What to Actually Check Before Hiring a Solar Installer
Licensing and a NABCEP certification are the floor, not the differentiator. Here's what separates an installer who'll still answer your calls in year eight.
NABCEP certification (North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners) and proper state electrical licensing are table stakes — if an installer can't produce these, the conversation ends there. The differentiators that actually determine a good long-term outcome are less visible in a sales pitch.
Ask specifically who performs the installation: your own W-2 crews, or a subcontracted crew you've never met. In-house crews tend to have more consistent quality control and are easier to hold accountable if something needs to be redone under warranty.
Ask how production monitoring works and who's actually watching it. A monitoring app that exists but nobody reviews is functionally the same as no monitoring — the value is in someone catching an underperforming inverter within days, not you discovering it a year later on a utility bill.
Ask what happens to your workmanship warranty if the installer goes out of business — this is a real risk in an industry with meaningful installer turnover, and some manufacturers offer warranty protection plans specifically for this scenario that are worth asking about.
Finally, get the production estimate in writing with the assumptions behind it (shading analysis, usage data, degradation rate) rather than accepting a single savings number verbally. An installer confident in their modeling will hand this over without hesitation.