Before you look at a single number, find out what the numbers were built on. The foundation of any legitimate proposal is a full year of your actual electricity use, taken from your bills or your utility account. A year matters because usage swings hard with the seasons, and a proposal built from one bill or from a typical home for this size is working from an assumption you never agreed to.
So ask the question directly: what usage data did you use, and where did it come from? If the answer is your bills, ask to see the annual figure they worked from written into the document. If the answer is an estimate, everything downstream inherits that estimate. That is not automatically dishonest, but you are entitled to know which parts of the proposal are measured and which parts are assumed.
A surprising number of proposals are produced without anyone ever visiting the property. Satellite imagery and design software make it easy to generate a professional-looking layout from a desk in another state, and the document that comes out looks identical to one built from a real site visit. What that desk process cannot do is measure obstructions accurately, evaluate the condition of the covering, watch how shade moves across the roof through a day, or open your electrical panel and look inside.
Ask plainly: has anyone been to the house, and what did they find? Ask what condition the roof is in and how they determined that. Ask whether the electrical service can accept the design as drawn. If the answers are general rather than specific to your address, you are holding a template. A template can still be a starting point, but it should not be the thing you sign.
Every proposal rests on a stack of assumptions: how much the array will produce, how much power you will use in the years ahead, how your utility will treat what you send back, and what happens to electricity prices over time. The totals on the front page are just those assumptions run through arithmetic. Arguing about the totals is pointless. Arguing about the assumptions is the entire exercise.
The most useful question you can ask is what happens if each assumption is wrong. What does the picture look like if production comes in lower than modeled? If your usage drops because someone moves out, or rises because you add a vehicle or air conditioning? If the utility's terms change before your system is approved? A confident salesperson will walk you through those scenarios. A weak proposal has no answer, because it was never built to survive the question.
There is a real difference between buying a system outright, financing one with a loan, leasing equipment, and signing an agreement to buy the power the system produces. They can be presented in very similar language, often reduced to a single monthly figure, and the monthly figure is not what distinguishes them. What distinguishes them is what you actually own at the end, who is responsible for maintenance, and what obligation is attached to the house.
So find the answers in writing: Do I own this equipment, or does someone else? Is there a lien or a filing against the property? Who repairs it if it fails, and for how long? Does any payment in this agreement change over time, and by what rule? If a payment escalates, ask to see the schedule written out rather than described. Any agreement where those answers are hard to locate is an agreement you should slow down on.
People move, and solar agreements outlive plenty of homeowners' plans. If you own the system outright, it generally travels with the house as part of the sale. If it is financed, leased, or tied to a power purchase agreement, there is a process for transferring or settling it, and that process has requirements, including whether your buyer qualifies to take it over.
Ask before you sign, not when the house is listed: what exactly happens at sale? Who handles the transfer? What if the buyer will not assume it? What if their lender objects? These questions are entirely fair and any company should be able to answer them from the document rather than from memory. If the answer is that it never causes problems, ask them to point to where the document says so.
Watch how the proposal is delivered. Pricing that expires tonight, a discount tied to signing before the salesperson leaves, a claim that an incentive is about to disappear, or reluctance to email the document so you can read it alone are all sales technique rather than engineering. None of them change what your roof will produce. A project that makes sense today makes sense next week.
The counter-move is simple and it costs nothing. Ask for the full document in writing. Get more than one proposal and compare the assumptions side by side rather than the headline totals. Take anything involving taxes to a tax professional, since nobody selling you equipment is giving you tax advice, us included. And ask any question twice if the first answer was vague. Good installers do not mind. That is the whole point of asking.
More than one, and enough that you start seeing where they disagree. The value is not in finding the lowest total, it is in noticing that two companies made different assumptions about your usage, your shade, or your roof. Those disagreements are where the real questions live, and they only become visible when you compare documents side by side.
Ask for the source and take it to a tax professional. Incentive rules change, and what you personally qualify for depends on your own tax situation, not on a line item in a sales document. We do not give tax advice and neither should your installer. Any figure that appears in a proposal without a citation should be treated as a claim, not a fact.
No, and how a company reacts is useful information. You are considering equipment attached to your house through your roof, tied into your electrical service, and possibly attached to a multi-year financial agreement. Anyone who treats careful reading as an obstacle is telling you how the rest of the relationship will go if something needs fixing later.
A few details about your home is enough to start. Or call 801-644-9000 and skip the form.