Do you feel sorry for ripped-off customer?

[ebee]

A long time ago two well established business's suggested that I was charging "very expensive prices" on a couple of my jobs.

Case 1 - a plumbing heating firm combined with gen building services therefore could do a whole host of jobs either inhouse or supplying additional trades as well on a subcontact basis. Any job large or small from conception to completion.

Asked about my charging rates 9I almost never gave these out as I just provided an estimate for a job completely and almost universally that would be the price of the final invoice..
So far so good, but on this occasion I I was asked to break it down a little, so I obliged A/ materials cost to me plus a small %age mark up and labour rate at XYZ per hour.
He objected. If he was purely selling something to a customer to be installed by A N OTHER he would charge a mark up .
On the other hand, if he supplied and installed the whole job then the materials were at cost then he added a labour rate.
He complained that when I supply and install I was "having two bites of the cherry!" .
Yes so what! was my answer.
My two bites plus labour was far less in total than his materials at cost then a massive labour rate on top, therefore the end price of his jobs was by far greater than any job done by me.
He could not see that!

Case 2 - similar set up but a smaller operation run by a joinery firm.

(I am an Electrician by the way).
He asked me my labour rate and when I told him he informed me that his regular man who had worked for him for many years was far cheaper than me.
I asked him a simple question - how much total would his regular subcontractor charge for a bog standard local authority grant aided rewire of a certain type of house - two up two down plus kitchen plus bathroom.
He told me and then I told him to turn over the piece I had put down in front of a few minutes earler and I stated "That is my price! Who is cheaper?"
I was.
Turns out that his regular electrician did indeed have a stated labour rate less than mine but he was charging for materials the official "trade price" .
Many wholesalers back the worked on offical trade prices or manufacturer`s RRP then gave a discount , on cables that was commonly a whopping 85% discount on other things still a sizeable discount but not as much as the cables discount.
All I worked on was the price of materials charged to me then I added my mark up.

I had never set out to be either the cheapest nor the dearest but rather what I considered tobe a fair price for a decent job.

I slept soundly at nights.

I would never engage in a race to the bottom on pricing in order to get a job.

Once I`d given an estimate I would stick to it unless there was something genuinely unseen (as a trade pro I am expected to reasonably forsee almost all possibilities of possible extra work that might be required and either price it in or explain those possiblities at the outset.
The number of jobs that have totally unforseen extraworks required should be very small, near zero.

One thing I would do with every job I had previously estimated would be to work out the cost purely on time and materials and mark up and confirm to myselfthat they did actually tally within plus or minus 10% , actually the really big majority of jobs did do so within better than plus or minus 5%.

And to my mind, that is how it should be.

Bad business sense I know, I never got rich but I was always busy and I never worked for nothing either.
I worked purely by recommendation.

 

[CountryFan]

Surely people haven't gone through life without learning a thing or 2. For example, TV programmes such as Watchdog et al tell you to obtain more than 1 quote. I feel sorry for people who have committed to expenditure upfront and then trade has done a runner or whatever. People are entitled to a 2nd opinion.

 

[JohnD]

Many people can't easily decipher this though. Last I read, about half of over 70s are still not online. Also, the average reading age for elderly people is about aged 9,

That's interesting. Where did you get this information?

 

[ericmark]

Yes, I feel sorry for ripped off customers, most it seems connected to government grants in some way. Be it solar panels, heat pumps, loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, the list goes on, and it seems to attract the substandard tradesman as people getting something for nothing or very cheap, rarely complain about bad workmanship.

Both my late father and father-in-law were caught out, poor central heating installs, solar panels to heat DHW, the list goes on and on, but a lot of the blame needs to be aimed at government, they were after all the clients, and they did not check the installations were done correctly.

Central heating must be one of the largest culprits, but it has gone on for decades, so a poor install or gas fired CH replaced by poor install or heat pump type, and the householder simply does not realise how bad the installation is. If same or better than the last installation, then they are happy.

At 74, I can look back before central heating was the norm, and I know any room in the house, even with single glazed windows, and no cavity wall insulation, or loft insulation could be kept warm with a 3 kW electric fire. In fact, we would turn off some bars, so room likely maintained with 1 kW or fewer. Plus a 3 kW immersion heater, so a 3-bedroom house was heated with electric using a 60 amp fuse (Old Wylex fuse box rated 60 amps) so 13.8 kW was total coming into the home, and the home could be heated using less than 10 kW total, so with double glazing, etc, now the requirement must be a lot less, so it is clear my dad did not need a 35 kW boiler for the central heating.

This house is a lot bigger, 5 bedrooms, and the 20 kW boiler has not failed to heat the house and produce lashes of hot water, and old house had a dedicated boiler (Main 7) I think 18 kW so DHW only needs 18 kW and the central heating can stop while DHW is being drawn, so even with a combi-boiler 20 kW is ample for most homes.

So why are so many 35 kW boilers installed? It is so clearly poor design, and workmanship, and has been going on for decades.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

So why are so many 35 kW boilers installed? It is so clearly poor design, and workmanship, and has been going on for decades.

I agree with all that you say above, but the reason for 35Kw, would seem to be one of instant hot water, and combi-boilers.

 

[ericmark]

I agree with all that you say above, but the reason for 35Kw, would seem to be one of instant hot water, and combi-boilers.

So I have heard it said many times, but my 18 kW boiler was too big for many shower heads, and I struggled to find one big enough.

It is the lowest output which matters, my living room needs less than 3 kW, most other rooms a lot less, just enough to stop anything freezing, so the whole house likely needs 5 kW or less, and the more times the boiler has to turn on/off the larger the hysteresis is.

The boiler should extract the latent heat from the flue gases, but if oversized, this is unlikely to happen, and if an on/off thermostat is used this will also stop it getting the latent heat, so the boiler is rated at say 85% efficient but due to sizing errors and installation errors, it is actually down to around 70% efficient. Plus the set-up is asking for unused rooms to be heated, so the gas bill is twice what it needs to be.

 

[ebee]

Speaking about grants , yes they seem to attract the low end bodge it and scarper ltd types quite often too.

I was part way thru a house rewire first fix and a "Warm Front" team came and I had to lay off for a couple of days,
they "butchered the joists" - put notches over the areas where I had put holes (as per building regs zones) because it was a flooring of chipboard sheets over the joists they did not carefully remove and then use the correct areas for the notches but lifted back up the boards I had carefully removed .

Those joists were severley weakend - the one saving grace was the lengths of span ere not great so it was not in imment danger of moving next week/next month/next year but in a few years time problems could well be envisaged.
A did use a picture of one such typical example as my members profile picture on this forum for quite a while, not just one joist, neraly all of them!
The local building inspector did his nut about it but eventually the owners settled for a "Guarantee Letter" from the company that the floor was sound (The Building inspector was insisting on calculations to be provided by the firm but it never happenend - shher force and bending moment calculations etc).

A right dogs breakfast of poor workmanship but the firm didn`t give a Castlemaine Four X about it. In my humble opinion.

Thinkg is with grants, in my experience, you tend to get some very good teams/individuals and some not so good in local authority districts but nationwide or sometimes County Wide seems to be far more of the very poor ones and often none/few of the decent ones.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

The boiler should extract the latent heat from the flue gases, but if oversized, this is unlikely to happen, and if an on/off thermostat is used this will also stop it getting the latent heat, so the boiler is rated at say 85% efficient but due to sizing errors and installation errors, it is actually down to around 70% efficient. Plus the set-up is asking for unused rooms to be heated, so the gas bill is twice what it needs to be.

I agree, a lot could be done, to improve the efficiency of the systems we install. I specced my own boiler, and that, much of the time is far to big, at 18Kw. Only on those rare occasions, when it is heating from cold, does it come close to needing that capacity. The rest of the time, it trickles along on minimum output.

I wasn't happy with the on/off run flat out, until it hit temperature, so I swapped out the controls to a much more sophisticated version, offering full proportional control of the boiler. TRV's, I understood, were a requirement, so I fitted them, setting the unfrequented rooms, to 1, just to keep the chill off, and the more used rooms to a bit higher.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

A right dogs breakfast of poor workmanship but the firm didn`t give a Castlemaine Four X about it. In my humble opinion.

Thinkg is with grants, in my experience, you tend to get some very good teams/individuals and some not so good in local authority districts but nationwide or sometimes County Wide seems to be far more of the very poor ones and often none/few of the decent ones.

There lies the crux of it, IMHO - the teams are shipped in from afar, with limited time on site, to actually do the work, so it has to be rushed, and corners cut. If, the work was handed to small local, responsible companies, it would do some worthwhile good.

 

[ericmark]

TRV's, I understood, were a requirement, so I fitted them, setting the unfrequented rooms, to 1, just to keep the chill off, and the more used rooms to a bit higher.

The flat rarely used in winter still has mechanical TRV heads, all fed from a motorised valve, so can turn the whole flat off. The main house has 10 programmable TRV heads, so every room has its own sequence, even with a 14 room house, the 20 kW boiler is twice the size required.