot can do the reading and prepare a note; the owner and the warrantor decide, and nobody tells a household it is covered.

The FTC's Businessperson's Guide to Federal Warranty Law, checked on 15 October 2026, draws a line the intake note should keep. A warranty comes with the product as part of its price; a service contract is optional and bought separately, for an extra charge. The note records which of the two the customer described.

A warranty lookup and a recall search both need the exact model number. CPSC's notice for LG's electric range recall, checked on 15 October 2026, tells owners the model number is on the range, inside the oven door or in the storage drawer at the bottom of the oven. Other appliances carry their plates elsewhere, so the intake request names the places the owner's own guide lists for that kind of machine.

The money page covers plate-photo transcription. Here one rule is enough: no lookup runs on a model number a person has not confirmed against the photo, because a match against a guessed suffix looks authoritative and is not.

The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act is the US federal law on written warranties for consumer products. The FTC's guidance, checked on 15 October 2026, describes its repair rules like this. A warrantor generally cannot make coverage depend on the customer using a particular brand of part or a particular company's service, and it cannot void a warranty or deny coverage solely because the customer used a part made by someone else or had an unauthorized party do the work. There are two exceptions: the warrantor supplies the part or service free, or the FTC grants a waiver after the warrantor shows the product works properly only with that part or service and that the waiver is in the public interest. A warrantor may still deny coverage for defects or damage that the outside part or service caused.

That last clause is why the intake note never tells a household that choosing an independent shop cannot affect its warranty. The law protects the warranty from being voided for the choice alone, not from a claim that the repair caused damage. The FTC's guide also limits the Act's reach: it applies to written warranties, not oral promises, and to consumer products normally used for personal, family or household purposes.

Neither the note nor the owner offers legal advice here. A coverage dispute is between the household and the warrantor; the owner suggests the customer contact the warrantor, and takes any question about the company's own position to a lawyer in its state.

Grok Bot, per its documentation, gives each Bot a persistent cloud computer with a browser that can use many sites without a connector, though a site can block automation or need a human step. CPSC's Recalls & Product Safety Warnings page, checked on 15 October 2026, lists recalls and safety warnings, filters them by date, hazard and product category, and lets the results be downloaded as a CSV file. In this design a Coverage Bot, which the owner creates for the check, works through that listing for the appliance's brand and product type, opens each candidate notice and compares the confirmed model number with the models it names. It records the notice's link and date, and whether the model matched.

The LG notice shows what gets relayed. CPSC's recall 25-126 of 6 February 2025 covers about 500,000 LG electric ranges whose front-mounted knobs can be turned on by accidental contact from people or pets, creating a fire hazard. The remedy is a repair: owners can request a free warning sticker with placement instructions and learn to use the range's Control Lock or Lock Out feature.

The note carries that remedy as the notice states it, with the link. It does not say whether the household's fault has anything to do with the recall, because that is the technician's diagnosis, and the owner decides how the household hears about it, pointing to the contact routes the notice gives. SaferProducts.gov, which CPSC also runs, publishes reports of harm submitted by the public; a report there is not a recall, and the note never presents one as if it were.

Based on the Grok Bot documentation at docs.x.ai as checked on 15 October 2026. The trade examples are Aevrion's illustrations, not documented Grok Bot use cases. Aevrion Ops is an independent consultancy. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or a partner of xAI, SpaceXSI or Cursor. Grok Bot is named here only to describe it.

The documentation suggests asking a Bot for work in a form a person can review, such as a short recommendation followed by its evidence; this note is one. It also tells users not to treat what a Bot remembers as the authoritative record, so every note starts from a fresh reading of the warranty document and a fresh recall search.

• MODEL AND SERIAL

  As confirmed against the plate photo, with the photo linked.

• PURCHASE DATE

  As the customer gave it, marked as the customer's statement, with whether proof of purchase was supplied.

• WARRANTY TEXT

  The manufacturer's warranty for that brand from the owner's own document library, quoted with its source rather than summarized.

• CONTRACT

  Any service contract or home warranty the customer named, and its seller, as stated.

• RECALL RESULT

  The matched notice and its remedy as written, or no match, with the search date.

• OPEN QUESTIONS

  What the Bot could not confirm, kept apart from what it found.

• READERS

  The technician and the owner. The note is never sent to the household as written.

A check and a diagnosis can end in a replacement, with the company asked to take the old refrigerator away. EPA's safe disposal requirements under Section 608, checked on 15 October 2026, treat household refrigerators and freezers as equipment that enters the waste stream with its refrigerant charge intact. The final person in the disposal chain, such as a scrap metal recycler or a landfill owner, is responsible for making sure the refrigerant is recovered before final disposal.

If that final disposer accepts an appliance whose refrigerant has already been removed, it must keep a signed statement from whoever delivered it, giving the name and address of the person who recovered the refrigerant and the date. A contract with a regular commercial supplier can take the statement's place, but EPA says that route does not suit infrequent suppliers, and it does not accept a sticker as proof. A repair company that recovers the refrigerant before hauling a unit away should therefore be ready to supply that statement: who recovered it, their address, and when.

A Bot can draft that record from the technician's notes for the owner to check and file. The junk removal guide in this series looks at the same rule from the hauler's side.

Once the check works by hand, it can run as a routine owned by the Coverage Bot: each weekday evening, read the next day's bookings, run the recall search and assemble a note for each confirmed model number. The bookings come from a list the owner keeps in the shared workspace, or from scheduling software through a custom integration, where its vendor's API or terms allow one and once tested. Scheduled runs sit at least five minutes apart, and when a routine is created the documentation has the owner confirm, among other things, its approval boundary and what it should do when a source is missing.

The documentation describes no automatic retry and no failure alert. A booking without a note in the morning means a run failed or skipped it, so the owner opens the routine's history, and the technician goes out assuming nothing about coverage rather than relying on an old answer. The reliable-workflows pillar covers routine design.

The readiness assessment is free and ungated. It rates a single workflow on twelve fixed dimensions and gives its result immediately, naming the blockers and the step it recommends. Score the coverage check at intake. If the rule for when a household is pointed to its warrantor exists only in the owner's head, rule clarity will score low, and a low score there caps the overall result. Writing that rule down is the owner's first piece of work. A scoping conversation with Aevrion Ops can follow once it exists, covering the Coverage Bot, the evening routine and any custom integration with your booking system, if the vendor's API or terms allow it and after testing.

1. Before a visit, the office checks whether a manufacturer's warranty, a service contract or a recall already owns the repair.
2. Every lookup runs on a model number a person has confirmed against the plate photo.
3. Per the FTC, independent repair alone generally cannot void a written warranty, but damage it caused can be excluded.
4. A recall check relays the official notice and remedy, nothing more; a SaferProducts.gov report is not a recall.
5. The coverage note goes to the technician and the owner, never to the household as a verdict.
6. For a household refrigerator, EPA puts refrigerant recovery on the final disposer, backed by a signed statement or contract.