Prices

[SolarCity]

I occassionally look at the thread on Navitron about pricing and I'm frequently surprised and depressed by what I read.

One guy is concerned that £5,800 all in is a little on the high side and one guy is getting a system for £4,995 all in.

I doubt many companies can make that work. When you factor in vans, accreditation, advertising, tools and the time and effort taken in surveying and quoting then surely any business that does £4,995 is destined to go bump?

 

[sedgy34]

that must be a muppet forum then if they are talking like that

 

[solarsavings]

That is the way it's going around here. Foster's (big social housing contractor) are installing a 4KWp for £5750.00 all in. They have a full page every week in the local paper so the smaller installers are now around the 5 grand mark with one from Peterborough installing the same system for £4750. I did see someone from down worcester's way advertising nationally at £4750 all in as well but can't remember the name.

 

[whinmoor]

I went to visit a customer recently who had been quoted over £12k for a 4kWp system. Just a regular house - nothing special about it. He showed me the paperwork which was scribbled down on a single sheet. Whilst I was there, the company phoned him and I overheard the conversation during which the caller offered to do him a "special" and knock £2k off if he could agree the deal immediately.

Needless to say, I was able to beat that quotation

 

[Gavin A]

I went to visit a customer recently who had been quoted over £12k for a 4kWp system. Just a regular house - nothing special about it. He showed me the paperwork which was scribbled down on a single sheet. Whilst I was there, the company phoned him and I overheard the conversation during which the caller offered to do him a "special" and knock £2k off if he could agree the deal immediately.

Needless to say, I was able to beat that quotation

I'd expect that we've also been quoting against the same company on a few occasions recently - had 2-3 jobs out of them from people who like the idea but decide to check the price out and get another quote first.


Shame that they must be picking up work at those prices though, probably by conning people with the return calcs

 

[whinmoor]

Shame that they must be picking up work at those prices though, probably by conning people with the return calcs

Yes - they were ridiculously optimistic. Over £40k!

Fortunately, this guy was a pretty sharp 40-year old. A Granny may well have thought it was a great investment and saving.

Two mildly amusing anecdotes from the story:

The rep had an Anglian Windows folder when he came to visit!
They were planning to fit CONergy panels!

 

[SolarCity]

Received an email about an hour ago from a local guy that I've been dealing with. I've already spent about 6 hours work on surveying his home, designing him a system and tweaking the designs.

He now tells me that another firm is cheaper (apparently they manufacture their own panels) and has asked me to drop my price.

Suffice to say that after materials are bought and delivered, scaffold erected and work starts - we would have £700 left on the job for labour/profit. All this for a 4kWp install on a rosemary tiled roof and before I've paid for an EPC visit or MCS registering.

We expect the job to take a day and a half for two men and it is a local job. I couldn't possibly make that work.

Incidentally, we sidelined into partition walls and ceilings a few years back and I've been doing a lot of that lately. We can bring in over £1,000 a week per man for doing this.

 

[JulianC]

There's a saying in photography circles that the only way to make money as a photographer is to sell your camera.

Anyone want to buy an irradiation meter and an MC4 crimp tool?.....

 

[Gavin A]

Received an email about an hour ago from a local guy that I've been dealing with. I've already spent about 6 hours work on surveying his home, designing him a system and tweaking the designs.

He now tells me that another firm is cheaper (apparently they manufacture their own panels) and has asked me to drop my price.

Suffice to say that after materials are bought and delivered, scaffold erected and work starts - we would have £700 left on the job for labour/profit. All this for a 4kWp install on a rosemary tiled roof and before I've paid for an EPC visit or MCS registering.

We expect the job to take a day and a half for two men and it is a local job. I couldn't possibly make that work.

Incidentally, we sidelined into partition walls and ceilings a few years back and I've been doing a lot of that lately. We can bring in over £1,000 a week per man for doing this.

I usually offer to split the difference in those cases, and ask them to consider the fact that it's going to be on the roof for decades to come, so do they really want a bodge job doing for the sake of a relatively small price difference.

This works a surprising amount of the time, and the ones it doesn't work with... well they're welcome to the crap install they paid for. Once you've put in the leg work though I reckon it's work it for a split the difference price most of the time even just to keep the work ticking over and suppliers happy to avoid credit limits being reduced etc etc

 

[SolarCity]

This guy stressed that he really wasn't going to buy on price. He wanted the lot - German panels, SolarEdge for its monitoring, Elios4U monitoring reading for immersion switching and solarflash mounting system for his tiles. But buying on price is exactly what he is doing.

Split the difference would have still made it far too cheap. If we went any lower than our current prices then we'd effectively be working for less than I can earn from an agency. Either other firms have immense buying power (which I doubt) or they are cutting massive corners both in quality and customer service.

This guy refused to tell me what the name of the firm was that he was dealing with.

 

[Gavin A]

we ended up buying second hand solar deck because we were getting priced out based on scaf costs from jobs further afield - it's a bit of a git to put up, so we don't use it on every job, but it does help to cut a few hundred quid off the costs we have to charge even with an allowance in the budget.

Sometimes though you also do just have to walk away and move on - we've got a whiteboard up for quotes at the minute, and the instant a potential customer says they've gone with someone else we just erase them from the board, dump their file into our dead cabinet and move on as if they never existed. No point wasting further time on them at that point.

We've got an in roof mounted system just confirmed for a couple of weeks time, using renusol, which looks really good, but then we used the design software and realised that instead of 1 back panel per panel, they want to add an extra plate top and side because they want 20cm overlap despite the backing panels only being 10cm bigger than the solar panels. I assume this was a design cock up on their part, but that alone is adding around £150 to the job - we'll order the extra, but only use them if we really need to I think.

I have to wonder though if there isn't a more cost effective method of laying some form of plastic sheeting behind the panels to water proof it, then flashing around it, as it seems a hell of a lot of money for not a lot of actual product.

Amazingly they didn't quibble on price either, well not for our bit anyway, a little on the full reroof that we're also arranging.

 

[SRE]

We've just lost out to Gallium & Power One for under 6k. Cheapest I can buy Gallium if I wanted to is 63p at the minute. It was a shiny suit, he told customer each panel would be optimised with the Power One because we'd been telling him about Solaredge. He'd been told Gallium were Spanish........

 

[Gavin A]

tbf 833 are spanish afaik.

 

[SRE]

Murcia head office - made in China. We have an apartment near there so I asked to go to the factory, it was a bit further than I thought lol

 

[Gavin A]

Murcia head office - made in China. We have an apartment near there so I asked to go to the factory, it was a bit further than I thought lol

oh really?

We got persuaded to install a system using those panels by someone who'd been convinced of their merits by a salesman, but wanted us to do the installation work.

The install looked good in the end, but I was a bit dodgy about the build quality with the mastic around the edges etc.