It seems like a simple and reliable product, but I know so many people who are put off of residential solar because so many of the contractors are sketchy. What is it about the industry that attracts so many of those folks?
It seems like a simple and reliable product, but I know so many people who are put off of residential solar because so many of the contractors are sketchy. What is it about the industry that attracts so many of those folks?
I actually used to work in a solar & heat pump company.
YES it does attract a huge amount of scummy people on both sides.
Some comments have already answered on the side of sales, but it also attracts a lot of shitty clients.
How? A lot of people get greedy with free energy and/or homesteading/offgird wackos. Usually they’re unable to pay the “normal” price so they chase down such scammy companies because the number they have offered fits their budget.
IMHO definitely an industry to avoid working in.
Solar is one of those really funny areas where extreme left and extreme right folks overlap sharing some of the same views. The extreme left are greenies with “carbon free power only! No to fossil fuels. No to nukes, even if we freeze or starve. Oh, and fuck cars” While the extreme right are the “my individual freedom means no government controlling my power and autonomy, and I love my F-150 like I love my son”.
There are a few solar power forums and these two polar opposite groups interact regularly. Both groups work very hard to hold their tongues on their respective beliefs, but every now an then one of them can’t help themselves and like the friends holding back the drunk friend at a bar fight, they drag each other back from the brink. There’s some passive aggression on both sides with choices of user avatars clearly showing their extreme position. Sometimes signatures under posts do the same thing.
The most interesting is when a deep deep red guy is patiently explaining battery management or solar array optimization to an idealistic young blue person, and they’re both getting along hating buying grid power from a giant government backed monopolistic corporate conglomerate.
Those formus were a bane of my existence, because their “technical explanations” were equally batshit crazy. (And of course none of those people was an actual engineer with knowledge in that field).
I think offgriders belong in the same crazy camp like healing crystals chicks, and antivaxxers.
As an offgrid person with an actual electrical engineering degree who built my system ground up, visiting the diy solar fourms is a trip
Its funny, I feel the same way about suburbanites and generally neurotypicals who speedrun a college debt right out of highschool for a career path that became over saturated with competition a decade before they applied. Then legally binding themselves to the first fuck buddy to provide emotional support/external validation, poping out two kids, further endebting themselves with unending rent/mortgage payments and using the financial + parental responsibility as an excuse to work a 9-5 for the rest of their lives. I can’t imagine having a life slaved to work with so little to look forward to besides vacations twice a year, watching TV, mowing the grass, bitching about HOA, and buying another car/empty status symbol. All before the age of 25.
It takes a special kind of crazy or stupid to blindly follow socital status quo of wanting the slop of comfort, convinence, and status. So easily convinced into racking themselves with lifelong debt equating to indentured slavery while giving into your hormonal monkey instincts for creating social bonding family structures in this political/economic climate.