We had a 14 panel 275 Watt per panel system installed in June of 2014.The 1st year the power co. owed us $9.00 so we broke even, which is what we wanted. Our reason for going solar was that my wife had inherited some money form a great aunt who passed away and we couldn't decide what to do with the $$. We lost a bundle in the '08 market mess so that cured us of that and savings or c.d. accounts were worthless, so we started looking around and saw a lot of people in our area putting in solar. After just a little checking we found out about the 30% tax credit which beats paying taxes on the money stuck in a mattress. This was also the time the federal govt. said that under the new plan utility prices would sky rocket, also our local utility had just received permission from the state p.u.c. commission to raise rates 30% over the next few years. Even though our utility bill was only $129.00 per month we decided that considering all factors solar would be a good self defense investment. As time passed our solar bill crept up a little every year until it was $603.00 this past June so we decided to add more panels.
This is where things got interesting, We called the company that did the original install and after several failed attempts finally got in contact with the owner. We blamed the lack of communication on the covid situation and over looked it.Big mistake. We told the owner that we wanted to add some panels so he showed up and checked our records and said we need 7 new panels and a newer style inverter controller to break even and, even though we were starting to get suspicious, we signed a contract.He had a crew of 2 come out in about a week, one of them spoke fair English and the other only spoke Spanish. No problem just get the job done.They installed the panels the 1st day and asked for a check,I asked about the inverter controller and they said that's not on the work order so it's not included. I called the owner and after a brief discussion he conceded that it should have been included and he would have some one out the next day. The same pair showed up and installed the unit and said they had to go back to the office to use their computer to update our system. Didn't happen.
I called the owner again and he said he would have his tech call me, never happened, after several more calls he stopped taking my calls or replying to my messages. We finally contacted Enphase, the manufacturer of the inverters and they walked us through setting up the wifi connection.But the new panels stopped communicating from mid morning until late afternoon and Enphase said we needed an installer on site to figure it out. The original company disappeared so we finally found a decent company who got a tech out within a couple of days. He got up on the roof and found that none of the connections were tight and then got into the inverter control unit and found the same thing. After tightening all connections and fixing another error the system is up and working well.
The original company was a top notch company when they did the initial install but in 6 years time went to the bottom of the barrel,I suspect that a divorce occurred and wrecked the whole thing. Lesson learned, when your gut tells you something is wrong, listen.
