Reviews by solar geek

Highlight Solar

We started our 4 kilowatt solar project in November, 2013 by reviewing the Yelp reviews for firms in the San Jose area, as well as one of the leading national leaders, known for their lease options. What we soon realized was that most installers, perhaps in order to keep their sales costs low, do not even send people to your home to survey it and make recommendations. Amazingly, most stop their analysis with a Google earth picture of your roof, and a rough sketch, often ignoring important factors that would cause the design to change if they had looked more closely.

Of the five companies that I contacted for quotes, only two, Highlight and one other, actually sent people to my home to design the system. The Highlight representative, a trained engineer, was the only one that took the time to climb onto my roof to measure it and precisely plan where the solar panels could be installed. This was particularly important because the odd shape of our home and a large number of roof surfaces required panels to be scattered across seven different roof sections, not only one or two, as in a typical installation. (The other company sent an inexperienced salesman who knew less about solar design than me.)

Oddly, the solar designs received from the firms that did not visit, ended up proposing to place panels on the west-northwest roof, the easiest place to do the installation but a very poor location with which to maximize power production. (Since our system was completed, the four panels that we placed on the west-northwest roof produce 20% less power than the others.)

Highlight’s design maximized the number of panels on southern facing roof surfaces. While it was the most complex to install, it was by far the most efficient design in terms of overall solar production.

I was also pleased with Highlight’s recommendations of Canadian Solar panels and Enphase micro-inverters, both leading companies with excellent products and a reputation for excellent customer service. I even called Enphase and talked to their customer service representative before moving ahead with the project, and they were very helpful, explaining the details of how they’d resolve warranty problems. This was particularly important as the micro-inverters—the units the convert the DC current created by the solar cells into AC current to power the home—are the most likely units to fail over time, compared to the solar cells themselves.

Knowing that our solar project would be a 25-year investment, we chose to work with Highlight for four reasons: (1) their lead designer’s intelligence, experience and willingness to work with us to design an optimal system, given our challenging roof layout, (2) his willingness to actually climb onto the roof to know that their design would work (none of the other five installers did) and learning several important facts that significantly changed the design, (3) their overall cost being the lowest of any of the bids that we received, and (4) my confidence, gained over three pre-sales calls to our house, that if the system were to need service, they would be around and responsive (this has proven to be true for several minor issues that have emerged since the system went online).

Once we had a design that was both aesthetically pleasing and optimized for maximum solar power production, the Highlight representative worked with our town building department to adjust the design to meet set-back requirements required by new fire codes. The installation itself was completed ahead of schedule and the workmen always left the worksite neat and orderly. It could not have gone more smoothly.

In summary, we selected Highlight because they were the only ones willing to do the hard work needed to design the best system for our house. Their people are experienced, well informed and did what they said they would do, when they said they’d do it; no excuses, and no missed promises.

I couldn’t more highly recommend that you consider Highlight for your project. The result will be an excellent system at a fair price.... read more

Type: Residential Electric

Reviewed: 03/01/2014