Flogging a dead horse?

SRE · May 3, 2012

Today's marketing tip - Twitter.

I completely lost the plot this morning when I got a £45 parking fine from a private company who were charging me for staying over the 2 free hours. The fact that I'd spent £400 didn't make any difference.

Anyway, I tweeted my disgust - several times, local followers retweeted for me and I tweeted directly to our local paper.

Result - in just under 4 hours the offending retail store are following me on Twitter now and try to resolve the problem, the local newspaper are covering it and because I've agreed to the publicity I slipped in the possibility of doing a piece on solar and the figures dropping through the floor and rural discrimination for people wanting to install solar and they've agreed.

Doing press release tonight (going out to do survey now otherwise I'd have done it right away) will let you know what happens with it - if they get a slow day next week they may just publish it.

solarsavings · May 3, 2012

Where do I have to park?

SRE · May 3, 2012

Anywhere with private parking bandits! Nearly as bad as double glazing salesmen - speaking of which ....

Just come back from doing a survey referred by one of our old customers. Customer has had Solarenergysaving round after being cold called on the phone asking if they were retired and owned their own home because there was a government grant available if they were - so they booked a visit.

Salesman comes, spends 2 hours, tells them the government only allow 25 installations per local authority area, they only need 6 panels because that will be enough for them. No mention of the type of panel or inverter. The customer wants black panels but they don't do black panels but they weren't told this and then the usual - we'll knock 25% off if you sign on the night - great they thought that's too good to miss and signed up for wait for it .......

1.5kwp for £9,000 that was the price WITH the 25% off - robbing *******s!

It's a slate roof but other than that it will hit the EPC without any bother and is a relatively easy install - how do they sleep at night!!!!

We've quoted for a 3kwp REC for quite a bit less than 9k and told them to sleep on it while I get the documentation to them. They realised they'd been conned when our customer had been talking to them and had managed to cancel in time but it was a close thing. I've asked them to report them to REAL - it's about time they did some REAL work instead of harassing decent installers with petty minutiae.

Somecamel · May 3, 2012

This must be where DECC and 'Which' get their prices from

SolarCity · May 4, 2012

SRE said:
it's about time they did some REAL work instead of harassing decent installers with petty minutiae.

Absolutely!!! The fact that SES still operates and the likes of SolarSavings gets picked up on petty thinkgs shows me that REAL is as much use as a unicorn saddle.

solarsavings · May 4, 2012

I popped into one of our installs the other day while passing to be told that their friends had just had a five panel system fitted for ............£7000 after having two had salesman stay until they signed the contract............all 1 page of it. They hadn't mentioned that we had fitted a 2.88KWP with an Aurora inverter before the cut off for £8400.00p

(

I often get emails address to me that should have gone to solar-------savings. I return them without reading them (honest) on two occasions they were from an Aston Martin dealership in Cheshire. How many of us drive them about?