Gas fitter's rate of pay

cyclonebri1

MonsieurFrugal wrote: »

What about his time in the office filling out paperwork ? I'm an electrician and spend lots of time in the office filling out certificates etc we certainly charge customers for it!

What about the OPs time earning his money, you want him to give that up too??

I think about jobs in bed at night, should I chaRGE???????????

cyclonebri1

This has now become a trade against punter thread, not uncommon.

What do we see?

A faction defending legit or bogus rates?, punter demanding value, :T:T

Get real guys, it really isn't a black art, a point I mentioned earlier, but it is about not getting ripped of.

missprice

cyclonebri1 wrote: »

This has now become a trade against punter thread, not uncommon.

What do we see?

A faction defending legit or bogus rates?, punter demanding value, :T:T

Get real guys, it really isn't a black art, a point I mentioned earlier, but it is about not getting ripped of.

But the OP had 3 quotes all around the same cost, so unless there is a coterie in OPs town all hoping to rip everyone off all the time, it was a good reasonable price. So who cares if it took less time than planned. Wow the gas fitter made some money. If it had taken all day instead then the engineer would have been on much less but OP would not have said 'oh here have more money because you won't have made your hourly rate'

bundly

Thanks Cyclone for your well-considered reply.

Just to respond to your final point:

cyclonebri1 wrote: »

next time maybe ask before the event and not after?

Not poss: it wasn't until he'd finished that I found out the job only took 90 minutes.

I think if he hadn't quoted a per hour rate, I would not have started to feel a little bit ripped off. If he'd just said, I charge £150 to replace a pump, and the materials will cost £100, that would have been much better.

B.

bundly

Its fascinating to me to see the posters on this thread talking about the paperwork, travelling, insurance, time spent making up quotes and invoices, and chasing them up etc because I, too, work for an hourly rate sometimes (I freelance for a publisher) and I don't get paid for all the peripheral administrative tasks I do like emailing and invoicing etc, nor for using up the electricity, A4 paper and printing ink here in my home on their job.

I also employ a house cleaner who is paid by the hour for two hours' work. If she tried to leave the house after half an hour, I'd immediately suspect that she hadn't done the job properly.

I'm just making some observations here, not looking for a punch up.

Nobody responded to the masseur scenario. Let's face it, if that happened to you, you'd feel cheated.

B.

C_Mababejive

cyclonebri1 wrote: »

This has now become a trade against punter thread, not uncommon.

What do we see?

A faction defending legit or bogus rates?, punter demanding value, :T:T

Get real guys, it really isn't a black art, a point I mentioned earlier, but it is about not getting ripped of.

Very few things are black arts. I have litigated on behalf of myself and others and never lost a case but im not a "solicitor".

I may give myself a scale and polish at the weekend when i have a spare five minutes.

phill99

bundly wrote: »

Its fascinating to me to see the posters on this thread talking about the paperwork, travelling, insurance, time spent making up quotes and invoices, and chasing them up etc because I, too, work for an hourly rate sometimes (I freelance for a publisher) and I don't get paid for all the peripheral administrative tasks I do like emailing and invoicing etc, nor for using up the electricity, A4 paper and printing ink here in my home on their job.

I also employ a house cleaner who is paid by the hour for two hours' work. If she tried to leave the house after half an hour, I'd immediately suspect that she hadn't done the job properly.

I'm just making some observations here, not looking for a punch up.

Nobody responded to the masseur scenario. Let's face it, if that happened to you, you'd feel cheated.

B.

But your hourly rate will reflect that you are freelance and have add on costs that go with running a business. Lets just say you earned £30 an hour freelance? If you were employed aa a journalist, writer etc, your equivilant hourly rate would be, say £20. This is because you are in someone else's premises using their heating and electricity, using their pc, paper, phone, liability insurance etc etc plus that you got paid holidays, sick, had pension payments and the like.

When a plumber charges you £100 an hour, he doesn't get £800 a day based on an 8 hour day. He only gets £100 an hour on contact time. So realistically, he may well be on £300 a day.

It amazes me that people are willing to get an engineer in from Hotpoint or Hoover when their washing machine breaks down and br charged £70 an hour. But you know that the engineer doesn't get that. He will be on a salary of £25k per annum. The other costs go on vans, call centres, offices etc, but most people don't mind this. But when you get a self employed person in and they charge a decent hourly rate, people go into apoplexy.

ollski

If he had been there for 8 hours because the system airlocked or any related valves leaked would you have been insisting he increased his hourly rate?
When I did little jobs like this I would just have to give a price based on an average time and 3 hours sounds fair. If I was lucky and the bungs held in the header tank and the valves undid and didnt leak then great, I was done in 40 minutes. Very unlikely though.
All dealer garages I've been to in recent years operate the same way aswell, went to get a price for a wheel bearing change on my van the other day and the guy looked in the book and said it was 4.5 hours labour plus the cost of the part and vat. He didn't even see my van.

Doozergirl

bundly wrote: »

Its fascinating to me to see the posters on this thread talking about the paperwork, travelling, insurance, time spent making up quotes and invoices, and chasing them up etc because I, too, work for an hourly rate sometimes (I freelance for a publisher) and I don't get paid for all the peripheral administrative tasks I do like emailing and invoicing etc, nor for using up the electricity, A4 paper and printing ink here in my home on their job.

I also employ a house cleaner who is paid by the hour for two hours' work. If she tried to leave the house after half an hour, I'd immediately suspect that she hadn't done the job properly.

I'm just making some observations here, not looking for a punch up.

Nobody responded to the masseur scenario. Let's face it, if that happened to you, you'd feel cheated.

B.

The masseur situation is different. On any beauty treatment list, against a massage is an amount of time. You are buying a 60 minute massage. (But this is not just her time, it is her overheads too).

On the other hand, when I go to the hairdresser, I pay for my colour and my cut and there's a price against that as well, but no time. If my hair decides on that day to lift faster because it's warm outside or takes ages because I've let my roots grow too long, I could be there for three or five hours - my hairdresser charges the same price (which is ultimately based on how long it takes on average and what she needs to take home in a year after she's paid her overheads and blocked out time for admin).

If her price is comparable to others of a similar standard and my hair looks great afterwards then I have received what I expected for the price I expected. The time frame is neither here nor there for me, I have achieved my objective regardless of how she said it would take her. She takes on an element of risk for me - will it take the time she planned? Could she have fitted in someone else after all or will she run late for her next customer - she doesn't really know.

Similar, your time is worth money, your printer cost money, the stamps cost money. Of course you are charging for those - you have to pay for it whether it's cold cash or the physical limit on the hours you can bill out on the fun stuff because of the admin time you have to take around it. You work 40 hours but bill 20 hours to the customer because they don't account for your admin time! They think your hourly rate is twice what it actually is...

bundly

ollski wrote: »

If he had been there for 8 hours because the system airlocked or any related valves leaked would you have been insisting he increased his hourly rate?

No, HE would have charged me more.

He told me that he didn't expect to find [something or other jargon thing which I have now forgotten] but if he did, then it would cost me another £50 as it would take an hour to put that right. As it was, he said he didn't find that this thing [whatever it was] had happened.

But it would have been bloody interesting if he had. Because having told me the job would take 3 hours @ £50 if simply a pump change, and an extra one hour @ £50 if this extra thing needed doing, how could he stand there and ask me for the extra £50 for going over the 3 hours, if he'd done the whole job in less than 2 hrs?

I don't know if everyone on here is on a fat salary (in which case why are you on MoneySavingExpert?) but when you only earn £7 an hour stacking shelves or £10 an hour editing books it's hard to find this money to pay all these people, so you don't want to feel ripped off by them.

Doozer: You are buying a 60 minute massage.

Indeed. I was also told that I was buying 3 hours of a plumber's time @£50 an hour.

B.