Even the scroungiest companies pay well over £200 to their boiler men for a combi swap. I've not been in industry that long but from what I hear its been 1k labour for a combi swap when the times were allright and guys who worked on site were getting around £300 per boiler of which they would easily do 2 a day. Its a long days work you can't really do it every day (who will do the invoicing?) I've been pricing minimum £600 and almost never lost a quote but these guys are getting into the territory and its not like I can explain to the average punter that proper Magnacleanse needs one man for most of the day, ideally with system pre-treatment, aggitator which they absolutely not get for this money. Come to think of it Magnacleanse needs a pump so they cant even take the old boiler off in order to flush. Almost tempted to get this boiler installed to see how the hell they can promise all this for mere 600 quid.
Hi Stanios,
If you were working all day every day on site at £200 a day, you'd be earning (assuming £35 a day work-related costs) £38,000 a year, possibly a bit less as an RGI will have higher overheads than a plumber. The invoicing will be done by Boxt, but I see your point: to match this price you'd have to pay both labour and all of Boxt's administration costs in order to get full days of work every day, which we both know often is not the case. Realistically, though, isn't that not much below an average wage for an RGI outside central London? I am, of course, assuming normal working hours and a 35 hour week as that Boxt boiler won't be a long day's work because it will be thrown in.
If Boxt are using self-employed installers, then they could just be pushing the labour cost down. £600 a day for the guys that put the boilers in on sites? Possibly - sites do seem to be less tight on prices than domestic work is and quality of some of our newbuilds would suggest domestic customers are likely to be fussier. But that seems a lot when you consider a basic shopworker may take home £60 a day, with a lot of the middle management types not taking much more, I'm sure Boxt will find people who will take less. To be honest, if I were gas qualified and were happy to join the race to the bottom, I'd take this sort of work on as I've worked out I'm not really capable of spending more than £14,000 a year in the UK unless I started donating huge sums to charity. But I didn't start doing plumbing to chuck in boilers and I disn't go self-employed to make money for Boxt.
Perhaps they are undercutting you, but if you're getting the jobs anyway it may be due to the quality of your work or your reputation rather than price? After all, it suits Boxt as the hard work is all being done by the installers, and they may well win in that they will get a large number of installations. All we can hope is that a market will remain for those installers who cost a little more and do a better job, although Boxt will probably always provide better value for the customer in a short-sighted kind of way.
They are probably also making a fortune on the cost of the components. You're quoting merchant prices presumably, but you'll see that customers can get things cheaper online and if they can, so can Boxt. It cuts out the middlemen. (Same thing in the news industry, something I know a bit about, seeing as my family has been selling newpapers since 1940. Talking Italian prices, a customer can get a postal subscription of a magazine with a 20-70% discount on the cover price including free delivery. As a newsagent, the discount is under 20%. How can the customers be given that price when a newsagent's wholesale price is so much higher? Probably they want to put independent newsagents out of business - and it's working!)
