is anyone else stupidly busy at the moment?

[Gavin A]

We're not exactly busy. Well, not exactly busy earning money anyway. We're trying a few different things to see if we can pull some more work in.

Good to see others are doing ok. If we were all quiet then I'd be worried.

are the prices on your website actually what you're charging now?

I can't see how you can make it work at £4995 for a 4kWp solar PV system these days after the panel price rises as a standard price without seriously cutting your own throat.

fwiw virtually all our installs now are for the quality end of the market with solarworld mono-black as our standard range at I think £6295 for 4kWp, which we actually just put up by £300 because I realised we probably wouldn't lose many sales by raising it that much, and might actually start to gradually make a bit of an actual profit again if we did it.

basically what I'm finding is that the people who have the money to do it are the people who want a quality product and don't mind paying a little extra for it, whereas those who want cheap kit often don't end up having the money, or just nailing the price down so low we may as we'd have been better off not to bother in the first place. It also doesn't give you anywhere to go if the customer wants to try to negotiate the price down a bit if you're starting at complete rock bottom IMO.

I'm guessing you must be competing locally with some pile em high flog em cheap merchant.... probably best to try to rise above them and focus on maintaining the quality yourself until they disappear IMO if you can, though it's obviously a tough call, and I've probably changed my tune on this a bit since this time last year.

 

[SolarCity]

The prices on our site are pretty accurate. We have actually done 4kWp for less on a couple of occasions. Some firms by us are actually doing it for £4.5k all in.

To be honest, we often wonder if we can make it pay. I do all of our installs personally so we have no staff to pay. I suppose our biggest issue is getting our phone to ring. Putting low prices on our site was an effort to convert site visits into installs.

Marketing, without a doubt, is where I struggle the most. To be honest, before we entered the PV market, we never had to worry about it. So it is pretty new to me.

 

[SRE]

It's funny but since we stopped trying to sell solar and pulled in other work we've been getting quality solar jobs. Installing Panasonic, Solar Edge & Immersun today and quoting for similar tonight. Have sold 3 Panasonic/Solaredge/Immersuns in the last couple of months - but we're telling people as soon as we see/speak to them that we're not the cheapest and we don't do "special offers" their home is too important to us.

 

[Eco Deal]

guys glad your all doing well with solar , I have not installed any for a while which is a shame if anyone does sun-power panels , an old customer of mine asked for a quote today but I could not help him...... if anyone does them inbox me for this chaps details I told him I would ask.

seems like your all offering combo's of products now anyway if you need any eco funding for walls , lofts boilers to add to the list of products let me know we have funding available & access to green deal finance.

 

[SRE]

3rd Panasonic, Solaredge & Immersun in a row - weird! Not that I'm complaining but weird!

 

[Gavin A]

just taking a deposit for a 4kWp Viridian solar install at £10k.... hideously complex 3 roof retrofit to slate that's probably going to take 3 days, so we're still probably not going to make much off it even at that price, but it shows that some folk out there are prepared to pay for quality and aesthetics.

I also had a woman snap my hand off for giving her a ballpark figure of £6.5k for 4kWp dual roof, after she'd had a salesman round after a cold call, and another from some other company, then spent the night up til 3am researching it on the internet and found us being recommended on which local.

I've had to send someone out to buy another sales / quotes board as the 5 we've currently got running are all full, and we really need one specifically for new builds as we've got so many in the pipeline and they take so long to work through the system they're like bed blockers on our sales board.

 

[SolarCity]

We're getting a mini burst of enquiries/installs coming through which is nice. Not exactly sure why it is that we get these troughs and peaks in our enquiries though.

 

[SRE]

I'd like our customers to get themselves in an orderly queue and fill 40 of the 52 weeks in the next few weeks. Maybe santa will be good to us this year lol.

 

[whinmoor]

We are buzzing as well. We could be working some weekends to squeeze everyone in by Xmas.

Panasonics seem to be popular. We're often going for Power Ones with integrated DC isolators to save a bit of time.

 

[Gavin A]

3am and I've just finished the heat load calcs for a low energy housing project we have in the pipeline for next year, after a full day on site, and I'm back in at 8am..... booked solid til Christmas now with 60kWp booked for Jan already. lucky it's still summer up here eh...