Review for NRG Home Solar (Out of Business)

Office location: 5858 Horton Street Suite # 275, Emeryville CA, 94608

02/16/2017
Anonymous

Terrible Lease and Faulty Equipment

I moved into a house that had a system from NRG. I've lived here a year and in that time the system has gone down 5 times. The system is only 4 yrs old. Their monitoring is terrible. The system will be down for weeks before they call to schedule an appointment. It was down 3 weeks last March. a month last Nov/Dec, 2 weeks in Jan of this year and now twice this month. It was just fixed on Tuesday and it went down the next day and now I'm waiting for yet another repair. Each time its a GFDI Fuse Fault and they replace a fuse and it works. They have fully inspected, the local repair company they contract with, but find nothing wrong. They have climbed the roof, tested all electrical connections, yet nothing. The concern is that they want to RMA the unit but if NRG gets it and finds nothing wrong, NRG will charge me $250 for the new box plus shipping both ways. <br />On to the lease... this lease is meant to protect only them. There is no way out of it and no matter how poorly the system operates, they have loopholes in the lease that give them the out. You keep paying your lease no matter and no credit is given. The guarantee they provide for power is per year but calculated based on the lifetime of the system. What this means is that the only year you might get some money back is the first. With a four year old system, it doesn't matter that my system was down for nearly 9 weeks last year. The guarantee is based on the average over the past four years so I'm out cold. I've now had my system down for 12 weeks over the past year and nothing from them. I just keep paying PG&E full rates while my system sits there dead. I've never heard other people with leases, from other companies, that had issues like this. I've talked with other companies who looked at my rooftop and sun patterns and they say the system should have had more panels and some on the back of the house. They are all on the front yet the front only gets full sun in the winter and only after 2pm in the summer. In the summer the sun rises hitting my back roof and stays that way until 2pm. My system is also not meeting my needs. It's rated to put out about 9500 kWh/mo but I really need 16k or more. Will they add more panels? NO. Even if a new lease or higher payments, they say the system is what it is and can't be changed. The system is based on the usage of the owner at the time the system is installed. They had a smaller family and used way less than we do. Oh well... there's nothing like getting a $2400 bill from PG&E for all the electricity they provided over the year. I expected to come out even or even ahead, not $2400 in the hole. That makes my annual eclectic bill about $4400/yr including the lease payment. I've never paid more than about $2k/yr in my last house which is the same size and age.<br />Bottom line, avoid NRG and don't buy a house that has one of their leases.

On schedule
Installation quality
After sales support