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Who needs ethics if you can be greedy?

November 10, 2025

It gets hot in the summer

I rarely have a very outspoken opinion about companies. However, my recent experience with a few businesses was so appalling that I cannot but write about them, and call them by name. When doing business, there are two companies you'd better avoid at all cost:

  • Group Protect, with their energy branch 'Energy Protect'
  • Test-aankoop, especially their (commercial) 'test-aankoop approved companies' branch

What went wrong? First, three lines converged into a point:

  1. I got a digital power meter as of the beginning of this year.
  2. During sunny summer days, my solar panels generate more energy than I can consume.
  3. I don't have an energy storage battery system.

This brought me to the conclusion that it made sense to install some air conditioning for the upper floors of my house. They get particularly hot on sunny summer days. The lower floor doesn't need it, as it is cool by nature.

Test-aankoop

Test-aankoop used to be a reliable consumer organization. With that, I mean an organization for the consumer. My parents were members for more than 40 years. As I received an e-mail by Test-aankoop that suggested Energy Protect as a company that had their approval for quality in their way of working and their customer treatment, I asked that company for a quote.

The incompetent lot of Group/Energy Protect

They sent one of their sales people over, a man with initials M.S. (not a good start, I realize afterwards). He boasted quite a bit about their Test-aankoop approved label. We discussed my needs and he made a quote. When going over that offer, I noticed that he underestimated quite a few items in the offering, a.o. only 5m of coolant tubes, while it was obvious that that was a gross underestimate. I alerted him to this observation. "You shouldn't care about that," he said, "the cheaper it is for you, the better, no? But if you insist, I'll put 10m of tubes in." Besides, our technical guy will be visiting you to double check everything.

Later that week I compared his offer amounting to (9.5 kEUR) with the offers I got from competing companies. The quotes were comparable, so I asked M.S. whether he would drop the price a bit to allow me to decide in his favor. He dropped it by 350EUR and I accepted. I even paid a 30% advance payment to make the sale final. This is not at all uncommon in Belgium. On the contrary.

When a few weeks later the technical guy, M.E., visited, it turned out he had a long list of items that were missing from the offer: tubing (20m!), condensation pumps, stands for the outside units, the rent for a lift during installation, ... The list was substantial. Result: at day end, I received new offer form M.S. in the e-mail, amounting to 11.5 kEUR, i.e. a surplus over over 2 kEUR, I kid you not.

I sent - I admit - a brutal e-mail back, telling them I thought this was unfair business: they made the mistakes and I had to pay for them. An easy wasy of doing business that is: make your customer decide on a low price that you later increase. I was willing pay part of that, but not all of it. M.E. appologized and sent me a new quote totalling 10.3 kEUR. I accepted. No appology from the sales guy. Only radio silence.

In preparation of the installation, I received an e-mail mentioning that on the first day, I had to reseve parking space for their lorry and the lift. I reseved that space on the agreed date, and I paid 44EUR to the city council for that.

And then the misery starts: they forgot to book the lift on the start date, so the technicians that were there for the installation had to go home without doing anything. Why did I pay for that parking space? And the misery continued. A few days later, they returned, but with a scissors lift. Result: my front garden is totally ruined by the multi-ton vehicle that they drove over my lawn. The result of the delay was also that I could not be at home during their final day of installation. Result: the electrical connection was not to spec and the outside finish (with black cable duct) was incomplete. It took them half a year to come back and finish it! And they even did not have to do the electrical issues, as I had solved these already myself.

A few weeks later I received the final bill, for a total amount of 11.5 kEUR! I complained again. Without any apology, I received a new bill for the correct amount: the remainder of 10.3 kEUR. I paid the very same day. However, what I would have expected, an explanation, an apology, nothing of the sort. Radio silence.

Another half year later, on a Friday, I get a short e-mail from N.L. (the internal sales coordinator of Group Protect) mentioning that I failed to pay 374.08EUR and that I had until Monday to pay my outstanding debt. I asked for an explanation. I did not get any, just another e-mail asking me to pay the debt, sending me a bill that I had never seen before. In the end, I figured out that it was the advance payment bill according to the amount of 10.3kEUR (of which I paid 30% of the original quote for about 9K1) for which they failed to send me a new bill more than a year ago). I paid the amount and I sent another - I admit - brutal e-mail to N.L. explaning to her all the things that went wrong, advizing M.E. (the only decent guy of them all) to go and look for another job, and suggesting that a short e-mail with an explanation and some apologies might have helped. Since then: radio silence.

Conclusion

My conclusion? Group/Energy Protect: no ethics, only greed.

In the mean time, one of the inside units started to leak. I'll fix it myself. No way I have those cowboys in my home again. And for Test-aankoop? They are in the same line: no ethics, only greed. They don't audit those companies for the quality of their business, they just have them pay for a 'test-aankoop approved' label. Though I canceled my subscription, Test-aankoop keeps sending me advertisement e-mails regarding 'good companies' that can do isolation works, install air condition, etc. I hope that these companies realize that from now on, I 'll be carefully reading those e-mails, to blacklist each and every one of them!