The things people actually ask

A referral service. We put clear solar information where people already are — a counter, a noticeboard, a waiting room — and connect anyone who gets curious with a licensed installation partner.

We do not sell, permit, or install solar, and we never give a professional opinion about someone's property. The neighbour who put that card where you found it gets the credit for the connection.

No. Every part of the actual work — the site survey, the design, the permits, the installation, the utility paperwork — belongs to the installation partner, who is licensed and insured to do it. Powur is that partner.

Older Solar Strive material described an in-house operation doing all of it. That is a retired plan, not a current one.

Nothing. We do not charge homeowners, and we do not sell assessments, feasibility studies, or reports of any kind.

If you ever see a Solar Strive page quoting you a price for looking at your roof, it is out of date and we want to know about it.

Your details go to the installation partner, who contacts you to talk through your roof, your usage, and what is currently available where you live.

The stages after that — site survey, design, permitting, installation, and getting switched on — are the partner's published process. We have written it up so you can see the whole shape of it before you commit to anything.

Us and the installation partner, because contacting you about your request is the thing you asked for. Nothing else happens to them.

The exact wording of the consent you agree to is stored alongside your submission, word for word rather than as a tick — so what you agreed to stays answerable later.

No. We do not do residential door-to-door under the Solar Strive name, and people doing field work for us agree to that in writing before they start.

The whole model rests on the opposite idea: nothing happens until somebody gets curious on their own and chooses to scan a code. If anyone representing us tries to persuade you into anything, they have misunderstood the job.

So the connection can be credited to whoever made it. Someone local asked that business whether they would keep the information by the door, and the code records that placement.

It identifies the placement, not you.

The intention is to reward that work in Bitcoin — it is a way of thanking connectors that does not depend on anyone making a sale.

Being straight about where that stands: the payment side runs on test networks, nobody has been paid anything yet, and so there is no figure to quote. We would rather say that than print a number we cannot honour.

Yes. It is open to anyone who signs up; there is no membership or invitation requirement.

Read the field guide before you apply. It is short, and it is mostly about what not to say.

A small stand of flyers and cards near where people wait. It costs you nothing, takes no staff time, and someone comes back periodically to restock it and tidy it up.

There is a page for hosts covering what the stand is, where it works, and what we ask of you.

A panel is a sheet of cells, each one two thin slices of silicon pressed together. Sunlight arrives as photons; a photon hitting that boundary knocks an electron loose. Across billions of cells the loose electrons flow one way — a direct current.

There are no moving parts anywhere in that process, which is why panels are silent and close to maintenance-free.

Panels (modules), the racking that holds them, an inverter to turn direct current into the alternating current your sockets use, your main service panel, and the utility meter. Some systems use microinverters or power optimizers behind each panel instead of one central inverter. A battery is optional.

Cloud reduces output; it does not stop it. Night stops it — there is no light to convert.

The useful measure is peak sun hours: the part of the day when sunlight exceeds about 1,000 watts per square metre. Twelve hours of daylight might contain four to six of them, and that block produces most of the year's energy.

It flows back to the grid and a meter records it. Under net metering the utility credits you for the export and bills you for the difference — hence "net". Systems typically run a surplus in summer and a shortfall in winter, and net metering is what lets those balance across a year.

The specific terms are set by your utility and your state, and they change, so that is a question for the installation partner about your address.

Unless you go fully off-grid with enough storage to carry you through the dark, yes. The panels cover daytime; the utility covers night and anything above what you generate.

The panels make none at all. Inverters can produce a faint hum, similar to a refrigerator, and are normally mounted in a utility space rather than a living area. At night they are idle.

Very little. Rain washes off most dust and pollen. The realistic list is snow that will not slide, tall grass around a ground mount, and bird mess.

Batteries and inverters need more attention than panels do, and any monitoring app will show you a panel that has stopped pulling its weight.

Panels are typically warranted to still produce around 80% of their rated output at 25 years, degrading slowly — roughly half a percent a year — and panels made decades ago are still generating.

Inverters and batteries have shorter lives and shorter warranties. Assume you deal with the inverter once in the system's life.

The strong case is a sound, unshaded, south-facing surface with room on it. But plenty of roofs that are not that still work.

Shade across the middle of the day is the one genuine disqualifier — and only across the middle of the day. A branch clipping the array at 7am mostly does not matter.

It still works. South presents the most surface to the sun, so it produces the most. East and west give up something in the region of a fifth of that; north gives up closer to two fifths, and tilt legs can prop panels off an unhelpful surface to meet the sun at a better angle.

Treat those as rough orders of magnitude. The real number for a specific roof comes out of a site-specific design, not a web page.

Mounts bolt through to the rafters, which is how your vents, skylights, and chimney are already attached; each penetration is flashed and sealed as ordinary roofing work, and installer workmanship warranties normally cover leaks. On a standing-seam metal roof, clamps grip the seams with no penetration at all.

Weight is modest — typically under five pounds per square foot.

As a rule of thumb, roughly 75 square feet per kilowatt of array. A 5 kW system of about twenty panels lands somewhere near 350 square feet. Panel efficiency varies, so a more efficient panel needs less.

Possibly, and it is the constraint that catches people out. A system runs 25 to 30 years; if the roof underneath has only a few years left, you will pay to remove and reinstall the array when the roof is replaced.

Cracked shingles, moss, or an existing leak are signs to deal with the roof first — and where it needs doing anyway, doing both at once is the sensible order.

A ground mount on clear land beside the house can be aimed properly and often beats a poor roof. A carport does the same and shelters what is parked underneath.

If none of those fit — or you rent — community solar and virtual net metering exist for exactly that situation: you subscribe to production somewhere else and receive credit on your own bill. Availability varies by state and it is worth asking about.

Generally not outright — solar access laws in many places limit an association's ability to block an installation, though they can often impose conditions that add cost.

The rules are state-specific and worth checking locally before you assume either way.

Trimming or removal is sometimes suggested where shade lands across peak hours. Treat it as a real cost to weigh, and get your own view of whether losing the tree is worth it.

Older solar material claims tree work done for an installation could be folded into the federal tax credit. That advice depended on a credit that has since ended — see the incentives section.

No. The federal residential clean energy credit — IRC §25D, the 30% everyone has seen quoted — was terminated for systems placed in service after 31 December 2025, under Public Law 119-21, enacted in July 2025.

This matters more than one missing line item: any brochure, calculator, or sales page still subtracting 30% is showing a payback period shorter than the real one. Our own estimator was corrected for this on 16 August 2026 and now applies no credit at all.

We are a referral service, not tax advisers. Confirm the current position with a tax professional and against irs.gov before relying on it. (Verified 2026-08-16; owner to re-confirm against irs.gov before launch.)

That depends entirely on where you live. State, county, and utility programs are separate from the federal one, vary sharply, and change on their own schedules.

DSIRE — the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency — is the free public register of these programs and the sane place to start. The installation partner should be able to tell you what currently applies at your address.

SRECs are the other piece: one Solar Renewable Energy Credit is issued per megawatt-hour produced, and in states with a market they can be sold. Their value moves with that market, so treat projected SREC income as a projection.

It is normally discussed per watt of installed capacity, which makes competing proposals comparable. What moves it: system size, the mounting surface, any electrical work such as a service panel upgrade, the components chosen, whether there is storage, and who does the labour.

We do not quote prices. The estimator on this site does rough arithmetic from your bill so you can decide whether solar is worth a conversation — it is not a quote and it has never seen your roof.

Underneath those four options is one question: who owns the system?

Cash or a loan means you own it — you hold whatever incentives and renewable energy credits attach to it, and the asset is yours when you sell. A loan spreads the cost and adds financing charges.

A lease or a power purchase agreement means a developer owns the equipment on your roof and you pay monthly, or per kilowatt-hour, usually for around twenty years. Any tax benefits and SRECs are theirs. That can still suit someone who wants no capital outlay — the point is to know you are buying electricity rather than an asset.

In any of them, read what happens if you sell the house, and read any clause that escalates the payment annually.

Honestly: it depends, and anyone answering with a single confident number for every house is selling something. Payback moves with your electricity rate, how much of your own production you use, the installed cost, and your local net-metering terms.

The estimator will give you a rough figure from your own bill, with its assumptions written underneath it. Then get more than one proposal — that remains the single most effective thing a homeowner can do.

It depends on your jurisdiction; several exempt the added value of a solar installation, and others do not. Check with your local assessor rather than taking a general answer.

No. We do not sell assessments, feasibility studies, irradiance reports, or site inspections at any price. Older Solar Strive material advertised those; that offering is retired.

Not on its own, and this genuinely surprises people during their first storm. A grid-tied system without storage shuts down when the grid goes down — deliberately, so it cannot energise lines that utility crews are working on.

What keeps selected circuits alive is a battery, with a compatible inverter and a sub-panel for critical loads. If outage cover is your reason for going solar, say so at the start, because it changes the design.

Adding panels can mean resizing the inverter, so it is less trivial than it sounds. Batteries are easier if the inverter was chosen with that in mind.

The cheap move is to keep the option open at the start: a hybrid inverter costs little more now and saves replacing a perfectly good one later.

An owned system transfers with the property. A leased system or a PPA does not automatically — the agreement has to be assigned to the buyer or settled, and the terms for that are in the contract.

This is the single most useful clause to read before signing anything.

You can, and for remote properties it is sometimes the cheaper option compared with running a service connection. It needs enough storage to carry you through nights and stretches of bad weather, which is a different order of expense from a grid-tied system.

For most connected homes it is a lifestyle decision rather than a financial one.

Community solar and virtual net metering: you subscribe to generation at another site and receive credit on your own bill. No roof, no ownership, and it moves with you within the program area.

Programs differ by state and are more developed in some parts of this region than others. Worth asking about rather than assuming.

It displaces generation. Every kilowatt-hour it produces is one your utility did not have to make — so the environmental value depends entirely on what your grid burns at the margin.

That is why a single national "tons of CO2 avoided" figure is not worth much. Beyond carbon, displaced fossil generation also means less sulphur dioxide and fewer nitrogen oxides, which are local air-quality issues, and thermal plants consume water for cooling where photovoltaics essentially do not.

Refining silicon is genuinely energy-intensive, and a factory's footprint depends on what powers it. The objection is fair and worth answering rather than waving away.

The relevant idea is energy payback time — how long a panel runs before generating the energy that made it. For modern silicon panels in a reasonable location, that is a small fraction of a working life measured in decades.

They are mostly glass, aluminium, and silicon, which is recoverable in principle and increasingly in practice — but panel recycling is a young industry and availability varies a lot by region.

Batteries have a more established recycling path, driven by the vehicle industry.

At household scale it is not close, for unglamorous reasons: small wind needs a genuinely windy site, wind profiling to establish that, planning permission, and maintenance of moving parts, and turbines shut down above a certain wind speed.

At grid scale the comparison changes completely and both belong. Nothing about a decision on your own roof requires taking a side.