The dishwasher started making a noise in March. It was not a loud noise, and it still washed, so the owner made a note to deal with it later. In June it stopped draining. When he finally rang the shop in August, the first question he was asked was not what was wrong with the machine. It was when he had first noticed it.
That question is not a stalling tactic. In consumer law the timing of a complaint is a legal fact in its own right, and it is one of the few facts that a buyer controls completely and often loses by default.
What the requirement actually asks of you
Finnish consumer legislation, like the EU framework behind it, expects a buyer who discovers a defect to tell the seller within a reasonable time of noticing it. The Finnish term for that notification is a reklamaatio. The obligation is deliberately vague on duration because the circumstances vary enormously — a fault that is obvious on unboxing sits differently from one that emerges gradually over a season of use.
What is not vague is the structure. The clock starts when you noticed the problem, or reasonably should have noticed it. Not when you understood its cause. Not when you obtained a diagnosis. Not when you decided you wanted a refund rather than a repair. Buyers routinely conflate these and lose months believing they are still investigating.
A short period is normally safe. Something in the region of a couple of months from discovery is generally treated as acceptable for an ordinary consumer, and complaining within days of noticing is safer still. Long silences are where positions collapse.
Why a delay does more damage than it looks
There are two separate harms in waiting, and only one of them is legal.
The legal harm is the obvious one: complain too late and the seller can argue you forfeited the right to rely on the defect at all. That argument does not always succeed — a seller who behaved dishonestly, or who has said nothing about timing while stringing you along, is in a poor position to make it — but it is the first thing raised and it puts you on the back foot from the opening line.
The evidential harm is quieter and usually worse. Every week that passes makes it harder to show that the fault existed, or had its origin, at the moment of purchase. In the early period after delivery the burden tends to sit with the seller: a defect that shows up quickly is presumed to have been there all along unless the seller shows otherwise. Later, that presumption reverses, and you are the one who has to demonstrate that the problem was not caused by your own use. Continuing to use a faulty item while you think about it accelerates the damage — literally and to your case, since the seller can then point to months of operation with a known problem.
There is a third, practical cost. Delay looks like indifference. A complaint made the week the fault appeared reads as genuine. The same complaint made after two seasons reads as a buyer who has changed their mind, and that impression follows the file into every subsequent conversation.
The deadline is not the guarantee period
This is the most common and most expensive misunderstanding in the whole area.
A guarantee — a manufacturer’s or a shop’s voluntary promise — has a fixed length. Twelve months, two years, five years on some components. When it expires, that promise expires with it. Buyers therefore assume that the guarantee period is the window in which they are allowed to complain, and that once it lapses nothing can be done.
That is not how the two things relate. The guarantee is one source of rights. The statute is another, and it works on completely different logic. Statutory liability for a defect that existed at the point of sale is not tied to a fixed number of months announced by the seller; it depends on how long the item could reasonably be expected to last given its price, its type and what was said about it. A structural fault in an expensive item that fails after three years may well remain the seller’s problem, guarantee or no guarantee. A minor wearing part on a cheap item may not, even inside a guarantee.
The two systems also impose different duties. Under a guarantee, you typically follow the procedure the guarantee document sets out. Under the statute, the duty is the one described here: notify within a reasonable time of discovery. That duty applies regardless of whether any guarantee exists, has expired, or was ever offered. The Finnish material published under the heading Kuluttajansuoja autokaupassa sets this distinction out plainly, in a field where buyers very often abandon a good claim on being told the guarantee has run out.
There is an outer limit in the background — you cannot complain about something a decade later — but it is a long-stop, not the operative deadline. The operative deadline is your own reaction time.
Putting the notice in a form that counts
A complaint has to be capable of being proved. A telephone call to a busy counter is not, and “I mentioned it when I was in” is worth nothing three months on.
Send it in writing. Email is fine. Keep it short and factual, and include four things: what you bought and when, what the fault is, when you first noticed it, and what you are asking for. That last item can be provisional — repair, replacement, price reduction or cancellation, in roughly that order of escalation — and it is entirely acceptable to say that you expect the seller to propose a remedy first.
Two habits are worth building. Date everything, including photographs, and keep the whole exchange in one thread rather than scattered across calls and visits. And do not stop the clock while you wait for the seller to respond: if a promised reply does not arrive, send a follow-up that references the first message. A documented chain of unanswered letters is a strong position. A gap of silence on your side is not, even if the silence was the seller’s fault originally.
If the matter does not resolve, the free national advisory route and, beyond it, the consumer disputes board at kuluttajariita.fi will both want to see that chain. The first thing either will check is when you told the seller. Nothing else in the file can repair a bad answer to that question.
When to pick up the pen
The moment you notice something is wrong, write it down and send it — even if you do not yet know the cause, even if you are willing to live with it, even if you expect it will turn out to be nothing. A notice costs you ten minutes and preserves every option you have. Waiting to be certain is the single most reliable way to lose a claim you would otherwise have won.
