Choosing The Right Pv System For Your Home

PV is about finding (i) the right product and (ii) the right installer for your home.  Since PV is still a relatively new industry, it's important to ensure that your PV product and installing contractor have a stable track record, adequate resources and personnel, so that you can be sure they'll be around for you as time passes. 

Last year our company contracted with PowerLight, in Berkeley, California, to install PV on 93 homes we were building in Southern California's Coachella Valley.  An incredibly well resourced and well run organization, they manufacture their own PV product, SunTile, and install with their own in-house crews.  They did a fabulous job of interfacing with us   in the planning stages, delivered first rate plans, schematics and calculations as required by the City's Department of Building and Safety, and intitated training sessions in the field with our roofing, electrical and sheet metal crews to ensure that all subcontractor interfaces were properly addressed.   They prepared informational presentations for our homebuyers, prepared interconnection agreements for each of our buyers and Southern California Edison (the PV systems actually connect to the homeowners' meters and the public utility grid), and provide monitoring equipment for each system so that they can continually monitor performance. 

And their architecturally integrated PV product, SunTile, is attractively low profile, and performs reliably.

The organization is first rate, and responsive, and not surprisingly they were recently bought out by SunPower, one of America's largest publicly held solar companies.   

One of the best things you can do if you're a homeowner, is find a company like SunPower, that's vertically integrated, and offers you soup to nuts planning, plan checking, product manufacture, installation in the field and customer service after installation.