When your solar panels stop working, you have three immediate priorities: document the outage with screenshots from your monitoring app, notify your solar company in writing, and compare your utility bill to the same period from the year before solar to quantify the financial damage. If the company fails to respond within 72 hours, you have grounds for a formal complaint with your state contractor licensing board and consumer protection office.
The Worst Morning in Solar
You open the monitoring app. Something feels off. The graph that usually shows little green bars of electricity production is flat. Zero. Or maybe it has been flat for days — weeks — and you only just noticed because your utility bill arrived and it is the highest you have paid since before you got solar.
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Your solar system has stopped working. The company that sold it to you is hard to reach. And you are still making monthly payments for a system that is generating nothing.
Here is exactly what to do.
Step 1: Screenshot Everything Right Now
Open your monitoring app — SolarEdge, Enphase, Tesla app, whatever your system uses — and screenshot the production graph showing the outage period. Note the date the production dropped to zero. This timestamp is evidence. If your company later claims the system 'just went offline' when you called, your screenshots prove how long they actually had remote monitoring data showing the failure.
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Get My Free Case Review →Step 2: Check the Obvious First
Before calling anyone: check your electrical panel for a tripped breaker. Check that your inverter's status lights are showing error codes rather than being completely dark. Check that there was not a utility grid outage in your area during the same period. If your utility was out, your system may have shut down as designed for safety reasons and will restart when grid power returns. Eliminate the simple causes first.
Step 3: Notify the Company In Writing — Right Now
Send an email — not a phone call — to your solar company's official customer service address. State the date production dropped to zero, attach your monitoring screenshots, and request a written response within 72 hours about when a technician will inspect the system. Keep this email. It establishes the timeline and creates the paper trail you need for any future complaint or legal action.
Step 4: If They Do Not Respond in 72 Hours, Escalate Immediately
No response within 72 hours means file a complaint immediately with: your state contractor licensing board, your state AG consumer protection office, and the BBB. File all three simultaneously. Companies respond faster to regulatory complaints than to customer service calls. Your regulatory filings also create records that support any future claim for compensation for missed production.
Step 5: Calculate Your Financial Damage
Pull your utility bills from the same months last year — before solar. Compare them to your utility bills now, when your system is down. The difference, plus your monthly solar payment during the outage period, is your financial damage. This number matters for any future claim for missed production compensation.
Step 6: Get a Professional Assessment
If the company sends a technician who cannot diagnose the problem or tells you the repair will take weeks, get an independent solar technician or electrician to assess the system. Their written report creates an independent record of the failure cause and timeline. If the company's own installation caused the failure, you need documentation of that before the company attempts to reframe the cause.
Get Help Now
If your solar system has been down and the company is not responding, you have legal options. Get a free contract review at breakyoursolarcontract.com and find out what you are owed.
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