Solar City - Marlborough

Details follow; but the bottom line is that ultimately, the project with Solar City was a failure and we're out $500. In the end, Solar City stopped communicating with us. We had hoped to continue working with them to have solar panels installed and reached out to Customer Care and directly to our Regional Sales Manager but to no avail. Our last outreach was at the end of May, 2018. It is now August, 2018. In the interim, we have done due diligence we should have done before and given other people's reviews now consider ourselves lucky for only losing $500. We had heard of Solar City, knew it was connected to SpaceX and Tesla and knew that there are many fly-by-night outfits; so we did too little research and assumed they were good. That was a mistake. Losing $500 is not trivial and we want other potential customers to know about Solar City's practices. If your project is small, you probably do not want to use Solar City. We suspect that the company is much more responsive and professional with larger clients like Hampshire College, which has recently signed a large contract with Solar City to install a large bank of solar panels Detail -------- We contacted Solar City last fall. We signed a contract electronically and paid a $500 deposit. Solar City visited our house and informed us that we needed 200 amp service instead of 100 amp service. We responded that we would do that upgrade and that the work would be done as part of a large renovation of our house (turning a half bathroom into a full bathroom and adding a bedroom with an attic above it). As always happens with large renovations, the project took much longer then planned and had complications. We were told that Solar City does not have the ability to schedule project milestones further out then 30 days. For a while, we kept changing the target date of the electrical work to be 30 days out. In retrospect, I now think we should have continued to do that. Instead, after a while, we stopped pushing it out. We didn't know when the electrical work was to be done and honestly, we were overwhelmed with other aspects of the project. To their credit, Solar City did reach out to us, leaving voicemails; and we received an email from our regional sales manager saying that they were "... canceling out [us] as active in the system and as soon as everything is finished on [our] end [we were to] feel free to reach back out to [her] directly and [they] can reestablish the process for [us]". Our electrical work and the renovation completed at the end of May. At that time, we reached out to Solar City to tell them that they could inspect our house for completion of the 200 amp electrical upgrade. We also told them that during the renovation, a structural engineer told us that we needed to have some structural reinforcement done of our living room base and the second floor of the house and that the solar panels could not be installed until that work was completed. In response, the Solar City contact on the phone told us not that we were inactive but that we were terminated and that we could start over but that we lost our deposit. Despite outreach on our part, we have heard nothing back from Solar City. We presume they do not want us as a customer. Solar City could have handled this differently. They could have said something like "We know that projects sometimes involve delays; and we would be happy to continue to work with you. We want you to know that the money you paid was put to good use in understanding your house and in beginning to get it ready for solar panels but because of the delay and the change in the shape of your house, we'll need additional money; but rest assured, you are still our customer". They did nothing of the sort. Moreover, given the lack of responsiveness and now that we he have done due diligence and understand what many other customers have experienced, we do not want Solar City as our contractor.

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We LOVE the solar panels and after only a few weeks of having them fully up and running are seeing great kWh production. Overall, we're glad we got them and would work with SolarCity again. The system is solid, looks really nice, the online tools and mobile app are really handy. Many of the company's processes are built to be modern and efficient (like electronic documents). The system is going to save us more money than we put into it (150% return on investment over 20 years on the conservative side) and we love the concept of clean energy.
That being said, SolarCity is still a "young" company at least around here (Worcester) and could do with some internal process refinement and personnel training. The less-than-perfect parts of our experience were mostly unique to our situation but worth mentioning if you're looking at working with them:
 - Confirming if our satellite dish had to be moved was a complete cluster. It ended up being fine where it was. Each person at Solar City we talked to told us the opposite of the one before them. It ended up being a non-issue but had us running in circles for awhile.
 - One (or more) of the installers left cigarette butts around our yard. The person who did it probably had no idea how disrespectful that was, but they should be trained better to never do that on a customer's property (or anywhere - it's an environmentally friendly business!).
 - We had a billing issue, which only occurred because there was a last-minute system change on the day of install and we'd pre-paid. The problem was that SolarCity apparently had no process to handle this situation and the credit due to us was in limbo. Our "solar consultant" told us he was sure it would be fine and then fell off the face of the planet. I spent a long time on the phone explaining the situation to multiple customer service and billing representatives, following up by email and phone, and for several weeks (weeks!) getting NO response. Then a credit was finally put through but it was short! I finally got a great person on the phone and she took care of the remaining credit due, even calling me back within a few hours as promised. I just wish it hadn't taken so long or caused so much frustration.
 - Someone measured wrong or calculated wrong and we got one less solar panel than initially planned (hence the issue above). The cost and documents were updated quickly but it seems a little odd that all those careful design steps missed something along the way. On the plus side, the change actually reduced my estimated pay-back period on the investment.
Other good things were the communication in the beginning and throughout the process outside of the billing/credit issue. We got timely emails, were kept informed of where we were in the design process and reminded if we needed to do something to keep it moving, every time SolarCity said they'd be at our house they were there, on time. The inspections (local building inspector after the install then National Grid before turning it on) happened more quickly than expected and all of Solar City's work passed with flying colors. Our installation included roof rafter reinforcements, too - there was no additional charge and that was done without a hitch. The roof looks good and is guaranteed against leaks from their work, which has so far stood up fantastically to some very heavy rains. And on sunny days, well, I love checking "My SolaryCity" to see the energy production and electricity cost savings!

Fantastic. No effort or cost on my part other than being available at various
times for inspections.
Interested? Give me a call.

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They were fantastic! We got a 9 kilowatt system on our house now. They charged us nothing and they are very professional.

They gave me a quote and their price was really comparable to everybody else's, so I used them. They had direct answers and if they didn't have an answer, they got back to me within twenty-four hours. They gave me a break up of the price, the labor cost and equipment cost. Then they gave me options for future if we wanted to set up more panels or if we wanted to make a generator backup. They gave me prices for stuff that they could do later, said that they could set it up for future and gave me different pricing from their top A-grade model to the most economic model. They broke out the pricing, they broke out the time and they broke out everything in their quote. Their prices were a little on the higher side but for what I got, it was excellent and for every direct question I asked them, I got a specific answer. I felt like I was their only customer. I am only going to use them in the future.