This was helpful, thank you!! 10 questions summarized here: 1. Tell me about your company 2. What do your customers say about you? 3. What is your core competency? 4. What brands of solar panels and invertors do you offer? What solar panels do you offer? What are the advantages of that product over another? 5. Are you offering any special promotions or programs? Incentives, rebate etc 6. Do you do your own installation? 7. Can you show me examples of your work? 8. Please describe your project management process. Dedicated point person?Communication methods, frequency, etc? 9. After my system is installed, what can I expect for operation and maintenance? Will someone be monitoring my system daily? If something goes wrong who do I call? 10. What are warranties and guarantees? For installation look for 10 year minimum (includes leaks). Ask about production guarantee (not common) like 90% guarantee 5-20 year. Can be negotiable. Bonus. What is your company mission?
Based strictly upon the prices quoted by the 3 companies we spoke with I'd have to say speak to someone at your local community college or similar. The markup on the components is outrageous. The big "selling point" for most of the companies we spoke with was "easy financing" and "federal tax rebate". When pricing the individual components used by the companies we spoke with, we could save almost 65% of their cost. Expertise and capabilities aside, you can find out most of the information you need right here on youtube. (I'm a RU-vid certified professional in about 30 fields now.)
Yourube certified? The hell does that mean….you Sir are what the video described as “commodity shopper.” Mark ups are justifiable when you think about supply and demand flow and cost of goods and how much a business markets their services. Its no different than real estate or buying a car; they are investments that are multilayered.
@@aldreifangman6982 well said . For Whoever reads this; do you want to research 5 different cos.for each component and their warranties. Do you go out and put your own radio when you buy a car or your own starter so that you can save money? The finance co. also takes a nice chunk. Bigger today than before. It’s not just the solar co. who makes the money. The sys is not so intensive but very few have s the time to make their own sys. I’ve run into 1 engineer and 1 architect who wouldn’t buy from me bc they could do it themselves. 2 yrs later , they’re still paying the utility co. for electricity.
My major thing is the kitchen stove and water heater the microwave in the refrigerator the computers are running off from solar panels that I already have and those solar panels never giving me any issue not even 35 years later but when I saw the company comes over and hooks up they're going to hook up to my whole house but it ain't going to be hooked up to my TV my fish tank my computer's or a few other things but it's going to be hooked up to about everything else and I can't afford the most expensive places maybe it'll take me 50 years to come up with the money to go to one of those more expensive places and get solar but I can't buy a bunch of solar panels at one time I got to buy it separately because it cost is so freaking high on everything else it makes it hard to come up with any kind of money to buy a whole system last year would have been okay year before would have been okay the year before would have been okay the last 10 years would have been okay 2007 would have been perfect 2005 would have been perfect that's when I wasn't worried about money before 2007 I didn't have to worry about money now I have to because everything's so expensive to get one paycheck the last of the next paycheck it's kind of hard but then again I'm thinking about getting rid of my kitchen stove and using something else in the place of it since it's so much cheaper to use that then the kitchen stove and I will never go with any kind of gas.
Generac has a company in Berlin Wisconsin and I work maybe a mile from that place but I live a couple tones away from there but generac has companies all across the United States maybe not in every state but it's across the United States they're mainly into generators that I know of but they also do solar because they want to come over and put solar on my house one of these days but I know they're so busy out of state last year they weren't able to come to the state this year and they haven't still been able to come to the state that I know of and I wouldn't want him to do it and this ice cold winter I'll make them wait till spring time now I put up solar panels usually in the spring summer and fall for myself I'm not a business but I was a construction worker for 13 and 1/2 years and that did not deal with solar panels I knew about solar panels because I started buying solar panels at that time even before I started working at that company even before I even had my first house I just started over at my parents place which now is my brother's place but I believe he saved me a boat and a pontoon boat one's a fishing boat and I hope he saved the broken fishing boat for me cuz I'm going to repair it.
The first thing I asked is how big is the solar panels how many watts how many volts how many amps that's the first thing I ask the next thing I ask when can they put it on my house generac was supposed to come over and put solar panels in my house there was another company that was supposed to come put solar panels on my house neither one of them has done it yet I talked to him both in 2022 one in the spring and generac and the other one in the fall but the one I talked to the fall says they're in the neighborhood now but I haven't seen them yet if I see the vehicle I see them somewhere along the line I'll stop and I'll talk to him generac said I'd get about $2,094 bucks a month and I have one year to pay him back in. But one thing I should tell you I already have some solar panels they're on ground Mount that I make my ground mounts are not full of solar panels yet I got about 3, 400 Watts of solar panels and a friend's bringing me 10 ft by 18 ft solar panels and these are probably the first solar panels ever made so I'm probably going to have to service some he said about 5 years from now that have to be serviced but I service my own solar panels that's kind of why my 35-year-old solar panels still give me the same Watts that they did 35 years ago even yet today but it looks like I got a service one solar panel yet cuz that one says give me powers but it doesn't give me a lot or an amp on the charger it doesn't say it's given anything but it says it's charging so I got one solar panel to check which I'm going to do in the springtime so I'm going to take off the box probably change some of the things clean the solar panel change the wiring perhaps take something out and put something else in there to solder but the time these companies come over to put solar panels on my house I'll probably have about 10,000 watts to get hook up to it cuz I keep buying solar panels and I'm probably buying it from the cheapest place I possibly can which is through Walmart and sometimes through the company that they get it from.
