Anyone have solar installers in Ohio they would recommend, especially south-west area? I did my own solar, but friends are asking who they could use to have solar installed at their houses. I have a few I talked to, but looking for more input or experiences with installers.
As
@JoeHam mentioned, I am with Envirosol out of Sugarcreek, OH. We do more work in the Eastern half of Ohio, but occasionally are in the Western half as well. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions, etc. In the past (10+ years ago) we did mostly off-grid, but over the last number of years we have been doing more and more grid-tie, and now we do quite a bit of grid-tie with storage as well.
Our website is
here.
Related question...
What inverters are installers using these days? What should I tell my friends to avoid? In 2023, Enphase was the main thing people quoted me before I went DIY.
When doing grid-tie, we use a lot of Sol-Ark inverters when our customers want battery backup, or if they want the option of adding battery backup in the future. If batteries are not of interest, we use Fronius.
For off-grid we have used Magnum (not in quite a while), Schneider, Victron and even a few Outback setups. Lately we have also been using some Sol-Ark inverters for off-grid as well.
We used SolarEdge for grid-tie in the past, and I really like their monitoring, but we just had too many failures! There was more than one place that we warrantied the same inverter multiple times! They are super on getting warranty RMA approved and sent out quickly, but it is just not practical to regularly be having truck rolls to go replace another inverter! So we switched to Fronius for a few years now, with great success! If someone needs optimization due to partial shading, we use Tigo Optimizers.
We have never used micro inverters, so I can't speak from experience on those, but personally don't like the idea of the inverters being subjected to high heat levels, mounted directly under the panels! (To be fair, optimizers would run into the same heat...)
