[RFI] SOLAR INSTALLATION PROS/CONS

[KD7JYK DM09]

"Some of you guys must live in great places with lots of contractors 
looking for work. We tried to add an RFI clause to our furnace/AC 
install. No one would even give us a bid until we removed the request 
for the RFI clause...."

That should be insightful.  What if you dialed it back a bit, and added 
a clause for "general liability", or other "nuisance"?  A good way to 
weed out the scum!

General solar industry related comments follow.

You can bet the installers have all sorts of "policies" (unenforceable 
potential victimization based notions some consumers foolishly agree to) 
to cover themselves...  People forget, that stuff goes both ways.  Funny 
how most are ready to take money, but balk at entry-level 
responsibility, or even knowledge of the products they push beyond, Step 
1: Install, Step 2: Get Paid.  Perhaps if consumers became consistently 
proactive in their own interests, the flakes would dry up, and blow away.

As for great places/contractors, here it's fly-by-night dirtbags going 
door to door, spoofing caller info, and using names of big companies 
that went out of business years ago, with several hundred complaints 
online in general, several dozen more with the BBB and FTC, scores of 
insightful posts from employees on "Glassdoor", and a few class-action 
lawsuits from one extreme to another.

Beginning May 5th, I received several hundred calls, one every few 
minutes over two to three days on one line alone, from “Bright Solar” 
aka “Freedom Forever LLC” aka “Forever Freedom Solar” aka “American 
Solar” aka “Jason From Energy Advocates”, and, aka “Bright Solar 
Marketing”.  Of those calls, all but ONE (which is how I found out who 
they were), were spoofed originating telephone numbers throughout the 
US, and Canada.  Some of the calls were originated by people in their 
homes (where one could hear the screaming/fighting kids, barking dogs, 
food preparation sounds, the grunting ultimate end result of food 
preparation sounds, and heart-breaking domestic issues), boiler rooms 
(with exciting background noises from their BS scripted spiel, one read 
the wrong script-of-the-day, "Medicare" WHOOPS!, to enraged psychopathic 
cuss-fests, even threats, toward those that aren't interested in the 
unsolicited scam of the moment), and AI, artificial intelligence (which 
is always fun to try to hack using specific words to trigger an 
unintended response).  Sounds SUPER legit, where do I toss a couple tens 
of kiloBucks to "virtue signal" at my expense, in exchange for 
potentially years of misery, and major lifestyle changes, as noted in 
this forum continuously???

One must wonder, at what point will anyone care to look at the industry 
from the ground up, mandate some basic regulations, or maybe just some 
common sense standards of the products, marketing, installation, even 
technical requirements, using its current state as an example of 
what/how to not do things, for the most part?  I know solar has been the 
hyped-up buzz-industry for a quite some time (with nobody ever thinking 
to step two), but it almost immediately went the way of bon*r pill spam, 
and late night marital aid infomercials.  I'm surprised in the some 
thirty-plus years this hasn't been seriously looked at, based on what we 
have now.

Kurt