10/21/2017
Anonymous
Solar Consultant: Michelle Davis<br />Project Manager: Spencer Allen<br />If you are looking for someone who will be honest with you, someone who can relatively quickly evaluate your needs based on past usage and provide a cookie cutter approach at a reasonable price, I highly recommend Affordable Solar. Michelle Davis was awesome to work with in that regard. The process is generally they review your past usage, and put together a package proposal of the number of arrays, where they would go and what your expected savings would be. Be aware, that all of the solar companies use the higher electricity rates for what you will recoup from having the arrays. Of the several proposals I received, Michelle was one who I think tries to be honest and up front. Spencer was very nice to deal with, but hard to get ahold of. Installation went reasonably well. The staff was polite and tried to be respectful and careful with the installation. They did mar the surface of my stucco on my deck just a bit. If I wasn't so detail oriented, I probably wouldn't have noticed. They also left a 30ft (I think) ladder tied to the side of my house for about 4 or 5 weeks after the inspector had used it. If that is all you need, no need to read on. In my particular case, I had a few issues I will list below.<br />There were some scheduling problems. I received a call during an important meeting I was having at work, and was chewed out a bit for not being home for a scheduled appointment. I left my meeting and rushed home. Once there, I started looking at my schedule. As it turned out, I had told them I could not make that appointment, and had had it moved, but they never canceled the first one. There was also another time I had a scheduled appointment for a wall patch. When the guy was 45 minutes late, after have a heck of a time getting hold of someone, I was told he had injured his hand earlier in the day and had to go to the hospital. I later found out that the injury to his had occurred several days before that and that no one had called to cancel the appointment. His patch work was very good.<br />The other “issue†I guess I will call it, is that my usage was in a state of change. What prompted some of this was my decision to go all electric on my vehicles. I was unable to get much help on what I would need, or what my options were for additional production. I had to research the heck out of things. I found the website (http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/) to help with this. I had to research how to determine what the cells would produce, and what I would need. I wanted to see about changing inclination angles for the panels, and I am still not sure the 10 degree angle for a flat roof is a code requirement, or the standard bracket mount. I tried to find out other things, such as how much off of south pointing the arrays would cost me in production. Spencer was pretty non-responsive to my questions. In one of the 2 or 3 conversations I was able to have with him, he promised they would point as far southward as possible, but that was never relayed to the installation crew (or so they told me), and they oriented in the same direction as my house. I never received any help in asking about rotating the arrays during the day to aid in production. As a result, I have waited several months to post my review, as I wanted to see how well it worked. I think over a year, I would have a hard time producing enough electricity to totally cover my usage, and that is after I added another 7 panels to what they proposed.<br />They have a production guarantee. I was told it was 96% of whatever the panels would produce. In the end, the guarantee I was given was only about 93%. Affordable came back telling me it was 95%, and to their credit, they did give me $500 to offset this. Production is a bit above what Affordable told me, and well above their 93% guarantee they put in writing. I can only hope it stays that way for the next 10 years.<br />The last thing I will mention that was very frustrating, is that I was repeatedly told about the 25 year production guarantee. When I went in to sign the contract, that contract was only a 10 year guarantee on manufacturing stuff on the arrays. I asked the question, so what happens if a weld breaks on an array, will it still be covered by the production guarantee, or does the mechanical guarantee take precedence. I don't think I ever received a good answer on that one.<br />Again, I am a picky person. I think Michelle and Affordable try very hard to be above board and honest. I also think they are very busy, and my questions we not easy answers and got pushed to the side sometimes. Even with the negatives listed above, I think they are better to work with than most of the others I received quotes from.