Green Homes Scheme - invitation letter

Harry227

Just received a letter, addressed to the 'homeowner' from a private company called "Green Homes Scheme", the name of which sounds exactly like the Government's scheme.  The letter offers up to a £4000 grant to upgrade our current PVs from 250w to 450 w, which will apparently "not affect your FIT payments", with the upgrade providing an extra "10p per kw of generation in addition to your FIT payments".

We've no intention of changing anything, but we're curious if anyone else has received this letter, or similar.  Aside from a limitation of our inverter to deal with the greater generation, and also the local (very rural) pole mounted transformer - which previous took time to gain permission/confirmation from The National Grid, we've now less than 10 years remaining on our current agreement,  and finally we're also suspicious of unsolicited offers, being crusty ol' gits that we are!  

QrizB

Fails the sniff test and there are reports on other forums of it being a scam.

Eg. https://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/scam.142183/

Edit to add:

On Trustpilot there's a suggestion that they are related to ESE Group, who were investigated by Trading Standards a few years ago. There's a thread about it somewhere.

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.greenhomesscheme.com

Harry227

QrizB said:

Fails the sniff test and there are reports on other forums of it being a scam.

Eg. https://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/scam.142183/

Edit to add:

On Trustpilot there's a suggestion that they are related to ESE Group, who were investigated by Trading Standards a few years ago. There's a thread about it somewhere.

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.greenhomesscheme.com

Yes, our thoughts too.  And there is nowhere on the letter which refers to a Companies House listing, reg. no. or similar.  It's headign for the recycle bin (once we've removed our home address of course!). 

tim_p

Sorry to resurrect an old post but one of these letters dropped on my mat on Friday. No interest in the company who are almost certainly a bunch of shysters!
The thing that interested me was the statement in the letter about upgrading existing 250W panels to 400W?
Anyone know if this is possible / allowed?  Depending on system this would take you above the 3.68kWp figure but is there any truth in their statement?
Alternatively, could you replace 4x250W panels with 2x500W ones?

QrizB

tim_p said:

The thing that interested me was the statement in the letter about upgrading existing 250W panels to 400W?
Anyone know if this is possible / allowed?

Possible? Yes, with some caveats. The standard panel size from the early 2010s was about 1600x1000 mm, but nowadays they're generally larger at 1800x1200 mm or so. Whether you can fit 16 of the larger panels into the same space as your current ones will depend on your specific situation.

Allowed? Yes, again with conditions. If you're receitFIT payments you'll have to contact your provider beforehand and get their agreement. Your FIT payments will be pro-rata'd, so if eg. you had 4kWp and refit with 6kWp you'll be paid for 4/6ths of your generation.

tim_p said:

Depending on system this would take you above the 3.68kWp figure but is there any truth in their statement?

If your inverter stays at 3.68kW then AIUI you won't need G99 permission / approval from your DNO. If you increase your inverter size you will need G99.

tim_p said:

Alternatively, could you replace 4x250W panels with 2x500W ones?

I guess you could (you'd still need the approval of your FIT provider) but I don't know what benefit you'd see?

tim_p

Benefit?  It might free up space to add another 2 south-facing panels to my second system, if not it would look better. But main reason would be to be able to add to total generation (providing DNO approves)