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A free, detailed analysis of your home, and help if it is worth it

What the free analysis is

An independent, detailed analysis of solar on your home, prepared by hand with the same model behind our calculator and our published studies, and sent to you by email. It covers:

• Your roof. Modelled from 3-D building data and measured sunlight, with the best panel layout for it.
• Your rate. Your utility's actual filed tariff, including any rate you would be moved to if you go solar.
• The money. Monthly and 25-year savings, payback and return, whether you pay cash, take a loan, lease or sign a PPA.
• Batteries. Whether one pays for itself at your home, and which size makes the most sense.
• A fair price. What a competitive quote for your system should cost, so you can compare the offers you get.
• A plain verdict. A good investment, a close call, or not worth it, with the numbers behind it.

Built by an energy scientist, not a lead broker

Most solar websites are lead farms. You type in your address, your phone number goes to whichever sales companies bid for it, and then the calls start. That is not a side effect of the business model. That is the business model.

SIA is built by a former renewable energy research scientist who spent years building technoeconomic models at national laboratories and institutional energy bodies, the kind used to judge whether solar pays, from a single roof up to utility-scale plants. This site runs that same class of model on your house.

What you get is an engineering assessment, for free. What you do not get is a sales pitch, because we are not selling you anything.

Who it is for

Homeowners thinking about solar. It is as useful if you are only curious whether it would pay as it is if you are weighing a quote an installer has already given you, or wondering whether a battery is worth adding. You do not need to have decided anything.

Why it is free

SIA earns money in one way only. If the analysis is good, you ask to meet an installer and you go ahead, the installer pays us a flat fee, and part of it comes back to you. If the answer is no, you still get the analysis and you owe us nothing. An honest “no” costs us nothing worth having: a sale that should not happen is worth nothing to an installer either.

When, where and how

• How to ask: use the button below, or email contact@siapolicy.ai with your home address.
• What we need: your email and home address. Your monthly electric bill helps, but it is optional. We never ask for a phone number.
• When: within one business day.
• Where: by email, as a written report you can keep.
• What it costs: nothing, and asking commits you to nothing.

Request my free analysis

What happens to your details

Your email and address are used only to prepare your analysis and reply to you. We never sell them, and no installer sees them unless you ask for an introduction. Email contact@siapolicy.ai and we will delete them within two business days. The details are in our privacy policy.

If the numbers are good: installer matching

If your analysis shows solar is a good investment at your home, we will tell you so plainly and suggest you give it serious thought. That is a nudge, not a push. If you want to go ahead, we will help: we introduce you to one vetted local installer, and nothing happens until you ask.

If it is a close call, we will say so, and the decision is yours. If solar does not pay at your home, we will say that too, and we will not send you to an installer.

How SIA makes money

A typical solar site sells your contact details to five or ten contractors at once. The phone calls you get afterwards are the product working exactly as designed.

We do it differently. One homeowner, one vetted installer, one flat finder's fee paid by the installer. Never a list, never an auction.

And because that fee only exists when the numbers already worked, we pass part of it straight back to you: $100 once you have actually met the installer, and $400 more once your system is switched on. Up to $500 in cash, for going solar through a match you asked for.

The second payment is tied to your utility's Permission to Operate letter, the document that says the system is live. That is deliberate. It means we cannot pay out on a deal that never happened, and nobody can claim the money without a real, commissioned system on a real roof.

You get the analysis free, you get money back, and the installer gets a customer who already understands the deal. That last part is why they will pay.

Why the current system produces bad behaviour

Residential solar has an expensive, mostly invisible problem: it costs a fortune to find a customer. NREL puts customer acquisition at roughly $0.50 per watt per completed install, about $3,500 on an ordinary 8 kW system, spent before a single panel is bought.¹

And it is getting worse. Wood Mackenzie has residential acquisition costs hitting a five-year low of $0.60/W in 2025, then spiking 40% to $0.84/W in 2026.² At that rate the same 8 kW system carries about $6,720 of pure customer-finding cost. That is roughly a quarter of what you pay, and none of it puts hardware on your roof.

That number explains a lot of what homeowners find unpleasant about buying solar. When leads are bought in bulk and most of them go nowhere, the few that convert have to carry the cost of all the ones that did not. Hence the door knocking. Hence the evening phone calls. Hence a 2.9% annual escalator buried on page eleven of a lease, quietly eating the savings that were promised on page one.

None of that is because solar installers are unusually dishonest. It is because that marketing has to come back from somewhere, and it comes back from you.

What a single match changes

By the time an installer hears from us, the modelling is already done and the homeowner has already seen the numbers, including the ones that make solar look like a bad idea. A lead like that converts at a rate a bulk list cannot approach, which means the installer's acquisition cost falls close to zero.

We charge them a flat fee for that, and we share part of it with you.

How SIA vets your installer

Because you get exactly one match, the whole thing rests on that one company being good. So the vetting is deliberately hard to pass. Every check below is done by hand, against public records, before anyone is added to the list.

They have to still exist in ten years

Solar has been through a wave of national bankruptcies, and plenty of homeowners are now holding warranties from companies that no longer answer the phone. We avoid high-debt, venture-funded national chains entirely. We look for local operators who own their warehouse and their trucks, because assets are harder to walk away from than promises.

A decade under the same name

A 25-year warranty is worth nothing from a company that folds in 25 months. We check state corporate registries and only work with firms that have traded continuously under one name for at least ten years. Companies that dissolve and re-register under a new name, usually to escape their reviews, do not get a second look.

A clean, unrestricted electrical licence

This is high-voltage electrical work attached to your house, not a roofing job. We pull state licensing board records directly and confirm an active, unrestricted electrical or solar contractor licence with no open disciplinary actions, fines or safety violations.

Insurance that protects you, not just them

This is the one most people never think to ask about, and it is the one that can cost the most. If an uninsured crew damages your house, or someone is hurt on your roof, that can land on you. We check three things on the licence record: active general liability cover, active workers' compensation for the crews who will actually be on your roof, and a current contractor bond with no claims paid against it. Lapsed or pending is treated as absent. A company that tells us it uses its own employees but carries no workers' compensation has contradicted itself, and that ends it.

Certified people, not certified marketing

Plenty of solar companies are sales operations that subcontract the actual work to whoever is available. We cross-check candidates against the NABCEP registry and require genuine Board Certified PV Installation Professional credentials among the people running the projects.

Their own crews

When the install is handed to a third-party subcontractor, quality drops and, more importantly, accountability disappears: when a leak shows up two winters later, everyone points at someone else. We check how the company actually staffs its installs and require W-2 employees who answer to the owner.

Contracts without buried escalators

The most reliable way to lose money on solar is a compounding annual escalator hidden in a long contract. We read the financing they offer, not the pitch they give about it. We require transparent cash pricing, sane loan partners, and a flat or low-escalator option that actually preserves your savings. Any company whose standard lease or PPA leans on a compounding escalator of 2.9% or more does not make the list.

No door-knocking

We read the worst reviews, not the best ones, and look for patterns rather than one-off complaints. Aggressive door-to-door sales, phone banks, or going quiet the moment the system is switched on: any of those and the company is out.

1. Cruce, J. R., et al. Evaluating the Impact of Residential Solar Contract Cancellations in the United States. NREL/TP-6A20-80626, January 2022. Reports customer acquisition of roughly $0.50/W ($3,500) per install, within pre-install soft costs of about $0.75/W; cites Feldman et al. (2021) at $0.38–$0.50/W and Wood Mackenzie at $0.45–$0.65/W, up to $0.77/W for some large installers. Report ↗
2. Wood Mackenzie, US residential solar customer acquisition costs set to spike 40% in 2026 before gradual decline. $0.60/W in 2025 rising to $0.84/W in 2026. Analysis ↗

It works the way the rest of the site does. You see your numbers first, you are told if solar does not pay at your address, and no installer sees anything unless you ask for it.