Posted by: @adamk

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@jamespa yeah I’m only showing the min wage we’ve set as a country not for individual trades. I’m surprised they are saying an electrician only gets £12.11-13.84, no wonder so many people want to work in the UK. No way you can find a sparks in the UK that earns that. My builder is on £27 per hour.

OK but that's market forces not minimum wage and of course we don't have info on what German sparkies are actuay paid.

So from the three things you suggested we are only left with import duties.  So far as I have been able to find any info ours were linked to EU ones until 2022 at least.  Furthermore we (with Germany) opposed the EU anti dumping ones. Now Germany is obviously still in the EU but we aren't so a difference could have opened up but, based on our position, it would be the other way round.  Thus at present in finding this one difficult to believe also, in the absence of documentary evidence.

@jamespa hmm sounds like a case of suppliers profiteering then. Wouldn’t be the first time, anyone old enough to remember how much the car makers were fleecing us back in the 90s? It was cheaper to buy them in France and bring them back. I believe the UK was referred to as treasure island by suppliers.

i also think there is some of “the uk people will pay more” going on as well. Seen that with apple products.

Posted by: @adamk

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@jamespa hmm sounds like a case of suppliers profiteering then. Wouldn’t be the first time, anyone old enough to remember how much the car makers were fleecing us back in the 90s? It was cheaper to buy them in France and bring them back. I believe the UK was referred to as treasure island by suppliers.

i also think there is some of “the uk people will pay more” going on as well. Seen that with apple products.

I feel thats likely it, there are after all a lot of tech products the retail price of which is the same number of $, EUR or GBP.  I also suspect the trade in this country however some of which appear to regard renewables and related technologies as a cash cow.  Its scary to witness some of the quite ridiculous quotes some give for heat pumps.

@jamespa having just had a heat pump installed I do wonder if the increases in grants are just being absorbed by installers, I saw this when solar thermal was a thing. I could work out from the material prices someone was milking it.

from my somewhat problematic install due to issues with the installer I wonder why it was so expensive. I had a plant room with all pipes ready for linking up and pipes external ready for the heat pump. They came installed the heat pump outside with a condensate that I’m not sure is to spec, used flexis incorrectly, and still haven’t sorted the incorrect rcds/mcbs. I had to pay my plumber to remove the old hw tank and boiler, admittedly it wasn’t on the quote, but £11300 for just a Vaillant 7kw aro plus and Vaillant 250L heat pump tank seems pricey, but similar to some other quotes. Like you say a cash cow, plus I’m in a difficult area for modern tech so they had a 30 mile plus drive each day.

Posted by: @adamk

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@jamespa having just had a heat pump installed I do wonder if the increases in grants are just being absorbed by installers, I saw this when solar thermal was a thing. I could work out from the material prices someone was milking it.

In fairness when the grant went from £5000 to £7500, which happened during my discovery phase, the quotes I was receiving did go down.  That said by then I was ignoring many installers and concentrating solely on people that would do what I wanted based on the solid evidence I provided to them.  That was probably a fairly severe filter to screen out the grant chasers.

My quote FWIW was £K12.5 minus grant (so £K5 to me) for Arotherm 7kW, 210l Vaillant cylinder, 3 convector rads and one fancoil.  Two installers came out at almost identical design and price.  The price didn't include

• the electric feed which was done in advance by my friendly local sparky for £180 (I did first fix - ie feeding the cable through)
• exposing and then closing up the void where I wanted the primaries to be hidden
• installing a cable between airing cupboard and old boiler position for the temperature sensor, which I did myself

It took 1 man week of very long days, plus another day a week later so six in total of which four were ~9am-8pm.  Obviously I don't know what he paid for the parts but presumably £6k-£K7 or thereabouts assuming a reasonable trade discount. I believe that a licence fee is due to MCS, and of course there are overheads/lost time for actually doing the selling, coming back to fix a filter which blocked up after 6 months etc. 

It feels to me like this was probably reasonably lucrative but by no means a rip off, and indeed he said that 1 ASHP per week would be a business that he was happy with (he literally worked alone).  I would rather an installer in this business was well remunerated, knows his stuff and shows a genuine interest than being 'bargain' basement.

So far quotes I have received for batteries feel like a total rip off given how cheap the kit is and how simple it must surely be to fit.  So I haven't bought one!

Posted by: @jamespa

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So far quotes I have received for batteries feel like a total rip off given how cheap the kit is and how simple it must surely be to fit.  So I haven't bought one!

You would think, but when I had my Powerwall 3 installed, the main installer/electrician was here for 3 full days doing the battery and gateway installation, and the solar crew another full day for two guys just to to mount the panels and hook up the DC cabling ready for the electrician to then run down to the Powerwall. I thought they'd probably be in and out in a day.

To be fair, I was totally surprised at the amount of work involved not to mention all the on costs for cabling, trunking, isolators, MCBs etc that are not included in the wholesale price of the battery. I could have used a national company for £1,000 less, but I'm betting they would have cut corners versus the installation I received. 

I'm sure some battery installations would be simpler where everything goes in a garage right next to the meter box.