PREMIER POWER RENEWABLE ENERGY INC

Premier Power were hired to install a set of 27 solar panels on our home back in August 2008. The installation was rife with mistakes. The project mgr. ordered the wrong electrical panel, not once, but twice, and waiting on other simple supplies that the project mgr. dropped the ball on. The electrician erroneously installed a grounding copper wire, running the full length of the house, taking most of one day to do it, and of course it was not to code and had to be removed. The original crew was from 2 counties away (San Diego) and had difficulty coordinating their schedules, and didn't show up on more than one occasion and never contacted us when they didn't. The original crew they hired were incompetent and were eventually let go, and were accused of leaving with company property/grand theft.. On one day 2 men from the replacement crew were on site the entire day, doing nothing, waiting for the electrician and parts. Coordination was pathetic. Finally the work was completed and the system has worked well until October of 2011. The Inverter failed but was still under its 10 year warranty. Sunpower sent a replacement inverter within 2 days and Premier eventually sent a crew the following week. When the 2 man crew arrived, I asked for their professional credentials. Because of the incompetency of the original installation, I felt it necessary to make certain the installation was done by an electrician. I asked if the gentlemen were licensed electricians, and they said no, they were under their companies license. The one gentlemen was clearly offended by my asking, and the other guy tried to say how much experience they had, but they were not electricians. He even said that electricians are only licensed by the union, and that they weren't union, so they didn't have a union card. Funny, I but I thought all contractors are licensed by the State of Cal. and held to standards of best practice in their respective fields. I declined their services and contacted Premier. Premier informed me that it was going to be difficult to get an electrician out to perform the warranty repair service. They said they only have one contractor that they work with down in this area, and they were on a big job. Then they said that "big" job was finished and they would be contacting me shortly. Then they said they contract with a local franchise electrical company and that they would be contacting me. Not sure what is true, but this job would have been perfect for the shortened Thanksgiving week since it was an easy access replacement for an already installed system. It has been 6 weeks since I first contacted Premier and Sunpower for the replacement and still the inverter sits in my living room and my solar system is down and not making electricity. The service that Premier Power provided was truly substandard. The only one who I felt any confidence in was a Tim Benassi, who also was flown down from No.Cal, home to Premier Power, to do a quality control assessment prior to the final buy-off by the Long Beach code enforcement. The inspectors had already found several changes and came out at least 4 times, including citing for the wrong fasteners being used on the panel racks and had to all be replaced to be brought up to code. I would never again hire a company like Premier, who is not a local company to do such a costly and important installation of a major system. In my opinion, Premier needs to stay in No. California and not sell solar installation in So. Cal, since they don't have their own staff and so they hire crews with substandard performance, that they don't even see or know personally the quality of their work. Geography matters in customer service and quality control.

They were pretty flaky but I am happy with the product. The installers were very competent but the administrators were not so great. Overall it turned out well though