While the company's representatives in the field seem to be both competent and friendly, it is apparent that the ownership of the company may not be completely familiar with all regional building codes. They also do not seem to be as large a company as we were led to believe, since they seem to have very few crews available for field work.
We had 20 panels installed on our roof, a 6.1kw system, during the last week of June 2019. The County electrical inspection passed just a few days later. The utility company swapped out the meter the following week and our City's building inspection (for the "mechanical" permit on the rooftop inspection) was scheduled for a few days later. Unfortunately, it failed, because there was not a set of "approved" plans from the building department. The inspector was present while I called the company and spoke with them regarding this issue. During that conversation, he mentioned that, although he was not officially performing an inspection (couldn't because there were no approved plans to match against the work) the leading edge of the mounting rails required additional supports to satisfy the building code. Angie, the company coordinator in the office, arranged for an employee of the company picked up a copy of the approved plans and deliver them to us the following day. She asked the inspector to return a day later. He did, but again failed to sign off because the leading-edge supports were still missing. Going into a holiday weekend, it took several days for the contractor to discuss the issue (apparently on the phone?) with the building inspector, and later called to say they were sending their employees to our home to add additional supports on the leading edge. The work was expected to take a couple of hours. It was scheduled for Thursday afternoon. Late Thursday afternoon, the company called to inform us that their crew was still working on a job in another area, but they would be here on Friday, as soon as they completed the other job, probably late morning. The crew would call us to let us know they were on their way. We also informed the Angie that several of the panels seemed to be consistently underperforming based on the monitoring software - producing significantly less energy than the adjacent panels on both sides. She would ask the crew to take a look at the panels when they came out on Friday morning. At 2:00pm Friday we called Angie to let them know we still had not heard from the crew and were informed - yet again - that the crew was still working elsewhere and would arrive on Saturday.
On Saturday morning, the crew arrived and installed extra supports to conform with the building code. We don't know if they checked the underperforming panels - they left without letting us know. On Wednesday morning the following week, the company was able to contact the building department and, one day later on July 17, the City's building inspector came out and signed off on our brand-new solar installation. With the monitoring software and wi-fi enabled unit from Greenlight Solar, we can monitor our production in real time. We can keep track of each panel's individual output and even see how many trees we're saving because of the renewable energy source.
While there were certainly hurdles to overcome, Greenlight Solar stayed in contact with us during each phase of the process, albeit with some prodding periodically. After obtaining a number of bids from different companies, we chose Greenlight Solar's proposal largely because of their extremely friendly and knowledgeable field representative (Casey was great to work with, and did not make us feel pressured at all) and their single point of contact in the office. Theirs wasn't the lowest bid we had received, but we felt they were the most "up front" and forthcoming with helpful information during the proposal process. The owner documentation and operations guide were delivered to us along with electronic copies for archiving, and Casey showed us how to use our phones, tablets and desktops to monitor the system from any location worldwide. Together, they guided us throughout the journey, and we now feel like we're certainly doing our part to save our planet. read more