Brilliant Harvest, LLC

I like to share my experience with my solar electric system during hurricane Ian. The system consists of 28 solar panels for 11.4 kw generation and two Tesla Power Walls. The move to solar made sense to me, considering the increasing cost of energy and the tax incentive currently offered. Before the storm hit, I received a text message that the Tesla Power Walls were charged up full and ready to provide power during the hurricane emergency. It went on to say that we would not even know when Duke Energy failed. And that is exactly what happened. Duke was down for over an hour before one of my neighbors informed me that commercial power had failed. We enjoyed electric service from our solar system for the days that power from Duke was unavailable. We had air conditioning during the outage and were completely comfortable. We never had a power failure at our house…not even a little glitch. I am very happy with the system. It is just what I wanted. My system was installed by Brilliant Harvest of Sarasota. They did a great job! Everything works as it should. They always were on site when they said they would be and were very professional. I highly recommend them.

For a price of $55,000, this company promised us a system that would produce more than enough power to cover all of our household electrical needs. I anticipated that we would have a monthly administrative charge to remain connected to the grid, but the system would offset that by making so much electricity that we would be selling our excess energy back to the power company. <br /><br />Our solar array is simply not performing as promised. For the first couple of months after it was installed, we did ‘bank' energy, but it was all rapidly depleted & we have ‘banked' none since. Not only that, but we have had a couple of electric bills not that far from our ‘pre-solar' statements. <br /><br />Brilliant Harvest promised to monitor our production online & they would guarantee their work for 2 years. Don't count on either of those things, and don't assume that the energy they say their system is producing will translate into usable energy for your home. Our system was down to almost no production at all for 6 weeks last Fall before anyone @ Brilliant Harvest noticed. <br /><br />There also seems to be a problem somewhere between our (purported) energy production and its delivery. The online monitoring system hosted by the inverter company says that our array is producing the amount of energy that it is designed to make. Our electric bills are incongruent. When I contacted Bill Johnson @ Brilliant Harvest, he told me that we must be consuming all of the electricity before it is measured by our electric company's meter. The idea is simply preposterous. We are a very small household & live in a very energy-frugal manner. I asked a representative from our electric company if this explanation could be true; she said that it is not. They did an energy audit for us & looked at the meter & found no faults. I don't know who or what to believe, but I am deeply disappointed to still be paying for electricity when I was promised a solar system that would take us to ‘net zero' and beyond. <br /><br />I am also deeply disappointed in Bill Johnson's response to my request to come to my home to look at the system to try to find the source of the problem. Apparently, what they guarantee is the online appearance of energy production; they don't guarantee that you will actually be able to use it. They don't consider it a warranty concern & won't come to evaluate it without a minimum charge of $150. <br /><br />So, ‘caveat emptor' -let the buyer beware. Personally, if I had it to do again, I would invest my money in stocks instead of wasting it on this system.