An end to MCS dominance in the solar PV market? (self declared exports now available)

[UNG]

@UNG organising work across Europe must have been a right pain in the neck!

It made life interesting making sure everything needed and more to the point nothing was missed was crated up ready to be shipped for some of the jobs I quite often found myself doing job walk throughs while I was asleep
As they say it is always the bits that go wrong or not quite to plan that you remember, for a job in Albania most of the kit was shipped by truck but some bits were sent a few days before we were due in country in a non top secret diplomatic bag that disappeared in Milan airport so we had to file a report with the Queens messenger evidently had it been a top secret diplomatic bag it would have caused a major incident so someone in Italy gained an SDS drilling machine some 4in tray and a few other bits and pieces, on another job that lasted for a few months we were asked by the owners of one of the masts we were using for our customers wireless network we were building if we could rig some Airwaves equipment for them so the heliax fixings and connectors were ordered from a company in Scotland to be shipped to the job in Jersey about 10 days later we started querying were the equipment was with the local DHL agent as work on the mast was due to start the DHL agent found the pallet was in the Heathrow cargo area and the pallet was too large to fit into the plane when asked why they couldn't break the shipment down so it fitted in the plane we were told they needed the customers permission the kit arrived the following day. It has to be said that in terms of shipping stuff to jobs Jersey presented more challenges than many other places

Insurance wasn't too bad, but I only had a small team and lowish turnover figures, around £500k. I always find it interesting insurance companies don't ask more questions like have your staff been trained to do xyz before offering cover.

Working at height insurance is not to bad for working upto 10 - 15m once you declare that you could be working upto 300m+ you get hit with some big quotes despite all the training and H&S requirements needed to get on a mast hence why we had 2 companies with one doing the high access work and the other doing the general contracting it was odd at times having both companies working on the same job and the same staff doing the work

I originally trained in the Aerospsce indistry where 20-30 year life cycles was normal. I applied, as far as possible, the same principles to solar, my team was never rushed to complete a job, and it's amazing how much faulty roof work we found and fixed - do roofers even have qualifications? I was tempted to take on some subby teams, it may well have improved turnover and my profits, but would probably have increased my headaches too. I sometimes wonder if big companies charge silly money to cover poor workmanship from their subbies?

It is good to have a high standard of workmanship I have sacked staff who thought their standard of workmanship was acceptable

It was mostly foreign worker teams I've seen without scaffolding, and some die hard DIYers. Trouble is if you don't feel safe on the roof, you can't focus on doing the job right, so I'm not too surprised at some of the phone calls I got to fix badly installed arrays. One fella had water running down through his house to the lounge. Unfortunately it was a 'rent a roof' install, so I couldn't help him as it wasn't his array.

I remember the job in Albania we were about 25m up on a mast and struggling a bit to get an antenna fixed and one of local guys climbed up the mast with no harness or any sort of fall arrest to help us out at the end of the job we left our time expired kit for them as we had new kit ready to go for the next week, I often wonder did they ever use it

MCS did do some good, they kicked Everest off the register for using high pressure sales tactics.

But that is only one how many more need to be culled

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