A standard installation puts panels on your existing roof, ties an inverter into your electrical service, clears a permit with your city or county, and clears an interconnection application with your utility. That last pair is not optional and not fast, because those timelines belong to public offices rather than to the installer. Everything else is measurement: what your roof can hold, what direction it faces, and how much power you actually use across a year.
The part worth slowing down for is the sizing. An array built around a guess at your usage is a proposal, not an estimate. Built around a full year of your bills, it becomes something you can argue with, which is what you want. If your roof is near the end of its life, or shade is heavy, or your electrical panel is already full, those facts should surface at the site visit rather than on install day. A good installer will raise them unprompted.
We do not publish prices, because a published price for solar is almost always a hook. The honest version is a list of what moves the number. Array size is driven by your annual usage. Roof complexity drives labor: pitch, covering material, how many separate faces the array is split across, and how cut up the roof is with vents and valleys. Your electrical service matters, since an older or fully loaded main panel may need work first. A detached garage can mean trenching. And if the roof is near the end of its life, it goes on ahead of the array. Compare assumptions across proposals, not just totals.
Installers can usually tell you how long their own crew needs, and that part tends to be short. The stretch nobody controls is the permit review at your city or county and the interconnection review at your utility. Ask each installer what they are currently seeing for both, in your specific city, and treat any promise of an exact turn-on date with suspicion.
Only if the roof is near the end of its life. Panels are mounted with penetrations through the covering, and taking an array off and reinstalling it later to reroof costs real money. If the roof has plenty of life left, panels go straight on. If it does not, doing both in one sequence is usually the cheaper path. A site visit is where that gets decided.
Penetrations are normal and expected; the flashing around them is what determines whether they leak. That detail is worth asking about directly. Ask how the mounts are flashed for your specific roof covering, who is responsible if a leak shows up at a mount later, and get that answer in writing rather than as a verbal reassurance on the driveway.
Enough to match what you use, limited by how much unshaded roof you have facing a useful direction. Those two numbers rarely line up perfectly, so most real designs are a compromise. Anyone who names a size before seeing your usage history and your roof is working from a template, and you should ask what happens to their math if their assumptions are off.
When a roof is near the end of its life, it usually goes on first. Pulling an array off and putting it back later costs money you would rather not spend twice, so the two jobs are worth sequencing correctly the first time.
Learn more →A battery is a separate decision from panels, not an automatic add-on. It mainly addresses outages and shifting when you draw power. Whether it earns its place depends on your utility rules and on what you actually want running when the lights go out.
Learn more →Production dropped, an inverter is throwing a fault, monitoring went dark, or the company that sold you the system no longer exists. Somebody still has to diagnose it. We can point you to installers who take service work on other people's arrays.
Learn more →Roof work under an existing array means panels come off and go back on, with mounts and flashing redone properly. It is its own job with its own scheduling, and it needs to be coordinated with whoever is handling the roof itself.
Learn more →A few details about your home is enough to start. Or call 801-644-9000 and skip the form.