They make it very hard for you to leave their site.
I have received emails from my visitors asking about GreenDIYEnergy.com. They want to know if they are for real. Again I am not an expert in solar at all so my opinion here really doesn’t mean that much, but I can tell you that when you visit their site they make it extremely difficult to leave. (To be far Earth4energy.com is the same way – they appeared to have copied GreenDIYEnergy.com site almost exactly – even the pop-ups).
I mean really difficult. If you try to close your browser’s tab for their site or try to leave their site for another you get a pop message below. It is the kind of annoying pop-up that might be associated with a virus or malware (it isn’t because my machine is not affected after a full scan). It just feels like a roach motel, you can enter the site but you can never leave.
After the pop-up asking if you really want to leave you get another pop-up below it asking if you want $10 off their training product. This is their chat window with an attractive female (Susan) that is not real, see the text in the screen capture, kind of funny.
Then after you hit the close link on the chat pop-up you get yet another pop-up asking if you really want to close the chat window. Wow 3 pop-ups and you still have not left the site!
To be honest I have not read through their really long sales copy on the home page, but it does appear that they offer a 100% refund policy, so who knows, perhaps it is a really good “step-by-step guide that will show you exactly how to build your own solar panel system”. I have no idea.
If anyone has tried this product please comment below so others can learn from your experiences with this site.
Again, I am not saying it is a bad product since I have not tried it, all I am saying is they have an annoying way of treating their site visitors that what to leave their site in my opinion.
If anyone from GreenDIYEnergy.com is reading this and feels that I have not treated them fairly on the pop-up issue I would be happy to sit down with you in a video interview where you can explain your pop-ups and your product (I notice they are located in Arvada, Colorado – not far from me).
)
I guess the reason their pop-ups bother me the most is it reflects on the solar industry as a whole. If this is the first site a person comes to to research solar power I bet they will come away with a bad feeling about the industry as a whole.
Update:
Also you can see from their Twitter post they are making a ton of money (over $11k in two weeks) from their product:
after only 2 weeks of launching GreenDIYenergy.com, we sold 226 solar guides yesterday! O’yea!!!
Below is Byron Walker telling a seminar class about how he makes money from this GreenDIYEnergy site at the Golden Community Center.
Here is his seminar class below learning how to become affiliate marketers. They are also learning how to write “fake” reviews for his product so they can make money too. I can’t wait for the new rules coming out in December that will make these fake review sites have to disclose that the are getting paid when someone fills out a form on there site or sent to Byron’s site. Just do a Google search for “GreenDIYEnergy review” and you will see the extent of this problem.
Bryon admitted that he does not know anything about solar (“I am not a techy”) in his seminar class, he told them he hired a person to build the panel and another person to shoot the video for him that he sells.
I have a copy of his first PDF Ebook that one of my visitors sent me and found it to be a duplicate of another solar DIY guide from Michael Davis written over a year ago. In his seminar he talks about buying the rights to articles like this for a very low price and then make tons of money off it later. I bet Mr. Davis won’t like to hear that.
Bryon confirmed that he did buy the rights to use Mr. Davis content:
The short answer is yes, I have a signed Private Label Rights agreement with Michael Davis to use any and all content and pictures on his site dated March 19, 2009. Go ahead and contact Mike and ask him, he’ll tell you this is the case.
So if anyone is interested in building a solar panel on their own you really don’t need to buy an ebook from him, you can just go to Mr. Davis site and get it for free.
I know I am picking on Byron but other sites are just as bad as his and have copied Mr. Davis work as well. Check out how earth4energy.com tells its affiliates to buy links.
Link buying can be very profitable if you choose the correct websites to advertise on. As the affiliate manager I am able to see all of the traffic stats I can see what type of traffic converts well for Earth4Energy. What I have noticed is that news (USA) websites and online radio/broadcasting/talkback show website traffic converts well. What you can do is setup a simple review website and purchase a link on a high traffic news/radio website. Monitor the sales and work out if the traffic source is profitable.
So in conclusion – it is not a scam product (even though it has that feeling) but you can get it for free from the guy that wrote it in the first place. And as for getting tech support from Byron who admits not knowing anything about solar as a value add to his product – that doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Update: If you do a search for GreenDIYEnergycom Review on Google and you look at all the ads on the right side (Adwords) you will see a bunch if not all fake review sites that are trying to sell you the book (these sites do not disclose that they have a relationship with Bryon.
If you click on the 4th one down you would think it would take you to Review-ratings.info but it redirects you to GreenDIYEnergy.com. Boy that is scammy and so not legit! The copy on that ad cracks me up, “Green DIY Energy a Scam? The truth will Shock You!”. Yea, right. I reported this to Google, let’s see if they clean it up. I’m sure they get lots of complaints.
I noticed that a Squidoo.com page ranks really well for “GreenDIYEnergy Scam” on Google so I add this comment to the Lens, lets watch and see if it gets deleted. See my comment below.
Another update:
I found a Twitter account called Cooler_Planet run by a Carolyn Ashcroft (if that is the real name) that was stinking up the place with all of it’s offers to sell you GreenDIYEnergy type info. Every tweet was a crappy sales pitch. I thought at first that the guys over at Cooler Planet had something to do with it, but when I contacted them they said no it was not them and they got the account shut down.
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From one of my readers comes the following review of groSolar from Vermont
Yes, it’s a total scam, preying on solar newbies.
In fact, as I write this, I see a variation of the ad right below this comment box, here on SolarDave. “Build Your Own Solar Panel” —just another variation of the “Earth4Energy” network.
There’s a lot of debunking, if you can unbury it from the fake positive reviews that the scam perpetrates to gain as many Google natural listings as possible. I wrote up one myself at http://www.kenoatman.com …and I just wrote the BBB, since the DIY solar panel sites sometimes illegitimately display their logo.
Folks truly interested in solar need to ACTIVELY work against this, speak up. It’s sucking away some of our integrity, which we’re working hard to build otherwise.
I am the owner of GreenDIYenergy.com. Thanks Dave for bringing up the “exit pop up” issue with our website. We are working on making the website more user friendly and I agree that the pop ups make it harder to navigate around and exit.
As far as the comments from kenoatman, I don’t see how I could ever sway him from his strong one sided opinion of our DIY renewable energy products but I will point our a few things for other people to consider when reading his comments.
The DIY solar and wind projects are easy to complete for the average person. How kenoatman can say otherwise when he hasn’t seen even seen the DIY guide books and videos doesn’t make sense to me.
Lets face it, buying retail solar and wind products is VERY expensive and there are thousands of people out there that would be using renewable energy, thus reducing green house gasses, IF they could afford it. The average person can’t afford to buy retail.
The GreenDIYenergy.com product is only $50 (or $40 with the exit pop up discount) and most people can build solar panels for under $100 when using our guide. If your application is small (backyard shed, water pump, etc), you can pick up a cheap inverter and your total costs are below $200. You can add more panels, batteries, etc to create even more power if someone wants to expand. The point is that it is very inexpensive and allows more people to start using renewable energy.
I’m not sure how making solar and wind affordable and getting people started with renewable energy hurts the industry. I believe it helps it in a big way because more and more people can get started without the large price tag that normally keeps people out.
We have a quality product. A very detailed guide and even videos showing the step by step process. It is a lot of value for just $50. From our 60 day, no questions asked refund policy, we have less then 2% of people ask for a refund on our CD-ROM product. People love it.
I don’t expect that I’ll sway kenoatman to change his view and I’m sure he will write a follow up post here slamming me and my evil product. But decide for yourself. You can either wait until you can afford a retail solar/wind system or you can do something about it now. The more people that get involved with using renewable energy the larger and stronger the industry becomes.
And yes, we are members of the BBB with an “A” customer rating.
PS – one more thing… the GreenDIYenergy.com guide is currently being used in numerous schools around the USA to teach kids about DIY renewable energy. And we just returned from teaching an Indian Reservation in South Dakota how to build solar panels and we have a trip scheduled to Uganda, Africa for next month. We match all donations made to SolarGoodWill.org
Byron,
Thanks for stopping by. I am glad to hear you are working on your site to make it more user friendly – perhaps we can see those annoying pop ups go away. If you do get rid of them, please stop by and let us know here. (I think if you are in the solar business for the long term and not here for the quick buck, you will do the right thing and get rid of of the pop ups).
Also, once again I extend my offer for you to come over and answer a few questions on video so my viewers can see more of what you are about.
Dave
Yea sure, i’d be glad to answer some questions on video for your group. I’ll email you.
Byron
Byron,
Thanks for accepting my offer on a video interview. I have a few questions I would like to ask that I have already thought of and if anyone else has questions they would like to have answered please ask them below.
It’s a scam, Dave.
And Byron: You haven’t built a single homemade panel or windmill, and your house isn’t powered by them. You’re just making money misleading people down a dead-end.
I could sell an e-book telling people how to build their own automobile and save thousands because they’re so expensive. Most people wouldn’t buy it, because they know automobiles are complicated to assemble.
They don’t know that about wind and solar. So Byron pretends to save them money, but no-one is going to save the money he claims.
So, it’s not scamming in the sense of pick-pocketing, but it’s a minor con game being multiplied by the web. Throwing away $50 on an e-book is pissing people off about renewables.
Shame on you Byron. I don’t suppose you’ll invite me to see how your house runs on homemade panels, because you know it’s bunk. You sound like you could use your silver-tongued talents for something that is useful to the world. Please consider it.
I’m sorry to hear it’s spreading to duping Indian reservations and Ugandans now.
It’s a scam for people who can’t do math.
How much energy falls on a solar-panel-size piece of your roof over the course of a day? Certainly not enough to heat your house. Maybe enough to LIGHT your house.
Now bear in mind that solar panels — the VERY BEST solar panels in the world, not these rinky-dink things people would be building in their garage — don’t approach anywhere near 100% efficiency. Last I heard, the professionals were getting something less than 40%. Your system can’t be even close to that.
You’ll spend untold money building these rinky-dink things, you’ll damage your roof putting them up, and you’ll get enough power out of them to run a light bulb ALMOST all night long.
There’s no Uganda trip — get real.
Byron — if you were for real, I wouldn’t have had to drill through, what, seven pages of fake reviews on Google to find this page, now would I?
Curt
One thing I think Byron is very good at is amassing all these people to be affiliates for his product and write fake reviews. Those fake reviews really bother me.
I guess Byron thought he would pull a scam on Africans, since Africans have been pulling scams on us for the past few years. In that regard, way to go Byron!
However, Byron comes from the school of George Castanza, in that “it isn’t a lie if you believe it is true”. I am a electrical engineer, and I challenge Byron to show me the cost savings he is claiming. I believe I know a bit more about electricty than Byron, and I will tell you that yes, while you will generate electricity building the panels that are shown on his site (or here for free -> http://www.mdpub.com/SolarPanel/index.html), you will not cut your electric bill in half (unless you are using next to no electricity to begin with). A more realistic number is less than 10%.
Let me break this down into numbers that the general public can understand:
A typical A/C unit uses over 4,000 watts. Each one of the panels that are in these plans will produce roughly 40 watts. It would take 100 panels just to offset the cost of an A/C alone. Also keep in mind that Panels do not collect energy at night, and are also affected by clouds, trees, and the angle to the sun, so most panels are never absorbing 100% of their capability.
Bottom line, yes you will save some money, but the savings will be so low, that even the money you invest to build panels, buy and replace batteries as needed, purchase an inverter, etc…, it will take years to recover your investment.
It is upsetting when people like Byron use a promising industry like solar power to mislead people into thinking that they are going to save thousands of dollars. Solar power has promise. Unfortunately the actual ROI (Return On Investment) is so high, it takes many years before you can pay off the system.
To everyone reading this, do your homework before handing your hard-earned money over to a snake-oil salesman. And to Byron, my suggestion is that I hope your passport gets stolen on your visit to Africa and you can stay with people of your own kind.
OW, I must admit I laughed on your last line.
Thank you for writing about this. The roach motel reference is priceless, having been mired in it’s fetid confines myself.
You’re welcome – glad I could help!
“OW above” has a good point. I’ve been looking at solar kits for many months and most manufacturers sell 1K panel minimums. So to effectively max my investment I would need about 3-4 of these panels. Thats about $20K (parts only).
So the book may teach you the ins and outs of solar energy but to get some payback you need to go somewhat commercial.
I subscribe to this web site and have purchased their power save 1200 energy saver and their solar fan.
http://www.power-save.com/
I am also a proud owner of a geothermal system as well. No more oil….
We bought because we are newbies. and they sold usabout five other books,valued at a lot , but sold to us for 69 dollars. I tried for months to find out where these books were and could not find them. I was reassured they were on the cd, but were not. I still have never found them. Nor were we offered a refund. This is one of the worsed cd’s ever. Don’t buy this ! This guy NOW this page is exactly right.!!!
Rebecca, thanks for stopping by and leaving your comment to let others know your experience with GreenDIYEnergy.
Yes Folks the GreenDIYenergy is as close to a scam as it gets.
Just a bunch of crap on a homemade CD and I’m still trying to get my money back………….. what a rip off……………… They won’t return my emails and no one answers the phone…………Save your money………..
Scott,
Thanks for letting us know that GreenDIYenergy is not returning your emails or answering the phone.
I am also seeing more referral data on “GreenDIYEnergy Sucks”. Unhappy customers it sounds like.
Thanks for letting us know about green diy energy. We should be aware of that scum site.
Yeah, that’s scam’s still on. If you google, ‘solar roof tiles’, the second link that comes up is http://solarrooftilesreview.com/ which is another shadow site for greendiyenergy.com.
Apart from the general smell that the websites (solarrooftilesreview and greendiyenergy) produced, the grammatical errors in solarrooftilesreview reminded me of people from a certain part of India (I’m Indian too), so i was pretty certain he was no ‘Dan Brown’ (that’s the name he picked!). A quick search through google images confirmed that his picture from the site was a stock photo from Shutterfly.
http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-30193657/stock-photo-green-job-series-young-electrician-repairs-solar-panel.html
Can I report this to google so it doesn’t come up so high on their search results? How?
@Manish Wow that is funny with the stock photo!