Good Office and bad Offices.

We have now been moved from cards to pay for our electricity to a periodic billing from readings. No official notification (of course) and no details of cost per unit or how (and how often) we will be billed. Can't understand why the policy is not to notify. It is almost like this would be an admission of weakness, rather than the opposite where we might begin to respect the owners or at least to understand the problems and reasons for making changes. More later on this I am sure.
On a completely different subject I have moved my email solution from Alentus to Microsoft Office 365. This is the online 'Cloud' version of Microsoft Office that includes an online version of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Onenote - and Outlook of course with ActiveSync to sync to your phone. Storage is now 25GB and at a cost of £4 a month compared to my previous £8 a month for Outlook only and 300Mb. An interesting and easy to use development in Office that is easy to use and set up.

Joint Efforts

All tidied up from the removal of the little office, the park is looking good now. A lot of work by the residents themselves though with the neighbour of the old office site even power-washing the empty pitch. There was a meeting with our MP (nice chap) to bring him up to date with all the happenings. There has been a great spell of summer weather and this encouraged the sporty types and a badminton net appeared. There was a lot of activity that was probably regretted the following day. I hear there may be a site tournament when the sun returns and the winner will have proved themselves fit for snow-clearing duties this winter!

Office & Fur

The little office has trundled away with a bit of debris left behind. Hopefully tidied up soon. Superb few days weather and time to enjoy a coffee on the patio - where we spotted what we thought was an otter but turned out to be 3 mink. Seems there is some project at the moment to reduce the numbers of them in the area.

No mates for Bill and Ben

Weeds removed by the Team on Friday so the park looking much better now. Also their boss saying good things so we feel a bit better. Superb sunny weekend and a superb place to be beside the river, ducks and folks floating past and peace and quiet.

Who said What

The results from the consultation (on proposed changes to the Mobile Homes Act) have been published and are worth having a look through. So the final proposals will be influenced by this as I understand. Waiting now to hear comments on the responses.....

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Built-Environment/Housing/privateowners/Residentialmobilehomes

Be part Of Better

Met with MSP today and had interesting discussion about the progress of amendments to the Mobile Homes Act and the recent Policy Cosultation Paper. It will be interesting to read what feedback was received due to the consultation and hopefully this will influence the final amendment in a positive way. It is a fine balance of course between the parks remaining a viable proposition for owners and giving the residents a fair deal and security. All the stakeholders had an opportunity to respond to the Paper and this will make it particulaly worth seeing the detail. The timescale of the implementation of the amendment is also encouranging as a draft SSI exists it could become law by end of year or early next. Lets hope it is worth waiting for and that it has some way of being enforced.

Want to buy a KWh?

Still struggling with this idea of paying 23p for each unit of electricity we use. Looking around all the providers sites I can't see anything that works out as high as this, well perhaps for the first bunch of units but then a drop to a lower charge for the rest. When they sort out the 20% VAT they are charging on and remove the climate levy it should go down a bit admittedly. I asked a friend on mine that has a fairly large caravan site and their units work out at 8p for the pitches and 17p for the business units. This is just dividing the total bill by the number of units used. It is a tricky situation really as the residents have no say over the provider that is chosen or the pricing plan so what can we do but trust this is the best deal - at the moment it does not feel like it.
On a positive front the weeds were sprayed yesterday so maybe they will keel over soon, if the rain today didn't wash them clean that is. There is a bunch of Japanese Knotweed lurking on the river bank - now that is an impressive weed! I'm sure it followed me through the park the other night.

Need for change

Before buying a park home I spent a long time looking around the Internet to get an idea of how secure we would feel living on a park. There is a lot of negative information but I thought we would be really unlucky to find ourselves with an unscrupulous park owner. Also after reading through the Mobile Homes Act I felt reasurred although there were some aspects that still worried me or that I felt were unfair.
We went ahead and have a lovely place to stay that is not too costly to run and over the last two years has been almost all we had hoped for. A change of owners seemed to be encouraging, as anything I could find out about them looked positive. I hope our experiences so far are not typical of what we can expect in the future.

I'm not saying that buying a park home is a bad idea, we are still very pleased with what we have bought and where we live. All we expect is that all legalities are observed and we are treated with some consideration and really just as a valued customer. Something is needed in the Act that covers these homes in a fair way that still allows the owners to make a profit while protecting and enforcing the rights of the residents.

Not Bothered

One of our residents took on this issue of the rights to enter our home and called a senior manager. I find it quite worrying that this manager insists that they (the owners or an employee) have legal right of access to enter a home in the same way as they have the right to come on to a pitch (in Scotland). I understand that during a subsequent call with another resident that the same manager was still claiming these same rights. Is the Act open to interpretation in this way? As far as I am aware all the sources that have been consulted say no, they do not have this right of access to enter a home. This needs clarification from an indisputable source one way or the other.

Just anticipating

Well, lots of support through questions in the forums and also from indignant friends and family as I tell them the story. It all helps of course and we will see what the week brings as I have sent off various communications to the Legal’s and Political’s. I suppose it might seem an over-reaction but it is such a basic right that no one has access to your home without your permission that it has riled me when I'm not someone that is easily riled. My telephone call to the person making the claim of access rights might be returned but I don’t expect so.  

Warm air where?

On the subject of green savings I though it was about time to clean the filters on our heat recovery system and to stop thinking about mismanagement. We have fitted these systems to our last three homes and other than a bit of crawling about in lofts with ducting they are quite easy to do. Basically the 'stale' air is drawn from the kitchen and bathrooms and fresh air blown into the other rooms. The clever bit is that the stale air is passed through a heat exchanger and this warms the air coming back in. In theory this can recover 80% or more of the heat, the house stays fresh and no open windows let the precious heat escape. Running costs are very low as the fans are super efficient and in most unit the heat exchanger is passive and uses no power.
It would take a long time to recover the cost of installation but the air quality is worth buying.

Up tae 23p

Aye well the man arrived unannounced as expected and set our meter to 23p a unit. Not his fault of course he was doing as he was told but I think management have a fear of paper as we have seen nothing actually written down. What happens next we will have to wait and see. Strikes me that this is way to make all electricity users think green. What can we turn off now? Do we need the oven to cook this? How much of a load can the washing machine take? This has become a challenge to see how little we can use.

Legally hot day

A bit too hot today but not worrying as it will be back to normal tomorrow. The keyboard got a bit hot as well as I browsed around the Mobile Homes Act. Everything I see says that the park owner has no right of access to the home itself. They do to the Pitch, which is fair enough. We will have no problem letting folks in if they tell us what they want to do and arrange a suitable time. Anyway, fired off a letter to their legal department - it was not easy to find the head office address, I find that worrying. More about this later.
Watched the ducks playing with our on-site weeds. Well at least they like them.

Welcome - anytime?

Oh well a bit of a stushie today I hear. It seems the manager was on the site to configure the meters. But we were supposed to be told beforehand. Even if I was here I would have said no. The owners say their manager has access to the homes anytime they like (well 9 to 5). Can that really be right? I thought they could get on the grounds (or the Pitch as they call it, not happy about that either!) but not inside the home. Tell me first Eh - it is only polite. Will have to find out more about this as I'm not happy with the thought of someone having access on demand. Anyway the sun is supposed be out tomorrow - just a quick visit before the weekend apparently. And we have notification of the changes that have to be made to the meter - well someone told somebody so that makes it official. Hmmm more later.

Going Up?

Not sure what is happening with electricity charges now. A rumour is going about that the cost-per-unit will double or more. It seems we were to be advised of the new rates and when they were going to change them but the manager was on the park trying to do it yesterday completely unannounced. Nobody has had notification of what the new rate will be either. Not looking good! The weeds are also still getting longer...

Weeds anyone?

The immediate problem we have with the site is the lack of any maintenance. "Be patient", we are told, "it will take time for us to get eveything done". Well we all think that maintaining the park is something that should happen all the time and we can't understand what the delay is. More later in this also.

Snow and Tax

What we have all discussed on our park is the council tax band we pay. We are rated band B. I'm not sure that the same system to assess a house applies to park homes. We also see less services in things like street lighting and snow clearing. All the other services we use of course and these are irrespective of the value of where you live. The band is calculated by calculating what your home would have been worth in 1991 - there are a few online calculators that will do this. This seems to calculate that a house worth 100,000 now would have been worth £36,000 in 1991 so it is Band C.
However a park home is not a house, not registered with the land registry and so on, but it is a chattel, like a car or caravan. The value may increase but is more likely to decrease. I think that unless it is an extraordinarily grand park home or on a very large plot they should fall into band A.
If not then surely we should at least have the snow cleared from our small access road. It seems, although we still have to confirm it, that the owners deny it is their responsibility as if they do clear the snow and someone falls on a cleared section, then they could be liable. This does not seem so be a reason not to do it as they do have a resonsibility to maintain the park and the access road belongs to them. More on this later!

Funny Electricity

The supply of electricity on park homes is usually quite a bit different from a house.
In your house you can choose a supplier and you have your own meter that is read by you or your supplier and you get a bill or pay standing order. In park homes the supplier usually supplies the owner and this is then charged on to the park home. With our home we have a card meter and we buy cards to use in it. These are the same meters used by landlords and can be set to a price per unit, 10p 12p or whatever. The rules regarding what you can be charged is fairly clear. The owner cannot make a profit on the electricity but can add something for management/infrastructure or whatever. Hopefully most owners are being completely honest and up front about this and making it clear about what are why the tenant is being charged. After all the tenant has no choice in what provider is chosen and has to rely on the owner choosing the best deal for the right reasons. Since our park has been taken over we are waiting to hear what rate we will be set to so more about this later on...

Park Home - a good choice?

After a fairly short time of thinking about it, we decided in 2009 to buy a park home on a park in Crieff, Perthshire. It was not a difficult decision to make, these homes are very nice. Well most of the time they are.
The one we looked at was in a lovely position beside a river, very well laid out and equipped and not a bad price. So we went for it. We are still happy with the decision and it is now our only home - we sold the bricks and mortar.
For anyone who is not familiar with park homes, they are a prefabricated house of wooden construction. They arrive in two parts on the back of a lorry and are bolted together. Bricked up around the base they look like a small bungalow. They now have a very high standard of insulation and if looked after will last for decades.
The downside or the reason they sometimes have bad publicity is that they are almost always sited on a park, on a pitch, and it begins to sound (and is regarded by Councils and the law) like a caravan park. This does not detract from quality of the surroundings or lifestyle. These parks have rules that will usually mean you can enjoy a quiet, comfortable life. For people who have it as their only home, the park must be a residential park and not for holidays only. You pay a monthly rental for your pitch and this varies widely, depends on location, location and quite a few other things. We actually thought that ours was in a lovely location and we could never afford to buy a plot like this and put a house on it. We think we would have to pay the equivalent of the pitch fee for 40 years at interest free just to buy a plot, it might be bigger and have more distance to our neighbours but we find the one we have is just fine.
The other potential problem is the owners of the park who can make life very difficult for the residents. There are good and bad of course.
This blog will follow our interaction with one of the bigger operators of residential parks in the UK, Wyldecrest Homes. The site we live on was previously owned by Welch Homes but after some problems it was taken over by Wyldecrest Homes. Our life here over the last two years has been fine, there have been some things not done as they should have been and we are hoping for much better from the much bigger organisation that has taken over. We will state facts here, no unfounded accusations but simply our week by week experiences. We hope it will help anyone else trying to make the choice of moving to a park home, releasing some of the capital from their bricks and mortar and living very comfortably. It may show some of the downsides and perhaps help in knowing what to expect.