Review for Solar Bear

Office location: 4091 AMTC Center Drive, Largo FL, 33764

11/20/2023
Kim Newman Tallahassee, FL

DO NOT Use Solar Bear if You Don't Live in Central Florida

We went with this company over local companies because they get such great reviews. Our experience was very different from most other companies. The salesperson, Michael, was great. That's it. Everything fell apart after we signed the contract in October 2022. We were told we would have solar panels within two months, and we ended up waiting more than 6 months for our solar panels to be installed and another 6 weeks to be hooked up to the grid. As soon as our project was handed to Patricia, we were in the dark. She basically ghosted us for 2 months and when she did respond to our requests for updates, she did not take ownership of her failure to keep us informed, sent us information about other projects, or provided inaccurate information. When I attempted to reach out to the company via the phone number and chatbot on the website, I could not directly access representatives. I left messages, only to never get calls back. We finally received a call from one of the owners, in February of 2023, within 2 hours of me writing an email threatening to cancel our contract for not completing the work, after more than 3 months of waiting in the dark. I had to contact our city department to get updates about our permits because we weren't getting info from Solar Bear. On multiple occasions, when I called the city's permitting department, they informed me that they were waiting for something to be corrected or submitted by Solar Bear. On the day we were finally getting the panels installed in April 2023, a team drove 4 hours to Tallahassee, only to find they didn't have the materials they needed to complete the installation on a metal roof. They had to wait to start the job until someone brought them materials from Tampa. The inspection failed and we had to wait another several weeks for Solar Bear to send a tech to Tallahassee from Tampa to fix all the mistakes. In the meantime, we were making payments for 2 months on solar panels we couldn't use. We signed a contract October 11, 2022, and started using our solar panels on June 29, 2023.