Buyers’ remorse may be something you’re suffering from if you’ve had a national company attend to your recent renewable requirements. Whether it’s A Shade Greener plumbing in your PV, Octopiss Energy enabling your EV or British Gas hauling in a heat pump, you’re perhaps now stood looking aghast at the quality of workmanship that was slapped onto your home. Okay, so you fucked up by failing to hire someone who actually cares about your most expensive pride & joy, but breathe deeply into a brown paper bag and calm yourself down my friend: the cowboys may have just ridden outta town, but now the Goddamn Sheriff is here replete with his surly expression, rusty badge and a phat belt o’ whiskey… in a dirty glass.
And okay, the above-named firms, and any others who happen to fit their description…, well, I won’t outright accuse ‘em of being chancers, hustlers, charlatans… or… uh… anyway, whatever my personal beliefs, I don’t wanna get sued by any big-boys with deep pockets, so I’ll insert a disclaimer here which states that the named outfits, and any other such national enterprises who offer a budget installation that we smaller legitimate electrical contractors cannot compete with, are not wholly terrible, and hey, maybe you’ll be the one lucky enough to have someone attend who has the requisite technical skill and patience to actually make a good job of it and…
[snort!]… oh, it’s no good, I can’t even cite a disclaimer. I’m sorry, but you got proper fucked over mate. Here’s why, and how I can help…
When it comes to the likes of renewables, the government invariably gets involved with some kind of well-meaning, albeit misplaced, grant scheme. Several firms predictably pop up; some big existing national concerns, others seemingly specialising in any given technical area. The heavyweight ones have political clout and/or people on the board of directors (probably) juiced in with the same politicians behind the grant scheme - their main scheme being to get stinking rich on taxpayers’ money through the exchange of whatever funny handshakes, fully expensed escort services or outright anal penetration happens to be required.
When it comes to the bolting of either solar, EV or a heat pump onto your house, these impersonal juggernauts want to production line the task as much as possible, which for them means treating each installation as being the same. That’s a massive issue, after all, how similar is your house compared to that of your parents’, or to that of your mate on a different estate? Applying a one-size-fits-all approach inevitably means everyone gets whatever base install the budget allows for rather than an installation actually suited both to the equipment already on site and the visual aesthetic your home personally deserves.
That means not only will any such work generally look shite once it’s been thrown onto your wall, but it’ll also be a red flag for the future either because the piss-poor workmanship was wank from day-one which will get called out on a future inspection, or because headaches such as water ingress to external components, or other such degradation, has left it downright dangerous over time.
But, hey, it all worked when it was wanged in and it was cheap… right?
The trouble with a lot of people ordering renewable tech is that they think their research into such qualifies them as now being electrical experts. Take pint-sized ponce Nicholas Raimo who released a video last year accusing we bona fide electrical installers of being a rip-off because he could get an EV charger so much cheaper from Octopus, an industry laughingstock he happens to be sponsored by. Oh, and don’t click the following link - I don’t want to drive traffic to Nicky's short-man web presence…
Nick the (balding) prick, presumably banned me from his YouTube comments, because although I can still see what I wrote in response to this demonstrable garbage at the time, there are no replies or likes which, frankly, would only be the case if the shortarse skidmark had censored me like a little bitch. So instead, here’s Jamie Blatant’s bang-on-the-bollocks response - go watch this for the real reaction deal instead of the above tool who happens to be happily sucking off Octopus' massive purple.... uh.. tentacles:
The industry issue is that we’re not comparing like-for-like because standards are not shared across the board. If I myself were to install a PV, EV or heat pump in the same way as the churn-‘em-out-cheap operators, I would get royally roasted by NICEIC for failings including, but not limited to, the likes of:
- Cutting supplier seals and pulling the main fuse.
- Installing client-side hardware within the meter box.
- Cutting into supplier tails without verifying anything to do with the existing upstream installation before or afterward.
- Improper exterior mounting and sealing of equipment.
- Failure to ensure best use of existing client-side hardware.
- Failure to even verify the installation was fit for modification.
My inspector would also doubtless take issue with my physical workmanship if I matched what I often see thrown up by competitors with cables incorrectly secured, top entry in external enclosures where water can get in, unprofessionally misaligned cleats or supports, incorrect protective devices, paperwork deficiencies... and so on, yet any such pile-it-high-and-sell-it-cheap rivals seemingly get a pass time and again because they're too big and impersonal to be policed.
Such double-standards have formed my decision to tell NICEIC to go fuck themselves. It’s absolutely unacceptable that I’m being held to a higher standard as a one-man-band when the big players with all the cash and clout can, and do, get away with murder. I already hold myself to a higher account quite voluntarily and would never bung in a half-arsed job on any of my customer’s homes because my name and reputation mean everything. How NICEIC don't understand this is quite baffling, and their failure to recognise we who are on the straight & level while they themselves rubber-stamp big-name garbage is exactly why today's electrical industry is proper fucked. At the time of (drunkenly) writing, I am still an NIC member, albeit probably not for much longer. So I challenge them here. You come at me NIC - let's see who my customers find more relevant and trustworthy going forward, my fucking logo or yours.
As for uninformed bloggers like Nick “short-round” Raimo who think it’s all an apples-for-apples situation, well it’s really not. For my customers, I would personally appraise your home and existing electrical installation with a sympathetic eye, and I would calculate the best way for you to have the functionality you desire in keeping with today's wiring regulations and with both the minimum of decorative disruption or exposed utilitarian components, after all, nobody wants cables and boxes bolted to their interior or exterior walls where it can be avoided. Even if such were required, we can doubtless negotiate the best cost versus component configuration to ensure you get an appropriately tailored solution.
I want you to have the advantage of your chargepoint, solar panels, heat pump or any other electrical alteration without any of it being outwardly visible as much as possible. I also want to incorporate it into your existing hardware where I can so that you don’t have a mess of individual switches, breakers and boxes all spidering off in various unsightly directions. The big companies want to throw in their own self-contained consumer units so that they accept minimum responsibility for anything else, which will inevitably lead to a clusterfuck of boxes crowding around your walls the more these disparate dickheads get involved.
As a homeowner, maybe you only care about price rather than the aesthetic, in which case you go right ahead and hire in one of the nationals like Octopish to zig-zag an ugly armoured cable all the way around the outside of your house - you fucking loser! But for anyone out there who has already engaged with these firms in good faith, and subsequently found themselves standing with the palm of their hand slapped across their forehead as they stare wide-eyed and blinking at the shoddy result, well I’m here with an offer for you if you happen to be in my part of the world:
I’ll attempt to put it right, and at half my usual listed price, so long as you consent to it being filmed for YouTube and Odysee for everyone to point and laugh at.
I can’t guarantee I’ll take it on - after all, I'm a busy boy - but I will keep the installation anonymised if we do go ahead; unless you want to personally appear on camera to get anything off your chest. If you believed a sexy service was going to be sympathetically installed with care and consideration onto your home, and instead found afterward that the electrical equivalent of a hapless crack whore had been stapled unevenly from your meter box all the way around your stone cladding, well I want to see that awfulness and document it.
But more than that, I want to fix it. Okay, it’s gonna cost you extra, but that’s always what happens when I have to correct someone else’s bullshit, and it’s hardly my fault you happened to hire the wrong asshole for the job in the first place. So go hire the right asshole now and let's get it made good bud.
