SunCommon (Solar Communities)

They installed them in June and by February we still did not have functioning panels. I called them the first day and said, ?it?s not working!? The guy said, ?oh, it?s cloudy!? It should work some when it?s cloudy. It had shorted out and shut itself off. He said it was due to it being cloudy and it was going to turn itself off and back on when the sun comes out. Which was not true, it had to be manually reset. It kept on mysteriously shorting itself out anywhere from 5 minutes after I reset it to 4 weeks after I reset it. I had to keep running out to the post several times a day to see if the panels were working. I kept calling them and one of their reps said to me, ?we are a very busy company, we can?t keep running to Jericho!? This was for an on-going problem. It was 4 or 5 weeks in and they still hadn?t fixed it. I kept calling and saying, ?we are still having trouble, it?s still doing that!? They wouldn?t return my calls promptly. If they did call back, they would promise they would send a guy out, but they would wait weeks. Meanwhile, the sun is shining and we are not making power. It wasn?t until I threatened legal action and calling the Better Business Bureau in November that they finally got serious about it. They didn?t know what a 4-blink code was. I knew what a 4-blink code was because I read the installation manual myself. I instructed them on what a 4-blink code meant and this means it is a problem with the AC end of the system. They came out and they changed out all of the DC wiring under the ground. I said, ?why are you changing the DC wires when it is an AC problem!? They said, ?well, you are probably running big equipment in your house, like power tools, dishwasher, dryer and refrigerator!? Well, everybody has things like that and that is not going to make every single system short out. It was never figured out why our system was shorting out. Eventually they took everything down and from the pole to the panels. Not the pole, they left the pole. They changed out everything, they switched it on and 5 minutes later it shorted out. There is something weird going on where there is a stray current. Back in November, they just wanted to disable the safety thing. I said, ?no, wait a minute, you need to convince me that disabling the safety thing is okay!? They didn?t get back to me, so I contacted the manufacturer of the converter and was told, ?no, don?t do that!? Then somebody else from the same company that I talked to later said, ?yea, actually it?s okay!? I read several articles and things that say as long as it?s ground mounted, you don?t have to worry about it; and there is a secondary thing that will shut it down before it goes to 5,000 degrees and melts everything. It was a comedy of errors. They disabled the safety thing and it has been working just fine ever since. They couldn?t convince me, they couldn?t give me any information at all. I had to go looking for the information and do the research and I am just a lonely homeowner who doesn?t know anything about this stuff. Now I do, I am well educated. I tell all of my friends to steer clear of them. It really was a nightmare. To this day when I see the SunCommon logo it gives me a stomach ache. It would have been fine if they had known their facts. I had to show one of the guys who came out how to shut off and reboot the router because he didn?t know how to do that. They came out with a special electronic gizmo that was going to show them which panel, if any was faulty. They unwrapped it out of the box and they were standing there reading the manual to try to figure out how to use it. They didn?t even practice back in the office. Come on, really! Then my sheep came home from pasture because so much time had passed. When they came out to look at the panels I had to move the sheep off to the corner, because I had an electric net fence between them and the panels so they could work unmolested. They said, ?oh, you?ve got an electric fence, that causes it to short out!? I said, ?it?s not plugged in!? I said, ?it?s not plugged in and it wasn?t in June or July or August or September or October!? We had a guy come out and he is going to address the problem. He comes out, he is standing under the panels, he is looking up and he says, ?well, I don?t see anything that is obliviously wrong? and then he left. Then I got an email the next day saying, ?we understand that so-and-so came out to address your issues and we hope that they were fully fixed now.? He didn?t even touch anything, he just came and he looked. There was no magic in his looking at it. If they had been timelier in coming back and fixing things, I wouldn?t have been mad at them. Actually, on two occasions they did hand us a check for the loss power generation, so that was a good thing. It was too late. One of our goals was to have it working all summer so we wouldn?t have to pay power bills all winter. We used the money that they paid us to pay the power bills for all winter. They made good on it eventually. I was at the point of saying ?look, you get out here this week and either fix it or take the whole thing down and give us a full refund!? They would say, ?gosh, we are just really starching our heads on this!? End of story! Well okay, stop starching your heads and fix it! I wrote everything down and I still have copies of all the transactions and all the conversations just because, I figured this might be something I ought to hang on to just in case anything ever happens.