This sort of thing honestly makes my skin crawl.

“Sign within 24 hours or lose £1,000” is not how a homeowner-focused heating transition should work. It’s straight out of the double-glazing playbook from the 1990s… not what you’d expect from a company positioning itself as a modern, trusted renewable brand.

If the system is correctly designed and correctly priced today, it’ll still be correctly designed and correctly priced in a few days’ time, after the homeowner has had a chance to compare quotes, ask questions here, review the heat loss calculation, ask technical questions and think clearly without someone breathing down their neck.

The industry talks endlessly about building consumer confidence and I think tactics like this actively destroy it.

 “Act now.” “Today only.” “Last chance.” “Everything must go.” It’s textbook scarcity BS designed to compress the decision window before the customer has time to properly interrogate the proposal or get independent advice.

Of course that doesn’t mean every Aira installation is poor. But high-pressure sales and good engineering culture are uncomfortable bedfellows IMO. A good heat pump design and proposal should survive scrutiny… it shouldn’t need urgency to close the deal.

@editor They should respond, if I sign today will you install tomorrow and if you cannot meet my 24hr demand will you further discount and loose another £1,000 for me?
Pressure sales needs to be met with pressure expectations otherwise its a 1 sided deal. Also lets be honest, the only way my company could offer a £1,000 discount is to artificially inflate the job by £1,000 in the 1st place, just saying!
Im not sure any of us as smaller companies really make £1,000 to even try to give away, perhaps I should raise the price by 25% (i'm jesting, we would prefer credibility over hard sales tactics)   
 

Had a quote from this company.
The main item to watch other than the price and large buffer tank is their 15 year comfort guarantee.
Mine started at 15 years then moved to 10 with the sales person and then to one year with the actual contract.
The other 14 years would cost approx £240 per year.
Total cost  a big "no thank you."
 

Posted by: @glacken

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The other 14 years would cost approx £240 per year.

Total cost  a big "no thank you."

I posted earlier about my experience which was not of sales based on solid engineering but on understanding the customer. 

But just curious about your £240 a year cost. Is this including the yearly service?

As Vaillant also make similarly priced yearly servicing a condition of their typical 7yrs warranty, which makes sense to me. 

Posted by: @editor

↑

This sort of thing honestly makes my skin crawl.

“Sign within 24 hours or lose £1,000” is not how a homeowner-focused heating transition should work. It’s straight out of the double-glazing playbook from the 1990s… not what you’d expect from a company positioning itself as a modern, trusted renewable brand.

If the system is correctly designed and correctly priced today, it’ll still be correctly designed and correctly priced in a few days’ time, after the homeowner has had a chance to compare quotes, ask questions here, review the heat loss calculation, ask technical questions and think clearly without someone breathing down their neck.

The industry talks endlessly about building consumer confidence and I think tactics like this actively destroy it.

 “Act now.” “Today only.” “Last chance.” “Everything must go.” It’s textbook scarcity BS designed to compress the decision window before the customer has time to properly interrogate the proposal or get independent advice.

Of course that doesn’t mean every Aira installation is poor. But high-pressure sales and good engineering culture are uncomfortable bedfellows IMO. A good heat pump design and proposal should survive scrutiny… it shouldn’t need urgency to close the deal.

As anyone with any kind of Internet savvy will know, this is one of the major red flags when looking out for malicious emails. Scammers deliberately manufacture an artificial sense of urgency to try to manipulate the email recipient into action.

From previous threads, Aira have been found to try stopping homeowners from installing independent monitoring (implying this may void their warranty). Now this "buy now or lose out" tactic. Approaches like that are only used when the product won't speak for itself, so it begs the question of what Aira are worried about people finding out. If their installations bear scrutiny, why not welcome potential buyers comparing and contrasting? If their installations bear scrutiny, why not welcome third party monitoring to corroborate? If their installations bear scrutiny, why not let the home owners have access to their own historic data?

The only conclusion I can draw is that Aira, using badged Vaillant kit as it does, is perfectly capable of installing a well performing system but no better than any other competent installer, and they don't want consumers to know that because they want to be able to mark their own homework.

This becomes more obvious when you look at their claims on their web site. For instance, they claim their Aira Home Energy System (heat pump, solar panels, battery) can save 90% over a standard setup (gas boiler, no solar panels, no battery). They then give a bit of gumph about how they calculate this and it seems reasonable until you actually dive into the detail. They also have a similar bit of gumph to "support" their claim of £490 annual energy bill savings for switching to a heat pump. However, they claim in gumph 1 to assume household use of 10,000 kWh gas and 2,500 kWh electricity (at 5.74p for gas and 24.67p for electricity) and yet in gumph 2 they assume 20,000 kWh gas and 4,500 kWh electricity (at 6.29p for gas and 22.93p for electricity). Both of these they claim are typical of an Aira customer based on Aira's own data. Which is it, Aira?

All these figures, by the way, assume a heat pump efficiency of 4 where we already know from Open Energy Monitor that 3.5 is far more realistic; 4 and above is possible but in a minority of cases and so not reasonable to use as the norm.