One respondent has been told by his refrigerant provider that it has to impose a 24 per cent increase in costs. Rubbing salt into the wound, our LinkedIn member only received two working days' notice of the price hike.

As he says: "This is just another in a torrent of high percentage price increases [with the supplier] citing lack of availability of the raw materials to manufacture the product."
Although he appreciates that this may, indeed, be the reason for the rocketing price, he believes that somebody must be profiting from the situation somewhere along the line.

A second respondent says: "I think it only goes to show that, as an industry, we need to shop around and begin to flex our combined purchasing power... The major players have been screwing the distributors for years at the expense of the smaller contractor."
Unfortunately, in the face of dramatic rises in raw materials prices, purchasing power is a relatively weak weapon in the contractor's armoury.

If raw materials prices are rising across the board, somebody has to pay, and it is inevitably going to be the poor, hard-pressed contractor residing at the end of the supply chain.