Marketing Issue [RE-wrenches]

Brad Bassett bsbassett at earthlink.net
Fri May 16 12:38:34 PDT 2003


In contrast to the PV industry, the plumbing/heating industry is very 
tightly controlled. I don't know if this is due to that industry being 
much older and more mature, or if it's the manufacturers, or 
distributors, or all of the above. 

I've recently tried to find a boiler or water heater for my own house. I 
challenge anyone to find a price for a Rinnai water heater, or Monitor 
MZ25, or Vitodens 200 boiler on the web. Not only could I not find a 
price, I could not find someone who would sell one to me as a homeowner. 
There were certainly no discount houses selling them.

When talking to a wholesale house as a contractor I got pricing, but 
also the warning that I could only get a warranty if it was installed by 
a certified installer. On the other hand, I was invited to attend a 
certification class for one of them next week at the local distributor, 
so I will be a certified installer after a 1 hour class I think.

There are a couple of brands of instantaneous water heaters that are 
much more widely available, ie: Takagi and Bosch, with pricing easy to 
find on the web. This leads me to believe that manufacturers have the 
choice of selling through established distribution channels or a more 
open distribution system. I'm sure there are pluses and minuses to both. 
I expect Takagi and Bosch get a lot more stupid tech calls than the 
others, but might sell more also.

I think it's possible that manufacturers in the PV industry believe that 
it would be hard to gain market share by restricting their sales to 
reputable distributors, they may or may not be correct. There may or may 
not be very many reputable distributors, certainly not every area has 
one. 


Brad Bassett
RWE Schott Solar Inc.
(formerly Schott Applied Power/Applied Power/Solar Engineering Services)
Tumwater, WA office
bsbassett at earthlink.net

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