A week or so ago Pets at home were doing FREE microchipping, the staff there were just learning to chip and needed some practice dogs. I took the 3 girls along, we had to queue for almost an hour and when it was our turn the staff were still very nervous and took ages, anyway I was happy to help them out and happy for the girls to be chipped. Today I got three forms through the post to register their chips, at a cost of £10 each - is this normal practice? A friend of a friend of mine does chipping, she only charges £10 a dog and that includes registration - and she knows what she's doing! It seems to me that the PAH offer may not have been that good after all. What are others experiences of chipping, do you pay at the time of chip insertion or afterwards to register? When I had my last borzois microchipped almost 9 years ago I paid the vet to chip them and that was that, I'm pretty sure I didn't pay anything extra at a later date to register them.

The person who does the chipping has to register the dogs - they are the one with the code needed to access the system - with my supplier you now have to register online, not by post and a cost of £1.75 per registration is included in the cost of the chips.  The only cost of registration which is paid by the dogs owner I can think of is to notify change of address or to opt for the "lifetime" one off fee which allows for mulitply change of address.

The last pup I had microchipped, the cost was approx £22.50 (it can vary vet to vet) but the registration form should have been given immediately afterwards with a stuck on strip microchip number from the chip implanted for you to then fill out your details and post off for registration at no extra charge. To be honest more worrying is that it was sent out some week or so later to you, time for human error to mix up microchip numbers. I've never heard of anyone, (other than already mentioned) apart from an address change being charged to post it off for registration.

Sounds as though they had them all registered at the vets practice and have now forwarded them to you for an address change.

Looks as though they pulled the wool over your eyes and misled you all, though I guess it is still less than half price when all's said and done.

This doesn't sound right to me, specially if Pets at Home were advertising the microchipping for free - to have them chipped but not registered doesn't make sense.
I'm doing a microchip implanter course at the weekend (I assume that the Pets at Home people had an equivalent thing going on). I have been told to take along 3 animals for me to practice on (a friend obligingly has some young dogs!) and these dogs will be chipped and registered free of charge.
When you have your animal chipped, the fee you pay includes the registration.  I'd query it with Pets at Home.

Thanks everyone, that's what I thought. I'll phone PAH tomorrow and query it :-)

> To be honest more worrying is that it was sent out some week or so later to you, time for human error to mix up microchip numbers

I'm not worried about that Carrington, but good thinking :-) They kept the registration form but did give me two spare barcodes for each dog, I wrote the dogs names on the labels at the time so do at least know their chip numbers :-)

Good to know. :-)

Who were the forms from? Not all chips are registered with PetLog, which is why I always buy chips where PetLog registration is included. I can't even remember who the other registry is but to me it seems as daft as having two kennel clubs to have two microchip registries! As mentioned you only pay extra to upgrade to a Premium account where you can change address etc any number of times.

They are registered, think the £10.00 is that if you want to change any details in the future such as the address, ownership of the dog, then you can do this for "free" if you pay the £10.00 charge and it lasts for life.  If you don't pay the £10 fee then you have to pay a higher charge every time you need to update the dogs information.

If the paperwork is blue then that's just your copy, the yellow stays with the microchipper and the top white copy goes back to Petlog, you should receive your certificate in the post in the next 7 -14 days