Solar Energy World

We decided to go solar through the Montgomery Co-op of Solar United Neighbors since we got a better price and warranty. Solar Energy World was the company selected by the co-op to install our 9Kw/30 panels solar system. We had a very poor experience with the company and in particular with their solar analysts. The two solar analysts who worked on our project showed a incredible lack of knowledge and customer care. Our first solar analyst, Mr. Jay R quoted us for a much bigger system (44 panels/13.2kW) that what we actually needed and he had a hard time following up with us. We had to ask the CEO of the company to work with another solar analyst. The second one, Mr. Bryan H was better following up, but did not demonstrate the proper knowledge regarding roof penetrations and his way to answer our questions was really condescending to a point that we were afraid to ask. Even when we requested a second meeting to review the project prior to the installation, he claimed that he did not have time to meet with customers more than once and this is the way that the company works. It should be noted that Mr. H is the Vice-president of sales of the company. Regarding the roof penetrations, we needed a new roof before installing our solar panels, so I mentioned to Mr. H that the roof company could mark the location of the trusses where the solar array is attached since I did not want extra new holes in our brand new roof. Mr. H told us that was not needed since the company uses a method to exactly locate the trusses by measuring and chalking roof. The day of the installation we discovered that the company actually uses echo location to locate the rafters (i.e. they tap with a mallet or a hammer and roughly locate the trusses solely by the sound), as one can imagine with this method it is really easy to miss the trusses. As a result, we ended up with a bunch of holes in our new roof that they had to caulk. I recommend to CEO that his company should invest in proper electronic truss finders to avoid this problem. The company only measures and chalks roof trusses in situations where they cannot identify the trusses from above the roof with a mallet. We were really surprised that the Vice-president of sales was not aware of it. We could have avoided all those extra penetrations in our roof. Mr. H also omitted to tell us that the company charges an extra fee to finance the system of roughly $2000 (apart from the money that goes to the loan interest) which would not have been charged if we paid cash. Finally and not least, he encouraged us to turn on our system before passing the county inspection. Thankfully we did not do it since the crew that installed our system told us that could cause the electric company to charge us twice (for the energy that we consume and the one that we produce) since we needed a new meter that knows the amount of electricity that we are producing. The company never gave us a detailed report of the project (for instance the specifications of the solar panels and the inverter, where things will be located and how the condos would be run) prior to the installation, even when we asked for that information. After the installation I got the specs of the solar panels and the inverter after a direct request to the CEO of the company. Furthermore the company never gave us or even offered the manual of the inverter. In contrast, the crew members that did the installation were very professional, they replied to all of my questions and they spent a good amount of time explaining things to us. The CEO of the company is aware of these issues. A solar system is quite a big investment and we believe that we deserved better customer care from Solar Energy World even when we are part of a co-op. We would like to add that we received several calls from Mr. Geoff M, the CEO of the company, after this review had been publicly released. The company took our complaints very seriously and we are optimistic that the chain of mistakes that make us fall through all the cracks that the company had will never happen again to any other customer. It is unfortunate that we are the first and most likely the last and only bad experience that a customer will have with the solar analysts of Solar Energy World. We believe that Mr. M will take measures to prevent an unfortunate case like ours by improving the techniques that his company uses to locate the roof trusses, and the quality, knowledge and customer care of his solar analysts.