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What we do with what you send

It goes to the two owners, Drew and Steve, not to a call centre or a lead exchange. Some of what looks like a local solar company online is a marketing operation that sells your enquiry on to whoever is buying that week. If you fill in this form you are contacting the people who would do the work.

We reply within the hour during business hours. There is no obligation at any stage, no guaranteed-savings math, and no countdown timer on anything we send you.

What makes the answer faster and better

Twelve months of electricity usage rather than one bill. A system sized from a summer peak is oversized for the year and one sized from a mild month disappoints every August, and neither error is visible until the array is on the roof. Twelve months also shows the shape of your use across the day, which decides how much of your own generation you will use rather than export.

Which utility serves you, read off a bill rather than inferred from your address. In the Charleston metro, Dominion and Berkeley Electric territory interleave (Daniel Island has both), so two houses on the same street can be on different providers with different export terms.

Your roof's age and covering, and whether anything has grown up around it since you moved in. Roof age is the detail that most often changes our recommendation, because installing over a roof with a few years left means paying to remove and reinstall the array later.

What happens next, and when we say no

A bill review first, then a survey covering roof structure, shading modelled across the year rather than judged on the day we visit, your main panel and service capacity, and where equipment can physically go. Then figures, with the assumptions stated separately from the totals.

Sometimes the honest answer is that solar does not make sense at your address. Heavy unavoidable shading, a roof near the end of its life where you are not willing to re-roof first, genuinely low annual electricity spend, or a move planned within a few years are the four common reasons. We put that in writing before anything is ordered, and that answer is free too.

If we do proceed, installation is typically one to three days. The less predictable part is the utility's permission to operate afterwards, which depends on their queue rather than on us: your system sits complete and switched off until it arrives. We would rather you hear that now than at handover.

Three states, three different answers

We install across South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia, and they are not variations on one market. South Carolina still has a 25% state income tax credit claimed on Form TC-38, capped at $3,500 in any one tax year and at 50% of your annual state liability, with a ten-year carry-forward, so most systems claim it across two or three returns rather than at purchase.

Virginia has no state credit at all. What carries a Virginia system instead is one-for-one retail net metering, which survived a contested proceeding at the State Corporation Commission in April 2026, and which means exported power is credited at the same rate you buy it back. Residential systems of 25 kW or less are also exempt from state and local property tax.

Georgia has no state credit either, and its exports earn roughly 7.2 cents per kilowatt-hour against a retail rate near 13 cents. That gap makes Georgia a self-consumption exercise: a kilowatt-hour you use as you generate it is worth close to double one you export, which changes the sensible system size and makes storage a real economic question rather than an add-on.

In all three, the 30% federal residential credit expired for systems placed in service on or after 1 January 2026. If you are holding a proposal that subtracts it, that proposal is working from an outdated template and is overstating your position by thousands of dollars. Confirm your own tax position with a professional.

How people usually pay for it, and what to watch

Buying outright is simplest: you own the system, you claim any credit you are eligible for, and the whole of the avoided electricity cost is yours. A solar loan keeps ownership with you, which matters because tax credits follow ownership, but the thing to examine is the difference between the cash price and the financed price for the same system, which is frequently several thousand dollars and is usually folded into the arrangement rather than shown as a fee. Ask for both prices.

Leases and power purchase agreements put ownership with a third party. They can suit a household without the tax liability to use a credit anyway, but they bring long terms, escalator clauses that raise your payment annually, and transfer conditions that surface when you sell the house and the buyer has to qualify and agree to assume the contract. Read the escalator and the transfer clause before anything else in that document.

We are not neutral here and would rather say so: ownership structures are simpler and we prefer them. The honest position is that the right answer depends on your tax liability, your available capital and how long you will stay, and any installer recommending the same structure to everybody is recommending the one that suits them.

Questions worth asking us, and anyone else

Who will actually be on the roof, and are they employees? A large share of residential solar in the Southeast is sold by one company and installed by a subcontractor the homeowner never meets, which becomes your problem the day a penetration needs revisiting. Our crews are our own.

Who holds the workmanship warranty, and will that business still exist? Manufacturer warranties attach to equipment and generally survive a company closing. Workmanship warranties do not, and South Carolina has roughly fifteen years of installed rooftop solar behind it with a good number of those installers gone. Our roof-penetration warranty is held by us for the life of the roof rather than passed through.

What is the production estimate in kilowatt-hours, and what export rate and rate-escalation assumption sit behind the savings figure? A kilowatt-hour figure can be checked against your own bill; a dollars-saved headline embeds every assumption and hides all of them. Two quotes for near-identical hardware can differ by tens of thousands over twenty-five years purely on those assumptions.

And is there a case in which you would tell me not to do this? Anyone who has never advised a customer against a system is either extraordinarily lucky in their leads or is not telling anyone.

What we will have ready when we call you

Before the conversation we confirm which utility serves your address and what its current export arrangement is, so we are not asking you questions we could have answered ourselves. Where you are in a market we publish a page for, we will already have the county permitting position and the local constraints in front of us.

We do not arrive with a system already designed. A proposal produced before anyone has seen your usage or your roof is a template with your name on it, and the number in it is a starting position for a negotiation rather than an engineering estimate. The figures come after the survey, not before.

What we will say on that first call is whether it is worth going further. If your annual electricity spend is low, or your roof is heavily shaded, or it has only a few years left and you are not planning to replace it, we can usually establish that in fifteen minutes and save us both an appointment.

If you already have quotes

Bring them. We would rather look at what you have been offered than pretend the comparison is not happening, and there are specific things worth checking that are easy to miss.

Whether a federal credit has been applied: it should not be for a 2026 system. Whether the state credit has been spread across tax years rather than shown as an immediate deduction, given South Carolina's $3,500 annual cap and 50% liability limit. Price per watt rather than the total, since two quotes for different system sizes cannot be compared on totals. And whether there are dealer or financing fees folded into a financed price that would not appear in a cash price for the same system.

If a quote survives those, you are comparing genuine offers. If it does not, you are comparing assumptions, and the cheaper-looking one is frequently just the one with the more optimistic arithmetic behind it.

Prefer not to fill in a form?

Call us, or email Drew or Steve directly using the addresses on this page. They reach the owners rather than a marketing inbox, and either route gets you to the same two people the form does.

If you would rather orient yourself first, the cost calculator gives a ballpark from your monthly bill without asking for contact details, and the utility guides explain what your specific provider pays for exported power. Neither requires speaking to anyone, and both will make this conversation shorter when you are ready to have it.