Ionsolar

A young girl came to my door to discuss ION Solar Panels with me, I was not interested in getting any but said that I would hear her out. She then notified me that she would have to schedule a follow-up meeting with one of their vendors that could provide me with all the details, prices, etc. but would first need a picture of our electric use for the year so they can see how energy efficient our house already is and so on. I provided that image and after several weeks had the follow-up meeting with one of ION Solar vendors, and I was told that it would only take 20-30 minutes tops. On that day I only planned to get the information to later talk it over with my husband and maybe at some point we would either move forward or not, and the female representative said that was no problem. The meeting with the male vendor Jesse ended up being almost 2 HOURS LONG, in the middle of my day. I realize that he had to repeat all the information when my husband showed up in the middle of our meeting, but I did feel like that some of the direct questions that I asked were evaded such as, "So after the 25 years and these solar panels are all paid off or even before that, we will no longer owe an electric bill due to all the solar power we have built up.?" Now I think that is a pretty straight forward question, especially since I really do not know much about solar panels, and he did mention that we would still have a PGE bill with their flat $11 fee per month, and if you don't have enough solar energy saved up, then you would pay the difference with PGE as well, so again 2 bills. This did not seem like a great deal to me. His response to my question was basically, "There will be other programs at that time." That wasn't answering my question though, like will I no longer have an energy bill after 25 years!? I even said that I think we are having some miscommunication here and he responded something to effect, "Do you know who the president will be in 25 years, that the same as knowing which companies will be providing the solar panels/energy!" That irritated me because my point was, will I still have a bill in 25 years if I pay off these solar panels. Come to find out, they often can break down, need maintenance and/or to be replaced, which is covered by your own home insurance not under ION Solar, and also, if you need them removed to fix your roof, ION Solar charges $195 per hour to do this for solar panels unless you plan on doing it yourself and possibly damaging one or all them during the process. He wasn't being straight forward answering my question because after 25 years, they will be outdated, and I would likely then need to go with a new program for more current solar panels, so the process would start all over again. Not a gain for me and my family! I was already exhausted by how much time this was taking out of mine and my husband day, and in the end the vendor said you can make this decision basically risk free because there will not be any charges until we were to actually move forward with getting a permit for your home to add these solar panels if your house qualifies. He said there was a $1,200 fee if you were to cancel beforehand, but only if it were to the point when they were getting the permit which takes a couple months. We went around and around about this, and I triple confirmed, ok so if we move forward and I finance these, there will not be any fee or charges incurred for at least 2-3 months because it takes that long to get the permit from the city, so cancelling any time before that is risk free. He responded, "Yep, exactly!" So I ended up moving forward, never having time to really read the full contract due to having prior conflicts I was late for and kid stuff, besides the details he went over briefly with me and my husband. While I was taking my child to their evening class, my husband told me to forward him the contracts so he could read them over and look up reviews, come to find out the last line of the contract said that if you do not cancel within 3 days, you will be charged a $1,200 fee. That misleading information along with other reviews I was reading about hidden charges during the process was enough for me to email ION Solar's Operations department that very night and request a cancellation of moving forward. I had to also cancel with the GoodLeap loan company separately as well. This entire process of me calling repeatedly to make sure everything was cancelled took at least 2 weeks, and FYI, you have to speak to a Manager with ION Solar to finalize the cancellation of the contract and cancel your first appointment with them. I notified the last representative I spoke with about the misleading charges, and that I was told the $1,200 charge would only be applied if ION Solar had gotten the permit already then you'd have to pay them back for that, not that if I had decided to wait a couple months and changed my mind that I would be legally responsible for $1,200 fee with no work done at all besides an inspection of my attic space and roof. She empathized and said that they are currently working on revising the contract in order to make it clearer. I notified her that the $1,200 fee after 3 days should be in large print and bolded in red so it's the first thing potential customers see, not to deter them specifically, but to inform them before they move forward with this large financial decision and loan process. I should have definitely read word for word before moving forward, but due to my time crunch and not expecting the meeting to take approximately 2 hours that day, it left me no time to go over the details which I planned on doing later, thankfully for my husband, not 3 days later! Due to the misleading $1,200 fee and potentially other miscellaneous charges and the time suck, I would not recommend ION Solar to any friends or family.