Solar handover: the visit that stops the calls

A solar install finishes when the inverter comes on, and the customer relationship starts there. Most businesses treat those as the same moment.

The calls that follow are rarely faults. They are questions about numbers the customer has never seen before and nobody explained.

Three questions cause most of the calls

• Why is production low today? Cloud, season and orientation all look like a fault to somebody new.
• Why is my bill still high? The app shows none of the export rates, supply charges or usage timing.
• What is this light on the inverter? A normal status reads as an alarm to somebody seeing it first time.

Each one takes five minutes at handover and twenty on the phone three weeks later, with a worried customer at the other end.

Show the app on the customer's own phone

A handover done on the installer's tablet teaches nothing. The customer needs the app on their phone, logged in, with their own system in front of them.

Walking through one real day, including a cloudy hour, sets the expectation that no leaflet can. The customer then recognises normal instead of reporting it.

Name the first bill, and what it will not show

The bill after an install often covers days before it, and the meter change can lag the install by weeks. A customer expecting a transformed bill gets a confusing one.

A sentence at handover costs nothing and prevents the hardest call to answer. That call is about a retailer's billing rather than the install.

Leave the paperwork somewhere it will be found

Warranty documents, the system design, the compliance paperwork and the monitoring login all matter in year six, when nobody can remember who installed it.

A single labelled pack, plus the same documents attached to the job in the business's own records, covers both. The customer loses paper and the business should not.

Photograph the array, the inverter and the switchboard

Those three pictures answer most warranty questions without a visit, and they prove the state of the switchboard before anybody else worked on it.

A business with that record argues far less about whether a later fault was theirs.

Book the check in before leaving

A call at six weeks catches the questions nobody has asked yet, while the customer still feels well served.

A repeating job holds that better than a promise does. Our guide to service agreements covers making that visit pay for itself rather than costing an hour.

The switchboard often decides the job

Many installs need switchboard work the sales quote never mentioned, and the customer meets that cost on the day.

A site inspection before the quote turns that into a priced line. Discovering it on the install morning turns it into an argument with somebody holding a deposit.

Monitoring faults are the quiet warranty cost

A system producing well with broken monitoring looks broken to the customer, and generates calls for years.

Checking the monitoring connection at handover, and again at the six week call, catches most of them while the install is fresh.

A note of the router and the connection method on the job saves a technician guessing years later, after the household has changed both.

A monitoring outage also hides a real fault. A system offline for a month could have been underproducing all of it, and nobody knew.

What to change first

• The handover runs on the customer's own phone, with their own system on screen
• One real day gets walked through, including a cloudy hour
• The first bill gets explained before it arrives
• One labelled pack holds the warranty, design and login details
• The array, inverter and switchboard get photographed
• A six week check in goes in the diary before the van leaves