We have a BT CallGuardian landline phone which can be set to require any unknown caller to go through a recognition process before we accept the call. People we want to keep in touch with go into our online directory and when they ring, their names come up on the handset and they get straight through. This works brilliantly at completely stopping those irritating recorded sales calls from abroad, and most of the ones from this country as cold callers don't want the bother of going through the vetting process when it's clear that the person on the other end isn't a fan of theirs. However, a few cold calls from the UK do sometimes get through. A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from some unknown solar company, offering to check the system we had installed 7 years ago. I never respond to cold callers and I put the phone down on them. A few minutes later they rang again, this time managing to say they had recently bought the firm who installed our system and asking if we would like them to check it over. I said no thanks, a bit more firmly. Blow me down, they then rang again, and this time I was a bit rude and told them to leave us alone and I would block their number if they tried again.
A day or so ago, they again cold-called us with the same story, and this time it was my husband who answered. He's the sort who is too polite to tell Jehovah's Witnesses to bugger off, and keeps the front door open to them in the depths of winter listening patiently to their doom and destruction. Consequently, he informed me that a rep would be visiting this afternoon to inspect the inverter on our system. When the rep turned up, he didn’t have any details of our installation or the name of our original installer. He said that, as our inverter was now seven years old, it was out of guarantee and it would be wise to replace it before it malfunctioned and whilst the £500 boiler scrappage scheme was still running. He didn’t know when or if the scrappage scheme was due to end. When asked what could go wrong with an inverter, he said that the electric cables could be chewed by mice, causing a short circuit. He took a look at our inverter, but didn’t inspect it or check the cabling, he just recorded the reading of units generated. He agreed that our system was working well, in fact better than might have been expected, judging by the units generated.
He then explained that his company could supply and instal two kinds of inverters, either a Grow Watt with a 10-year warranty for £2,100, or a Solar Edge with a 25-year warranty for £3,500. He said he was not allowed to write these prices down for us, claiming that prices were changing all the time, dependent of whether a cluster of customers could be fitted in one day to save transport costs etc, and he didn’t provide any sales materials with details of the specification of the appliances, so I wrote the prices down on a piece of paper myself for future reference. When discussing guarantees, he recommended that, if we ever needed to make a claim under guarantee, we should go back to the manufacturer rather than to the company who supplied the appliance.
He said that, if we agreed to choose a new inverter then and there, to save him the costs of a future visit, it would be fitted next Thursday or Friday, and after that, the price might well go up. When we said that we would not make such a decision without thinking about it first, he said that we could have until Monday to book our appointment for the end of next week. Since under Consumer Contracts Regulations, customers have a 14-day cooling off period for purchases made by salesmen or over the telephone, such a speedy appointment to fit an appliance would not allow time for that to happen. He suggested that we should immediately fill out the order form and said that he was prepared to waive the deposit of 10% to secure our booking.
Of course we found these high-pressure sales tactics most off-putting, and in no circumstances would we have bought anything from a company that employed them. Our concerns were increased when going on line to check up on Chelsfield Solar, the very reputable company which installed our system and which they said had gone out of business, and from whom they claimed to have bought the previous customer list. We were pleased and relieved to find that they are still going strong, and still saying they don't need to employ any sales people or pressured techniques because most of their business comes from recommendations from happy customers, like us.
Under the circumstances, you will not be surprised to hear that we have no intention of booking a replacement inverter installation from this firm. And I hope my husband has learned his lesson.....
