After days of trying to reach him, Richard Salmon finally agrees to talk. All of his competitors either never picked up the phone or flat out refused to speak. “The Londoner?” replied one woman, straining her voice above the sound of busying trucks. “I’m sorry, things are way too mental right now. I have to go!” she snapped, slamming down the phone.
It’s getting towards 6pm on Wednesday, bang in the middle of that maddening heatwave which baked the city to a halt. Richard pops up on my screen looking exhausted but relieved, with the kind of dazed joy typically reserved for marathon runners or women who have just given birth. “I am broken,” Richard sighs, slapping a hand on his reddened forehead. “I have no muscles or anything in my body. My vocal cords… uh… have also expired.”
Such exhaustion would make sense if Richard were a firefighter, or perhaps a stockbroker, hot off the trading room floor. But Richard is none of those things. He’s in an industry that’s far more lucrative, far more stressful in weeks like these. Richard is in the business of air conditioning.
As extreme heatwaves have become more common in recent years, the air con industry is taking off. But while air conditioning salesmen are doing just fine, selling isn’t where the real money’s made. Outdated regulations and restrictions on how to cool London’s homes has meant that installing permanent air conditioning systems is often either prohibitively expensive or impossible to get approval for. Besides, when the heat strikes, who has time to wait? The real money lies not in permanent machines, but in loud, energy-guzzling portable air conditioning units. And renting them out to make millions.
The gold rush begins
It was early afternoon one Sunday when Richard first realised something was up. Flicking through the admin page of the website to his business, The Air Conditioning Company, normally he would have been able to see around 30 people visiting the site. This time, with a heatwave looming, there were over 2,000 visitors. “I couldn’t give away an air conditioner five weeks ago,” he laughs.
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