How installer matching will work

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.

I am a former renewable energy research scientist. I 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 I am not selling you anything.

How I plan to make 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.

I intend to 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, I plan to 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 I 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 me, 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.

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

How I will vet 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. I avoid high-debt, venture-funded national chains entirely. I 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. I 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. I 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. I 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 me 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. I 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. I 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. I read the financing they offer, not the pitch they give about it. I 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

I 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 ↗

When this goes live, it will still work the way the rest of the site does. You will see your numbers first, you will be told if solar does not pay at your address, and nothing will be sent to anyone unless you ask for it.