Gah, I am so frustrated right now!! I have a full solar system plus 2 powerwalls sitting pretty in my garage ready to go for 4.5 weeks and I just found out they forgot to push the "send" button on the PTO request to my utility. Oops.
From what I can see Tesla Energy is an unorganized mess. I feel a bit suckered right now for signing with them when I knew Solar City was not known as a good installer. I foolishly trusted the Tesla name.
Here is my saga:
I will say Tesla Energy is always very apologetic when these issues have been found and they have always agreed to correct the errors. But the errors just KEEP happening, so it just gets very tiresome. My next hurdle is to make sure my SGIP application actually gets submitted and/or for them to tell me WHERE I am in the queue, which they have so far refused to do. The customer service rep was apologetic (as usual) and they are supposed to be looking into that for me. We will see how that goes.
Sorry for the wall of text. Anyway - I hope this helps anyone who is thinking about signing with TE. You have to keep track of the whole process yourself every step of the way and you can't trust the status updates you get from them. Very unfortunate and at this point I can only hope our next 20 years of warranty service aren't also riddled with these same issues.
From what I can see Tesla Energy is an unorganized mess. I feel a bit suckered right now for signing with them when I knew Solar City was not known as a good installer. I foolishly trusted the Tesla name.
Here is my saga:
- September 2017: Sign contract with TE for solar plus 2 Powerwalls. Assured that they DO have plenty of Powerwalls in stock. Thought at the time we might be able to get the job done before the end of the year for the tax credit.
- Over the next few weeks have to sign multiple copies of documents because they keep getting them wrong and have to have me re-do them. My sales advisor would tell me one thing, documents would arrive from engineering with different numbers, etc. Right hand not knowing what the left was doing. Each correction usually took several days to sort out.
- Wait weeks for my permit. Call the building department myself and find out TE had to do a re-design of my plans and had to resubmit. Awesome. I am not their first PW install in my city, but whatever. Permits finally get approved.
- In December after calling many times to find out when we would be scheduled we find out that "oh, there was no way you could get your system installed this year even though you signed in September. We are looking at March 2018 as the earliest". I would have made a different choice on signing if this had been made clear to me in September (all the other installers were telling me they could do it by December). Too late now.
- March rolls around and its finally install day! They show up with the WRONG panels. We had ordered the black/black 315W panels and they showed up with the white line 325W panels due to a last minute unauthorized substitution. Tesla Energy is apologetic and says they will get us the correct panels.
- Two and a half weeks later, we get the new install date for the correct panels and they will do the city inspection that same day. Great! Panels arrive and are correct, but we ended up not passing the city inspection. Sigh. another delay.
- Next available date after they fix the inspection issues is another two weeks away. We are now in mid-April. Finally pass inspection. Tesla Energy tells me they submitted the PTO paperwork on the 18th of April and my utility has a 4-5 week turnaround. OK, that sucks, but it is what it is. I get a few updates over the next few weeks from MySolarCity that they have checked on the status of my PTO and it is still in work.
- 4.5 weeks later, I decide to check in with the utility myself to see where it is in the queue. They look into it, and tell me Tesla Energy hasn't sent them the documents yet (!!) I call TE to see. TE says: we did send the documents and got confirmation in April, but we can't follow up until the 5 weeks have passed. So I call SCE back to find out exactly what is missing. SCE tells me that TE has put the documents in the online system, but didn't push the "send" button to push them over. Call TE back. The sales rep says - oh, I see they submitted that "just 2 minutes ago". So apparently the story I got the first time I called and all the status updates I had been getting were all wrong. More delays. So now I am STARTING my clock with the utility. Hope it doesn't take another 4 weeks.
I will say Tesla Energy is always very apologetic when these issues have been found and they have always agreed to correct the errors. But the errors just KEEP happening, so it just gets very tiresome. My next hurdle is to make sure my SGIP application actually gets submitted and/or for them to tell me WHERE I am in the queue, which they have so far refused to do. The customer service rep was apologetic (as usual) and they are supposed to be looking into that for me. We will see how that goes.
Sorry for the wall of text. Anyway - I hope this helps anyone who is thinking about signing with TE. You have to keep track of the whole process yourself every step of the way and you can't trust the status updates you get from them. Very unfortunate and at this point I can only hope our next 20 years of warranty service aren't also riddled with these same issues.
