Review for RGS Energy (Out of Business)

03/14/2015
Anonymous CA

Not so pleased

Wow! My experience ended so differently that I expected. Last year we asked three local solar contractors to come to our house to provide quotes for a solar system. We selected RGS because we felt the salesman was honest and he gave us a lot of assurances that RGS was the trusted longtimer in an industry filled with upstarts. We made our decision because we believed him when he said they would be a partner. <br /><br />Well I'm guessing that, looking at my rating, you realized that didn't happen. RGS fired our salesperson because, according to him, they no longer allowed part time employees. Whatever the reason, everything fell apart after that. I have to admit that I am being a bit dramatic. After all, the system was installed and it is working - most of the time. <br /><br />We were assured that one way RGS excelled was in their customer service. They were going to provide one year of 24 hour monitoring of our system. That was to allow us to become accustomed to monitoring it ourselves. It's nice that they gave us a year, because no one ever showed us how to run the system. Again, to make sure I'm being completely upfront, we were shown a little bit of of this and a touch of that. Earlier this month our system went down for a couple of days. Turns out the controller popped a circuit breaker. We only realized this because we were showing the monitoring app to a friend. We didn't get a call from RGS, who is supposed to be monitoring, and we didn't get any sort of alarm or alert. <br /><br />Speaking of monitoring, one of the upgrades that our salesman strongly suggested was a controller that was capable of monitoring individual panels. I was a bit surprised that that wasn't standard, but we bought it. When the system was installed and we reported that the individual monitoring didn't work, we were informed that we needed to buy an additional piece of software. To their credit, RGS did eventually provide that software at their cost. <br /><br />That individual monitoring may have been a bad idea. Because through it we learned that some of our panels were generating at only a third of what others were. <br /><br />We have also been concerned with the placement of the panels. We requested that they include as many panels as possible in our system. After installation we noticed that there was a lot of unused space on our roof. We never received an explanation why. <br /><br />At this point you might be wondering why we haven't requested assistance. We have on several occasions. We contacted our salesperson's replacement repeatedly - yet we have received no response! We finally wrote to the installation contact, the person we believed to be the salesperson's manager, and a third contact, Clayton Pitts, whose email address we obtained sometime during the installation. We only heard back from the third person and I mention his name because his response was so perfect. In my email to them I try to be as friendly and even-tempered as a business email should be. In the email I suggest that much of this might be communication related and might be settled by them stopping by for lunch. Clayton replies, ".,. I could come for a visit to check the system, but unfortunately I cannot come to "have lunch". There is a charge of $110hr labor and $55hr for travel. Minimum of one hour for labor. ..."<br /><br />I replied to Clayton suggesting that charging a new customer to finish the installation was perhaps not the best of customer service and asked for a contact. I never heard back from him. The joke is on me though. Now I have received a bill from RGS for nearly $5000 for installation. The date on the bill is March 5, but the installation date is October 14. Is this because I'm trying to get someone to answer my calls?<br /><br />I telephoned the main office customer support. Certainly I'll hear back from them... eventually?<br /><br />Fortunately, shortly after the system was installed I received a call from Enerbank, who has the loan for the system. The very nice rep asked me how everything was progressing. At the time I told him we had some issues but that I thought RGS was addressing them. He said that if I continued to have problems I should contact them. I did so yesterday. I asked them to note my call in their file, but that I wanted to give RGS corporate a bit more time to respond to my call. That only seems fair since I called them both the same day - after receiving the $5000 bill. <br /><br />One more thing. If you do choose RGS for your system, stay on top of them for paperwork. I'm preparing my taxes this weekend and I have not a scrap of paper to support my tax credit. I'm hoping that if anything happens my documentation from Enerbank will be sufficient. <br /><br />Good luck to you, and after all that, I still think solar power is the direction we should be taking... perhaps just with a different partner.

Sales process
Price charged as quoted
On schedule
Installation quality
After sales support