Sunrun Reviews

On the other hand, a number of my neighbors have also installed solar panels and they have their batteries stored in a garage. How other companies could install batteries inside the garage in my neighborhood and Sunrun could not is something that still is a question for me. When they said that the city is not allowing installing batteries inside the garage, I took that. This may make sense because it may be a safety issue. Maybe it's a fire issue because battery is something loaded with all kinds of energy storage and sometimes, batteries can heat up and explode and be a higher fire hazard. Maybe that is the case. And I was making up reasons to convince myself that what Sunrun is telling me is making sense.

But as I saw the others installing batteries inside their garages, I thought about how sincere Sunrun’s feedback was and how solid the reasoning for that was. You can be cynical and say that at that time, Sunrun did not have enough batteries in their stock and they just wanted to just weasel out. Or installing a battery did not make financial sense to someone at that point. And therefore, they just moved my project forward by giving me a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Maybe someday, somebody will help me understand that.

The price of the batteries was approximately $10,000. The cost of everything is going up and will keep going up. Maybe the competition will drive the cost of the battery down. But on the other hand, with all the EVs and the additional need for storage of electrical power, it's very likely that the cost of the battery will go up rather than down. So, even if Sunrun comes back to me and says they’re ready to put a battery inside our garage, I'm gonna be paying a high price for that because of the cost difference between 2023 and hypothetically 2025.

We just have the panels and it's connected to the network and they don't pay a lot for that. So, we are producing energy and sending it to the network for a lower price. And we're getting them for a higher price from the network. We have no storage capacity so, we're at their mercy. When you have storage, it will reduce the dependence on the higher-cost electrical power that you're receiving from them. But overall, Sunrun did well. The product is great and everything seems to be functioning well. I hope it will be functioning the same in the future, at least for some time. I have the app and I don't do that regularly but once in a while, I go to it. In Southern California, we have months of May and June overcast. So, we don't have a whole lot of sunshine until later on in the day, and that piqued my curiosity to see if the system is producing or not. I go to it and when I do, I see how much we're producing, which is good and it is all I need.

There were some surprise costs that I didn't anticipate. I had to do some work on my roof because it wasn't up to the code for the solar panels, but I understand that happens. I had to redo part of my roof because it wasn't good enough to support the panels. We wanted to have enough panels that I wouldn't be paying anything out of pocket for electricity. So, we fudged it on the side of like it generating more than I used. The results have been fine. Sunrun has been responsible. To some extent, you gotta deal with Sunrun and you gotta also deal with your utility, which is LADWP. So at one point, Sunrun would be done, but LADWP wasn't ready. Then it took them about a month to certify it. I understand everybody has those issues. I haven't talked to anybody that didn't have those issues.

Then my meter went bad in January of '23 and for about a month, DWP couldn't tell how much I was generating. That was actually on them. Other than that, they've been very responsive. There's been a couple of times where I had issues. When I called them, I got through to them right away. They do send people out really quickly. Initially, I wasn't very happy with them because it seemed like they had forgotten about me but once they got that part fixed up, it was okay. And since then, everything's been okay.

I don't pay anything for electricity. There's a bank of money that goes up every month where I'm generating more electricity than I'm using. And even though I don't get cash for that, that would count against any month where if I somehow used more electricity than I generated. So if it was a really cloudy month, I would have a bank against that. I haven't had any problem with outages. I do have a backup battery, but I haven't had enough power outages just to even know how that works. Sunrun is a good company to work with. They're a big company and they're located out of state, but they're still responsive. They deal with local contractors for the installation. The biggest issue with solar is just the rules with the California Public Utilities Commission. They keep changing. So, you do have to do your due diligence. The rules today are not the same as the rules when I bought my system.

When I got the bills, I didn't understand why I was behind on one of my bills. It’s automatic and he said they were two different bills because they can't bundle them. He never told me that upfront. I probably still would have gotten it but I would have known about it. I had already purchased a Tesla so it wouldn't have made much of a difference on that but the salesman never said it was the only way they could do it. I told him and he said he did. I know he didn't because it was three months and I was calling accounting and I was told what happened. But I am happy with the service with Sunrun. It has nothing to do with the salesman. He wasn't the same one from the year before. If you don't ask, they won't tell you certain things and he thought maybe I wouldn't get Sunrun for panels. But I was still gonna get them because I have the vehicle.

I see what the Tesla costs to charge every night because I use it every day. But I'm under and still have a credit with STG. So, it's not like I go above and beyond and try to use as much current as I can because I have panels. It's still my wife and myself, so we're still under but I'm fine with that. I'm very satisfied with the service and it was just that part that the salesman said he was sure he told me.

I'm in San Diego County and my aunt who I lived with for 15 years lives in Cucamonga. I called Sunrun and they referred me to a different salesman out in Cucamonga. So, he went out and did the estimate on my aunt’s house and everything was ready to go. That was six months ago. They did all the work. But two weeks ago, the salesman came back and told her she has to pay $2,300 because they screwed up on the estimate that they have to do something with the existing electrical panels and there's a charge. My aunt is on social security so she's tight with her budget. So I talked to him and I said I had them do my service and my neighbors too. But now they’re telling me it's $2,300 for them to finish my aunt’s. She doesn't have the money. He said he was gonna call Sunrun and see what he could do so she wouldn't have to pay. He told me he screwed up. He should have told her but he didn't.

It was the salesman and Sunrun who got lost somehow on that extra charge. But so far, they haven't hooked it up. He hasn't called me back to see what the deal is. This was Tuesday of last week and we're just waiting on him to see what he's gonna say. There's no way my aunt can pay it even if it's payments because she's just trapped. It's a four-bedroom house and her husband died. It was a slip-up. But besides that, everything's fine. I live on a cul-de-sac so it's hard because I don't know the other neighbors that live up the street. But any chance I can, I'm always telling them to go to Sunrun. They can't go wrong. The guys that came out did all the service. They painted all the tubing and the conduit. Everything was nice and they didn't cut any corners. It's perfect.

I called Sunrun about it. If I want to have my panels cleaned, I have to have them done by someone who works through them. I told Sunrun that I had a person who was gonna do everything else on my house and he said he could do the panels, and I wanted to check with them. They said, “No. Don't have him do that. We'll have someone come out and assess everything and let you know how much it would cost to have them done.” So I told the fellow that I was working with to do everything else but not the panels. This was at the beginning of last summer in May and it took the whole summer to get them to come out and figure out and tell me anything.

I ended up telling Sunrun that I would just have part of it done. I told them to clean the panels that were under the trees. They said that they would check on that. Then they called and said they had a guy that would come up and do it. I'm in Massachusetts and he was in Connecticut. Someone called me that the fellow was gonna come up that day to do the work. I asked how much it was gonna be and it was a lot more expensive than I was thinking it was gonna be.

The guy told me that it was more expensive because he was gonna do all the panels. But I told him that I didn't need all of them done. He said, “If I wanna come all the way out there and have all my equipment and go up to do it, I'm gonna do all of them.” So I canceled that. After that, I didn't have anyone to clean them. Now it's getting to the end of the summer and going into fall. So I called Sunrun again and I told them what happened. They said that they'll check into it and get back to me. Then they called me back and said that if it was too expensive and I just wanna have a few done, I can hire my own person to do it. So I waited all summer to have them tell me to have my own person do it who I had here already three months ago and now to have him come back, it would cost me more than it would have originally. I never got it done but it's not a big deal.

In May, I hadn't really received much information of what was going on. I kept calling and writing to them to find out when it was going to happen because the summer months were coming. I really wanted some relief from the high bills, but it didn't happen. They kept saying that there was a hold up in the permits. They were waiting on the California permit to get approved, and there was some kind of problem with the title on my home. I live in Woods Creek Mobile Home Park, and it's in Jamestown. I own the home but not the land I sit on. So, I have to pay property taxes on the house and a monthly space rental fee. I owned a home previously and I had it in a family trust so that I was sole owner and trustee of the property. When the other house was sold and this one I acquired, I had them put it in the family trust name, which was under my father's name.

I think that caused some confusion in determining that I was the rightful owner of the house. Somehow, that got straightened up along the way and we waited on through the end of 2021. The agreement with Sunrun was that once the panels are turned on, they would pay the first six months. That was the perk to get you to sign up for it. So, we wouldn't have any PG&E bills for the first six months. I was still calling around in 2022. They finally said we are getting the approval. They worked with another company, which is called Bright Planet. Bright Planet is located in Contra Costa County. The technician lives in Pittsburgh, and then he had to drive to Livermore to get the company truck, and then from Livermore, up here. So, it was a long journey for all of this to get finalized, but he was very sweet, and talking with Bright Planet, they were always trying to answer my questions.

There is another company circulating Tuolumne County area called V3. They were installing some solar on the mobile home park next to us called Mill Villa. One of their installers was canvassing over this area to see if any of our homes here would adequate rooms to be able to have solar installations, and he noticed that our solar panels were on our house, but that the inverter was off. So, he tapped on our door and he talked to us for a while. I gave him information and he said, "Well, our company could remove those panels. We could install ours, and we could have you up and running right away, being that it's been over a year and you still have no power. That's ridiculous."

He wrote something to Sunrun that day, indicating that we were unhappy and that he was going to make a bid on our house and that. Then their legal department got involved and started writing back to me and talking about how they were going to sue us for $30,000 if we did anything like that, but they were sort of polite about it. They requested that we just hang on a little bit longer to let them get the permit straightened out, so that they could go ahead and turn the installation on. I got back in touch with V3 and I said, "Look, let's just back off. We're gonna stick with Sunrun. And if it doesn't happen, I can always call you again."

Bright Planet got it taken care of some time toward the end of March. Since March, I have been paying Sunrun a dollar a month. I've been getting billed by PG&E for their office accounting, establishing the net meter and their readings. So, that's about $6 a month to pay to PG&E and if I'm counting back, if they said that they covered April, May, June, July, August maybe, and then September, then by October, we'll be paying our agreed upon $82 monthly throughout the end of the contract with them. 82 is a whole lot better than seeing a summer bill of 175 and crawling upwards of what it was like last summer. It was awful last summer and it was very hard to make those payments on our income.

We did not have the battery offered to us at the time. In the extended year of wait period, they were finally able to become competitive and begin a new package like that for newer customers. When I saw that, I called them and I asked them about it. I wrote to them as well asking that I'd be put on the list for when they could begin a retro fit and a backup battery. The last I heard was they didn't think they were going to be able to offer that to us because at that point, PG&E was not going to approve that. Evidently, they're losing out too much on their income from the off peak-hours that we're getting charged. So if they can work that out, I do want to get the backup battery. As the way things worked along with us, it's been a fine plan. We've gotten what we needed when we needed it and we're happy.

Other than that, the biggest benefit of going solar is you're paying upfront for a system that is going to last at least 12 years at zero cost down the line. With the rising prices of energy, it mathematically makes sense to do it. If you're going to sell your home in the next couple of years, I would not suggest it because you don't get the value out of it on a resale. But the loan that I took out to get the solar is annually less than what I would pay for electricity. So it pays for itself in that sense. Aside from that, through the Tesla App, I can look at my daily usage and tracking of the system. I have a backup battery, so it makes it very nice to be able to adjust the way the battery is used as well as the amount of residual capacity that I'm able to tap into every day. Then monthly, PG&E provides an extensive report.