this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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What a shame. Is there no competition among contractors or is it inherently expensive?
Lots of red tape, at least in the US. And lots of scammy contractors out there.
As the guy in charge of the red tape - there really isn't much.
Show that it's designed to be safely installed on the roof and that you have a licensed electrician doing the install.
Then submit to an inspection.
It takes 15 minutes to get a solar permit, and the whole thing videos like $250 in permitting - most of which is inspections.
But the contractor invoices $3,000 for permitting, so of course they're gonna say there's a bunch of red tape to justify it.
Depends on the area. They're trying to force every solar installer here to be a licensed electrician, including the guys who slap the panels.
And our local utility and government inspectors take months to come out to do an inspection. It requires one person from the company to sit at the site all day because you never know when they're actually going to show up. Or if they're going to show up.
That's weird.
Our insurance doesn't even allow our inspectors to climb on the roof. We make sure the electrician doingg the wiring is licensed and has liability insurance, and we inspect the electrical panels when they're done. The workers don't even have to be there, and neither does the homeowner if the panel is accessible from the street-side of the fence.
We actually prefer doing inspections without the contractors being there. It keeps them from trying to guide our inspectors away from their fuckups and prevents the contractors from trying to argue. We take pictures of the violations, upload them to the permit, and tell them to fix it.
If they don't, we eventually arrange it to be fixed by another electrician and file a claim against their insurance.
Because it takes months to get inspectors out, we wanted to do everything we could to avoid having them come out again. A lot of times I've saved a job by promising to do a spot fix and having the inspector swing back by later that day, or take pictures/video and send it to them.
We have 2 inspectors for all inspections (commercial and residential for all trades) who are also our building plan reviewers, building official, and City Arborist for one of the fastest-growing cities in the country (about 45k people now), and we can almost always make it next business day. We can do same day most of the time.
Sounds like you're working in a city that doesn't know how to manage resources.
Definitely true, when it comes to inspectors. But also they just didn't care.
The inspectors were good at their jobs, but they had no sense of urgency whatsoever.
The department was also critically understaffed. Probably still is. I've been out of the industry for 5 years.
Mine took weeks to get an inspector out, and the local permitting fees were thousands (yes, I called the city and county to verify). Then the utility apparently required their own inspection, which took another month, because their guys kept no-showing.
It's mostly just time consuming. It took 5 days to get the solar installed on our roof.
Seems like a huge project. Or a challenging roof layout.
21 panels and very simple layout. The longest part was building the frame to hold the panels. Installing the inverters etc. took a little time and our town is a little strict when it cones to construction. This is a very good installer which doesn't rush things just to move on to the next job.