About
The Installer's View
An independent advisory practice for California solar homeowners. Built because the homeowners reading this deserve to know what people inside the industry know.
Where this comes from ↓The problem we're trying to fix
The residential solar market in California is broken in a specific way. Not because solar doesn't work — it does, and well-installed systems pay for themselves over time. The break is in the information environment between installers and homeowners.
Walk into a meeting with most residential solar sales teams and you'll find people trained primarily in closing techniques, not in solar. They've been taught how to handle objections, how to create urgency, how to bundle financing into a payment that sounds smaller than the real total. Many have been with the company less than a year. Some have been in solar less than a year. The training programs are weeks long, not years.
The proposals they hand you are written to be persuasive, not to be read carefully. Dealer fees are buried in financing structures the homeowner is never told about. Production guarantees use language that sounds firm but commits to almost nothing. Escalator clauses compound silently, year after year, until the contract that started below your utility bill is now well above it. UCC-1 financing liens get filed against your house without anyone explaining what that means.
Then the systems get installed by crews who are often even less experienced than the salespeople. We've walked through thousands of residential systems over the years. The ones homeowners call us about — because something feels wrong — usually have at least one thing wrong. Sometimes minor. Sometimes major. Sometimes a code violation the AHJ should never have approved.
Most of the solar content available to homeowners online is written by the same industry that's selling them the system. Installer blogs. Lead-generation marketplaces. Affiliate sites paid by the same companies they're recommending. The Installer's View exists to fix that one piece. The bigger problems — installer accountability, regulatory enforcement, financing reform — are beyond us. But the information gap between what homeowners need to know and what they're being told? That part we can address.
Where this perspective comes from
The credibility for everything on this site comes from a 21-year career in electrical work, the last fourteen inside the solar industry. The path matters because of where the experience comes from.
This practice didn't start in solar sales. It started in electrical components — combiner boxes, recombiners, DC collection systems for utility-scale solar plants. The kind of equipment that, designed or installed wrong, can take down megawatt systems. That's where the foundation of National Electrical Code knowledge, UL product certification standards, and system-level safety compliance comes from — the actual technical landscape residential installers are supposed to be working within. Most residential salespeople have never seen a combiner box up close. The work here was building them.
From there, the path moved through three residential-focused solar companies in technical and field-support roles. Training installers. Troubleshooting systems across hundreds of homes. Working the manufacturer side of the relationship through more than a decade of policy cycles, market shifts, and the changing economics of California solar.
That depth is the point. When this site identifies a red flag in a proposal, it's not because someone read about red flags on a list — it's because that specific issue has been seen play out across hundreds of installations. When we explain why a contract clause matters, it's because we've watched that clause hurt a homeowner three years after they signed.
The Installer's View is the independent practice built on that foundation — a deliberate decision to use that experience to help homeowners directly, on terms that don't put us on the other side of the table from the people we're advising. Based in San Jose, in the heart of the Bay Area solar market. California-focused.
— Zach
What we believe
The site has a point of view, and it's worth being explicit about it so readers know what they're reading.
We believe California homeowners are systematically under-informed about residential solar. The proposals they're shown are designed to close, not to clarify. The contracts they sign contain terms most installers have not actually explained. The systems they buy are often installed by crews with less training than the homeowner assumes. And when things go wrong, the homeowner has very few places to turn for honest help.
We believe this isn't because individual installers are bad people. It's structural. The market rewards volume and speed of close, not quality and clarity. The cost of a system that underperforms or contains a code violation is borne by the homeowner, not the installer who sold it.
A homeowner who reads their proposal carefully, asks the right questions, and knows what to look for becomes a much harder sale for a salesperson trained on the wrong things. Multiply that across enough homeowners and the market starts to demand better.
The voice of this publication is informed by that view. We're combative toward industry practices that harm homeowners and empowering toward homeowners who want to understand what they're being sold. We're not anti-solar — we're pro-solar enough to be angry that the industry is squandering the opportunity. And we're not neutral. The site speaks for the homeowner reading it, not for the industry on the other side of the conversation.
How this practice works, and how it gets paid
The Installer's View is an independent advisory practice. When advisory services open, the work will be straightforward: you'll have a question or a situation, send us what you have, and we'll write back honestly with what we'd do — for a fixed fee, stated upfront.
What matters most is what stands behind that advice. We don't sell solar. We don't have an installer we secretly recommend. We don't take commissions for steering you to lenders or installers. The recommendation we give you is the recommendation — there's nothing behind it. That independence is the entire point of the practice, and it's the standard everything here is held to.