Reading through the Guardian online this morning when a headline caught my eye
¨We lost £3,000 after collapse of Ikea’s solar panel installer¨.
Of course it’s very sad for all the people involved. It never ceases to amaze me that people actually buy solar equipment from large corporations; the utility providers are bad enough – people image that because they’re large-scale providers of electricity, that somehow means that they’d be a good choice to contract for solar panel installation, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. And of course large multi-national firms who deal with groceries, D.I.Y, and flat-pack furniture, are going to be even worse -at least the electricity company actually has electricians working for them.
Needless to say, the pension funds that own the likes of Octopus, and foreign utility companies which own others such as EDF (France) and Scottish Power (Spain), are too big to care about 5-10kw PV installations, and any one customer of theirs is too small to matter to them. They’re only in the UK domestic solar PV installation market out of greed. Ditto private equity entities such as Project Solar.
I can see why people might feel somewhat overwhelmed by the technical aspects of a Solar PV installation; what I struggle to see is why people would think that a corporation worth billions of dollars would necessarily be a good choice to contract for their project, especially with the knowledge that they got those billions by exploiting staff and profiteering from market power. So let me explain what you get when you call a company like Tesco or B&Q, Ikea or Octopus, to quote you for solar panels.
Firstly, you´ll be lured in by some fantastic offer with a suspiciously low headline price. It will almost certainly be for an off the shelf system, with only 1 type of panel, inverter, and battery on offer, regardless of its suitability in any particular customers own unique situation. But it will inevitably turn out that there’s a requirement for access -which will then be billed at several times the actual cost, adding thousands to price you end up paying- as well as a full site survey (add a few hundred more), and other electrical components and wiring required to fit the main kit – the panels, batteries, inverter, etc- with all sorts of other charges that vary from one installer to the next and can include everything form delivery to an administration fee. There’s a lady who walks her dogs int he village where I live that I am friendly with, and it breaks my hearty to think that she bought a system from Octopus that was sold in such a manner, and which we’d have done for a third less (or £5.5k), and designed it substantially better so that even with a similarly sized array, our design would have produced significantly more power, every day it was installed, for years and years to come (we only started to become friends in the months after she’d had her solar panels fitted in case anyone was wondering why we didnt do the job in the first place).
Secondly, the rep that calls out to see you -theres is perhaps a 1 in 10,000 chance they know anything meaningful about solar energy. They will have spent a week in a Premier Inn by a serve station off the motorway somewhere, doing a weeks training, and of that week, the first 4 & a half days would have been been company brainwashing, and they’d spend a couple of hours learning about the theory of solar PV installation, on the Friday afternoon before the long drive home. But they’re only going to sell one type of panel, inverter, etc -whichever type their employer had bought up most cheaply and got a warehouse full of somewhere, so that couple of hours is deemed sufficient to send them out on the roads quoting people.
Solar PV design (I know ive mentioned doing a post on this before -this is coming soon I promise – this is the most important aspect of the whole project, and one almost entirely neglected by the kind of people who shop for solar as though its a pure commodity item, when it isn’t -its effective employment depends on it being sold as part of a well-designed system considering the specific location for the project concerned).
If you are foolish enough to buy an off-the -shelf system from a large corporation with an inexperienced designer, using fitters from the other side of the country, you shouldn’t be surprised if what you end up with is sub-optimal (although you’d like to think they wouldn’t just go under, as was the case with Ikea’s Solar PV Installer).
As niche company offering unrivalled skills and expertise, but without billions to spend on marketing, we get squeezed from both ends – by large MNC´s like Ikea with -compared with ourselves – almost infinite money to spend on advertising campaigns and able to achieve vast economies of scale in their purchasing yet still offer a derisory choice of products to their customers), and on the other end, the local electrician who’s been on a solar course and maybe chucked a few panels in somewhere, who sometimes offers to install systems for practically zero profit because they are so desperate to try and establish themselves and just to take on any work whatsoever -and using these is every bit as much of a risk for people as with the like of Ikea, as they often have zero business acumen, and dont sell enough systems to justify the thousands and thousands that you ahem to pay each year for accreditation, and so on.
So what are the lessons?
For your solar PV installation, use a trustworthy specialist with genuine expertise. Only one comes to mind, so ill just say it:
Buy your Solar PV and Electrical Energy Storage System from Ecotekk. It will work exactly as we say it will and we’ll look after you.