The primary moan as I see it was the way in which the cuts were handled. FiTs clearly have a reducing element in them, as it should be, but twice pulling the rug at very short notice from underneath a new industry is very damaging.

I'm not even in FiTs to make money, but I've (probably) lost an entire installation because of the damage caused by the hamfistedness (and poor arithmetic, and Treasury shackles, and lamentably low ambition in terms of target GWp installed). That's a 100% loss to me on that install through no fault of mine.

Rgds

Damon

PS: Is the price of a 3-4KW system falling faster than the new income it generates?

positives..
The good thing about the fits rate drop is that the rip off companies with salesmen and energy showrooms and marketing in every shopping centre will probably be forced out of the market,after April, which should then revert to Electricians installing PV as a part of their business. As a guide my nearest biggest three competitors are a conservatory company, an energy company which are less than Ideal , and a sales company that used to sell telephones. All just use subbies on fixed prices and the standard of work is appalling.

negatives...
The top manufacturers , Sanyo and Schott are going to struggle to compete on price with a load of the Chinese rubbish flooding the market. Customers will need to be a lot more switched on and get hold of the TUV and Oko reports. TUV / EuPD recently tested over 400 manufacturers equipment and awarded a certificate "top brand PV seal " to the top ten brands. If you go much below manufacturer number 28 on the list the equipment is unlikely to last the next five years. That means there are over 350 brands of solar equipment currently on peoples roofs that will fail in a short time. As an example Suntech were bottom of the OKO report out of fifteen brands but loads of installers promote them because they are very cheap and therefore more profitable.
The recent stupidity by the government resulted in massive equipment shortages and inflated prices which resulted in far more crap equipment installs before the deadline but will cause major headaches for those that are left long term.

The whole idiotic install rush is going to happen again in March when the public realise that some properties will never acheive the energy rating and therefore PV will be a now or never for them. The last six weeks was just a dress rehearsal.

Try this ST, I just quickly scanned over some detail from the TÃœV Rheinland website and I read that the module manufacturers had to pay for the tests which were, "quite expensive", so maybe this could explain some companies being unwilling to participate. I have no idea where PV magazine originates.

http://www.pv-magazine.com/pv-test/

Thanks Owlman, shall have a look later.

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: Brianwilson</cite>A sideways thought on FITs,linking of fitness machines to allow additional home power generation with payback . Giant hamster wheels at Gyms would allow masochists to contribute to provision of power plus help fight the flab in our reported obese society.</blockquote>

As an aside, I've done a fair bit of research on human powered vehicles (specifically boats) and looked closely at using a human/electric hybrid system, either parallel or series. As part of this we did some measurements on the sort of power reasonably fit people can sustain when pedalling. Around 80 to 120 watts seems to be about it for most people, few can put out more than around 200 watts peak. The best cycling athletes can manage about 400 watts for maybe an hour.

One side effect from measuring electrical power from pedal generators was that it gave the "victims" we used for the experiments a new found respect for the vast amount of electrical power they used in their homes.