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Shameer was the only "human" we had even talked to or had any communication with. There was no other salesman or what ever title he wants to use to get away with the deception and run off with the money without consequences. And the contractor...who we have never met or even spoke to allows this? . Shameer took care of everything. We barely spoke to anyone that knew anything about our system until 6 months later when the supervisor told us the BS about the system working as it should.
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Whatever Shameer's "title" is Lead generator, or solar broker (this is how they are able to get away with these scams)...he was the only one we spoke to ...he quoted the price, made the sale, executed the contract, signed the contract, and received the $7,200 commission. In our minds that makes him an unregistered salesman and the contractor should have known that and not allowed this contract to happen. We did not know this at the time. The contractor is responsible for allowing this. We want to get out of the contract and have the panels removed. We want the lien taken off our house. We want nothing to do with ESP. We have an attorney who is looking at our case for fraud.
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It sounds like you have done a lot of investigation since your first post and are comfortable with your path forward. Reading your description above on what you want, it is conceivable that the solar company could remove everything they installed (roof mounts, solar panels, inverter, conduit, etc.) without repairing any holes in the roof, walls, etc. This might seem like minutia, but if you are going to put your requirements in a legal document, make sure you put all your requirements in the legal document. The other party is going to do the bare minimum to meet the requirements.
Are there power company agreements that need to be reversed?
Remember, I am not a lawyer. Please take my comments with a grain of salt. Good luck.Comment
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Yes we have done a lot of research into the legalities of this. We had offered ESP to buy out the system for $10,000. The average price for a system like ours is $13,000. We already paid about $2,500 on loan. And we would keep the system. The contract would be canceled. The loan for $31,000 would be canceled. The lien on our house would be canceled. That way they would not have the expense of removing it. We would not have any roof damage. But they did not accept that offer before. It would be fair we believe. Yes, everything will be put in a legal document made by our attorney and understood and signed (paper and pen) by all concerned. I don't know if there are power company agreements that need to be reversed. Would we contact ESP about that?Comment
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You said ESP was of no help. You might try contacting your power company to see what documents they have on file.
If you get to keep the system and ESP is out of the picture, how is the system going to be maintained? You will no longer have an installer. SolarEdge often requires installers to act for them. In my experience, it is often very difficult to find an installer that will accept responsibility for an installation they did not perform. There are too many unknowns. Just my 2 cents.
Good luck.Comment
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Thank you. I will contact power company to see what is on file. What is involved in maintaining the system? ESP won't be cleaning them or anything as it is. We have Solar Edge. I don't see why we couldn't maintain it ourselves. I don't understand what it is ESP does to maintain them. I am sorry. Still know very little about solar.Comment
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If you keep the solar system, then there is probably no action required with the power company. But it would be nice to know what they have on file about your system.
SolarEdge maintenance. Search this forum for solar edge issues. For example, what if an optimzer fails and your inverter logs a fault and stops working. Do you know how to check to see if your system is or is not working? If the system isn't working and you need an in warranty optimizer replacement, how do you do that? Who do you call? Most solar inverter companies won't talk directly to a customer, they want to talk to the installer. At least that has been my experience.Comment
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Thank you. We didnt know all of this. We dont like the thought of being stuck with esp but it seems we dont have a lot of choice since they the installer. I checked our pge again and the system isnt working now. It never worked even marginally this past year. When the new inverter was installed it seemed to be on for about a week. Im sure solar is good for some...but for us it was a huge mistake.
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What direction does your system face? Preferably the azimuth (0 degrees = North, 90 degrees = East, 180 degrees = South, 270 degrees = West). Also, what is the tilt of your installation?Comment
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So it sounds like your converter crapped out some time in Oct 2021. Your Jun '21 - Sep '21 production seems like it was tracking ok, and actually generated you credits, but then you were getting hardly any production during the winter. And it sounds like that was recently replaced? That's unfortunate it broke so soon.
Also in one of your reviews you mentioned a $600 True-Up. $600 divided by 12 is $50 a month, that's actually not terrible considering your system crapped out for 7 or 8 months. Provided you don't have any issues with it this year, you should see a much lower True-Up next year.
Now, I reverse engineered some of your numbers. I also pulled you up on https://www.californiadgstats.ca.gov. Well, I think it's you as I filtered on 95422 with ESP Contracting around 4.8 kW. What I found was the system cost was $25,669.12. Now if you back out sales tax, guessing at 7.75%, that gives a pre-tax cost of $23,822.85. Now the stats download says your system is 4.752 kW so that gives a per watt price pre-tax and pre-incentive cost of $5.01 per watt.
Now, $5.01 per watt is not great, but I've seen worse. Also, it seems like there were a few installs in your zip code slightly cheaper, and a few install slightly more expensive.
If you take $25,669.12, subtract the 26% ($6,673.97) tax credit, and run a loan calculator for $18,995.15 for 25 years at 1.99%, you get a payment of $80.42. Now, is how the correct way to do it? Technically maybe. If you had $6,673.97 to put down and financed the rest, then paid yourself back during next years tax return, I guess that would be the net. Is that what your sales person did? Hard to say.
Now what you ended up with was $116 per month with 0 down. You also mentioned around $31k. So that means they took your $25,669.12 system cost, added around a 20.8% financing "fee", then gave you a $31,000 loan at around 0.99% for 25 years, which comes out to $116.69. Now, this is pretty common, head on over to Reddit /r/solar and you'll see tons of posts like this. I'm not sure if I can link to it but if I could I could show you a post from 11 days ago where this exact type of proposal was made.
Me, I financed back in Jan with Tesla for 2.99% for 10 years, no financing fee. If that was not available I would have got a HELOC, home equity loan, or just a straight up personal loan before I even thought about paying any sort of financing fee.
Finally, your tax credit. I saw somewhere you asking for help. NO solar company is going to help you with that. It's a tax credit, applied when you file your taxes, so I really hope you brought it up to whoever does your taxes. If not, call them ASAP. Have them amend your tax return. If you don't have enough of a tax burden, you can carry it forward. If you have 0 tax burden, well then you unfortunately just did not understand how the ITC (Investment Tax Credit) works.
So hopefully going forward your system has no further issues. If you get 7,000 kWh a year out of it at blended summer/winter rate of, say $0.26 /kWh (hard to say since you're on CARE and I don't really know PG&E rates) puts you at around $1,820 per year solar value. At $31,000 that's a pretty long ROI unfortunately. Even if you had paid cash you would be looking at 14+ year ROI. With a financing fee and being on CARE, your ROI does get pushed out a bit further. The ROI is much shorter when you have something like 9.6 kW at $2.5 per watt, $0.69 per kWh peak pricing, and straight finance at 2.99% with no finance fee, or better yet pay cash.
Best of luck to you.Comment
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Thank you for all the info. Where on the website https://www.californiadgstats.ca.gov. did you find our system and neighboring systems? That would be very interesting to see. Does it also show the costs of the systems? And the installer?
Unfortunately, we weren't able to get the income tax credit. Our salesman told us a lot of lies. He was not registered through the CSLB. He took advantage of my brother who has two serious illnesses when I wasn't home. My brother doesn't even recall signing the agreements. And salesman disappeared with his $7200 commission 3 weeks later.
We don't understand how the loan went up to $31k. No one was aware of a 20.8% financing fee. This is outrageous. My brother and I are low income seniors on the PGE care program. We weren't really interested in solar. Didn't know much about it. Thought maybe we could save money. Wish we never opened the door for that BS salesman.
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Look under downloads. It's a zip file that holds three big spreadsheet files, one each for SCE, PGE and SDGE - https://www.californiadgstats.ca.gov...le21_projects/Comment
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