I opened my paper yesterday to see the following wildly inaccurate,
misleading and sensationalist report regarding home energy saving and
renewable energy. It was in several of the papers, here are some
links.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle2648540.ece
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...13/nhip213.xml
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770
http://www.building.co.uk/story.asp?...de=3097491&c=0

There was a graphic in the Times, illustrating some figures.
http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c1...ic_smaller.jpg

The figures in the graphic are in cloud cuckoo land.
£761 to lag the tank? £755 for loft insulation?? £2,240 for
thermostatic radiator valves? At £9 per valve that's a pretty big
house!. All of the costs are between 5-20x exaggerated over real world
prices. I'd be interest in seeing the actual report, but of course,
there is no link to it.

What struck me in particular was this paragraph:

"But the study from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors shows
that some of the measures, such as solar panels to heat water, would
cost £5,000 to install but reduce average bills by only £24 a year and
would take about 208 years to pay back."

I work very hard to market ethically, using the "safest low figures"
as provided by the Energy Saving Trust and guidelines from the Solar
Trade Association

The very, very minimum saving on an appropriate solar thermal
installation is £75 per annum per panel, in the real world it's many
times more. I'm sure even the most sceptical person in this group can
see all of the figures are utter nonsense. But what to do about an
ignorant public?

Nonsense like this ruins years of hard work rebuilding the reputation
of an industry which has already had hard times due to mis-selling.

I've written to the RICS asking to the see full report, where the data
came from, and how they worked their figures out. But meantime, does
anyone have any thoughts on what the agenda of this report might be,
apart from to spread lies and mis-information?