Green Muscle installed my solar and Powerwall on December 31st. They sold it as a single day…read moreinstall because my system supposedly wasn't complex. What actually happened was weeks of touch and go work by several different techs before the system did what I was told it would do when I signed the contract.
The crew showed up on time that first day. Joseph, the lead, showed up an hour late. At the end of the shift he made a point of complaining about staying late, which was him making up the hour he'd missed, and they wouldn't stay the two hours it would have taken to actually finish. The job got left unfinished and my Powerwall got left sitting outside uncovered. They had to send a tech back out on a separate trip just to put the cover on it, and this was during a stretch when we were getting scattered showers.
Before the install I told Andre, my project manager, that I didn't want panels anywhere roof vents would put shade on them. They installed two right next to a taller vent anyway, so depending on where the sun was, one or the other sat in shade for part of the day. If you're looking at a string inverter system, this matters much more than it sounds like it should. Panels on a string are wired in series, so the entire string produces at the level of its weakest panel. A single shaded panel doesn't just cost you that panel's output, it drags down every panel on the string for as long as the shade is there. That's the whole reason I brought it up before they started. They ended up having to come back out and relocate both.
The backup is the part I'd want anyone considering this company to read. I never asked for anything less than whole home backup, not one time, and I signed on the assurance that my whole house would run on solar. What was actually written into the contract was partial, essentials only backup. When I raised it, nobody at the company could trace back a single piece of communication showing how that decision got made or who made it.
Then after the install it came out that the solar couldn't see any load that wasn't on the backup panel, which meant most of my house was never going to run on solar the way it had been described to me. Their answer to that was an energy monitor. I spent weeks troubleshooting it before we established that it could only see half of my EV charger's draw, so it was never going to solve anything. Their next proposal was to move the charger onto the backup panel and bill me for the whole home backup that should have been scoped correctly in the first place.
They had also missed my HVAC controller. So when the power went out, my air conditioning went out with it and roughly 90% of my house sat dark in the middle of the day at peak solar production. In Arizona. That is the single scenario this system exists to prevent.
I also ended up running the entire interconnection process with my utility, ED3, mostly on my own. Coordinating with the power company is squarely a project manager's job, and honestly it was one of the specific reasons I wanted a company that assigns a dedicated PM to every install. Andre was AWOL for that whole process. I was the one tracking where things stood, following up, and keeping it moving.
Beyond that, Andre kept telling me things were normal when they clearly were not, and nothing got resolved unless I pushed for it myself. At one point he forwarded me a reply asking for a photo I had already provided in that same email chain. When it escalated, Brett, one of the owners, asked me why I had agreed to a partial backup, which put his own company's scoping error back on me, and then told me he'd lose money covering the whole home backup because of how far out I live. Most of those trips he was counting were rework his own team created.
I chose Green Muscle in part because every job gets a dedicated project manager. That turned out to be the weakest part of the entire experience. The system works now, months later, and only because I wouldn't let it go.
