So essentially then the gist so far is that calling ones self a 'specialist' in a given area, is a licence to print money and people will either pay it or risk death because no-one else is capable of carrying out the job other than the 'specialist'???
Lenny - methinks you might be taking it a bit on the general side, comparing your lemon to an apple........
That's not the gist at all -and certainly not the one intended.
Anyone can call themselves a "specialist" in any field they choose. To actually be one is a different matter.
An analogy might be that a policeman does so many years as a "general" policeman, learning the common parts of that job, and has to do that BEFORE he can become say a drugs officer, or a traffic officer, firearms, whatever.
And so it is with fire as a specialism.
There are thousands of guys out there calling themselves fire alarm engineers. Most of them are nothing of the sort.
To get to a level of "commissioning" (or designing), typically, you need to have several years active experience of fire alarm engineering, and you need to demonstrate also that you are fully conversant with not just BS 5839 and EN54, but also related fire legislation - the RRO, HASAW, EAWR, BS9999, COSHH, and many more. Until 2007, we had to be familiar with potentially over 120 different pieces of legislation affecting fire safety. The legislation that replaced most of those isn't much better - as in the main it simply passes responsibility to the owner of the premises in question. In turn, that responsibility is passed to the "specialists" coming in claiming to know how to repudiate that risk.
There's a big difference between being a specialist in the area of fire detection or safety, as against say an AV specialist.
Also, what about IT support? Rates of £200 an hour for software engineers are common - and the protocol argument stands perfectly there too, the moment you choose to have a bespoke bulletin board, over an off the shelf one.
When it comes right down to it, almost anyone is capable of carrying out even specialist fire work - with the right knowledge and tools.
Your notion sort of falls on its head a little every time you moan about a DIY'er getting it wrong, and end up having to put right several incorrectly wired plate switches, or sort out an intermediate switch the DIY'er couldn't get his head around, as well as having borrowed neutrals in.
The point, in your case - the £360 - you were paying for the use of the licenced protocol as well as the guy's time - as I said, there's another layer in that charging over and above using open licence kit - but that said, call Apollo out to a system that isn't doing what you think it should - they'll charge a similar level for their engineers (who, incidentally mostly have that extra layer of knowledge and training too, mostly because Apollo would not want the bad press associated with their protocol, should the fire system fail).
It isn't about calling yourself "specialist" and hiking the cost up - theres far more to it than that.
