Sun Light & Power

I had a great experience with Sun Light & Power installing rooftop solar on my house in East Oakland. The process was really easy and low stress -- all of the staff were super friendly, explained things patiently, and followed through. The paperwork was straightforward and their advice was great. I love my solar panels!

We had a great experience with SL&P, from the first sales call to the final system start-up. We found them professional, competent, experienced, and communicative. They helped us get in under NEM-2.0, while still giving us great flexibility in the design of our 8kw array.

This was awesome The final product was awesome. very knowledgeable

Excellent service, responsiveness and advice from the first meeting. Installation crew was fantastic--efficient, polite and timely.

They were excellent, very professional. I had two other vendors come out. They were by far the most responsive, most informative, they were fairly priced and very professional in their installation and their follow-up.

Sun Light and Power did an excellent solar installation on my house. They listened to my concerns and answered all of my questions regarding price, rebates, permits and performance. They looked at my Power bill did a survey of my roof and determined the number of panels and type of inverter that I needed.

These people are the real thing. VERY smart about the technology and laser focused on customer service and education. Steve K, Andrea L, Eric Y and Brady C all gave incredible support from the early phases of knowledge gathering through installation and certification.

Sun Light & Power installed our solar energy system two years ago. In addition to installing 24 solar panels they installed a back-up battery. Their people were impressively professional. They took the time to answer my many questions during the installation process and were always friendly and informative. I had two other companies come on-site to propose an installation. I liked that SL&P is a locally based employee-owned company. I felt the other companies were just installers and had little interest in any long term relationship with their customers. This is, after all, a significant and long-term investment. A few months after the installation my system stopped working. It turned out that a rat had chewed through a low voltage wire for an emergency shut-off that the county (sometimes) requires. SL&P came on-site, diagnosed the problem, and replaced the wire. They put the new wire in an armored conduit to prevent any reoccurrence of the problem. They performed the work at no charge even though, in my opinion, they rightly could have charged me. I have been very pleased with the system. It has been reliable and performed beautifully when the power went out last year because of the wildfire situation. We didn't even know there had been an outage that lasted over five hours until my neighbor told us about it. I highly recommend Sun Light & Power. I would certainly select them again given my experience with the company and its people.

Wonderful! Everyone on their team was extremely professional and great to work with. I am very pleased with my solar system, and I recommend Sun Light and Power very highly and without hesitation.

My experience with this company was excellent. The systems have worked extremely well for years.

They worked very **** ** this project, and did not give up until the system worked correctly and reliably. In fact, it now works better than it ever has, probably because of the rewiring of the panels to give a higher voltage. On a typical sunny day, we are using about 3 kwh over the 24 hour period; without the solar panels, we would be purchasing about 13 kwh.

1. -- 2013 The first solar breakdown was after the warranty expired -- the inverter failed and was replaced in 2013. This could have cost thousands to replace and, to their credit, SL&P negotiated with Fronius (the inverter company) and replaced the inverter for the cost of labor only. I sincerely appreciated their efforts on our behalf. However, dealing with their office was not a satisfying experience. This is when the poor service began and it continues up to today. .
  a. When I contacted their office via email for warranty info on the replacement inverter, I received a strange email that said that when we bought the house from the previous owners, the warranty was not transferable to us. After some back and forth, it seems that they had put our paperwork into our neighbor's file and assumed, without checking the paperwork, that we had purchased the property after the solar was installed.
  b. After that issue was straightened out, I asked again for the warranty on our new inverter. They said that the inverter was refurbished and that there was no warranty. I explained that the person who spoke to me at the time of installation referred to the inverter as new. Perhaps he meant that the replacement inverter would be new (to us). But when he said "new", we of course expected that it would be...NEW. The woman at their office claimed they had discussed these things at the time of installation. This is not true. No one said anything about the inverter being a refurbished one and that it would not have a warranty. I made the point that there was nothing on the work order that said the inverter was refurbished nor was there anything about no warranty. Then she told me that no solar power company provided a warranty on a replacement inverter. I dropped the issue because it was clear there was nothing else I could do.
  c. Another paperwork error: On the work order, there were two "current" dates, the Work Order date was incorrectly typed 8/8/11 and the date next to their signature was correctly typed as 2/26/13. This has led to several confusing conversations since then.
2. -- 2015 Now the system has failed again and my contacts with the SL&P office are even more incomprehensible. I called their repair number because the system was shutting down and restarting approximately every 20 minutes due to overheating (error code on equipment screen).
  >On 8/12/15, I left a message "The system has broken down, yet again". When Mindy called me back she repeated my message word for word, making fun of my voice and the way I emphasized words in the message. She asked if the system was down right then and I said that it was currently up but that it had been cycling off and on for a while and it just happened to be on as I looked at it. She said that they were very busy and it would be difficult to make an appointment. I had to repeatedly insist that she refer the issue to the repair department before she agreed.
  >On 8/13, I had not received a callback so called again. Mindy said that she would forward a message to Repair again.
  >On 8/17, still no callback so called SL&P again and selected a different extension and complained to a very professional woman who said she would call repair for me. I recommended that they not install systems if they weren't able to support them. The response was that their Repair department repairs systems installed by other companies, too. In my opinion that is beside the point. Received message from Repair. He gave me his direct number and said he would be on a job in the afternoon but would call me first thing 8/18. I called back to leave a detailed message with my name and address, background info about our system, the error code on the inverter display, and the symptoms of the problem, so as to prepare for our 8/18 call.
  >On 8/18 at 11:30 am, he hadn't called me so I called him. He obviously hadn't listened to my message, and didn't even remember he had left a message for me, because he had no clue who I was and I had to repeat all info I had left in my message. He thought the problem might be the fan and said he might save me a site visit fee if he contacted Fronius before a site visit to see if they would approve ordering a fan in advance. If they don't approve it, he will have to come out and check the system first. While I appreciate his trying to save me money, I am generating no solar power on warm days due to the overheating problem and on cool days, the restarts don't happen frequently.
  >On 8/21, I still hadn't heard back, so called again. He told me he hadn't heard back yet and there was really nothing more that can be done because he has to wait for them to call. Meanwhile, on warm days, my system does not generate much solar power and I'm hoping the overheating will not generate a fire.
I don't know when this problem will be fixed or even if the fan is the problem. However, I given the lack of responsiveness and professionalism, the poor quality equipment, and actual rude treatment in one case, I could not recommend Sun Light and Power to anyone.

unknown

Sun Light & Power has been in the solar business for decades. They know what they are doing. I wanted to put a very large system on my roof, one that could generate all the power needs of our house. The engineer who came to do the estimate was super-thorough, polite and knew his stuff. Shortly thereafter, I had the solar power system I'd always dreamed of up and running. They did make one error in a setting on the inverter, but they quickly came out and fixed the problem and we haven't had an issue since.

They were good at understanding what our needs were. In installing the system, they were a little bit less good at explaining things to a layman in terms that were easily grasped, because it was very technical. They could use some translation in the future.

Sun, Light, and Power has very good engineers and they were very good about figuring out where to place the items. They were very creative and they had really good ideas. The workers were people that I didn't mind having around my house and they were very responsible. They also looked over our last years bills to see where we could cut costs with the solar equipment.