When it comes to solar, you want to go with a local company that has a long track record. You want…read morea company whose growth is based on word of mouth, and one that will be around in 25 years to honor their warranties.
I'm a first-time homeowner with a modest budget, converting my home into a zero-emissions building. EIS was recommended to me over and over again. I got quotes from multiple companies, but only EIS's sales guy, Ian, did a tour of the whole property and listened to me talk at length about how I intended my installation to work with the other systems of my soon-to-be fully electrified home.
I had deliberately bought a house with a south-facing yard so that I could do a ground mounted install in addition to the roof. Ian told me they could install a ground mounted system themselves, but it would look more industrial and possibly out of place in my small yard. But if I built my own backyard pergola structure, it would look more like something that belonged in my small backyard (and it would be cheaper). As I'm sure he knows, an installer would make more money, faster, if they didn't tell me that. I respected his decision to tell me, and it's why EIS won my business.
I'd never built a pergola before. I couldn't use a kit, because I needed it to fit the specific constraints of my yard, the angle of the Sun, the zoning maximum height limit, the minimum property line setback, the minimum height before I'd hit my head, etc. I had to design it myself. The panels were in metric and the lumber was in imperial. EIS corresponded with me in detail throughout at least nine or ten revisions, all before they'd received any money other than my token down payment, and - though it would have been easier and more money for them - they did not ask me to reverse course and pay them to build the support structure themselves.
There was another hurdle in the process. We had trouble finding me a lender. Although I have a mortgage, aside from that, I don't really go into debt. I buy everything in cash. That means I had no credit history. You'd think that would mean my credit would be perfect, but the American credit score system was designed by concussed cave trolls. Although I had the savings and income to cover what I needed to pay back a loan - and I was not by any means the poorest client EIS had ever worked with - it was hard for EIS to find me a lender.
Again, it would have been easy for them at this stage to simply abandon the project and move on to more profitable clients. They didn't do that. They found me a lender, and we worked it out.
I now have a working rooftop and ground mounted installation supplying my home with more than 14 kilowatts of power: enough for all my future electric appliances, plus an electric car. Today, it was cloudy and rained all day, and I still generated more power than I used.
If I'd just wanted a rooftop install, EIS could have been done in a couple months. But my more thorough requirements created a lot more work for them. Now that it's done, I'm very glad we did it all.
I will be calling EIS again as soon as I am ready to install batteries in a couple of years.