Solar Exit
You have more routes out than the salesperson mentioned, and the first four are free. The pages ranking for this topic get paid on the other four.
Somebody knocked, sat down at your kitchen table with a tablet, and pitched you a smaller power bill. What you signed in that one visit is a twenty to twenty-five year payment obligation, and it comes in three forms that exit differently. You bought the system, most often with a solar-specific loan the salesperson arranged on the spot. You leased panels a company keeps owning. Or you signed a power purchase agreement and now buy the electricity by the kilowatt-hour. The CFPB puts the average installation at roughly $25,000 and found that in 2023 loans covered 58 percent of the at-home market, cash 19 percent, and third-party ownership, meaning leases and PPAs, 23 percent. Whichever one you signed, something got filed. Lenders commonly record a UCC-1 lien on the panels themselves. If the pitch steered you into PACE, you have a bigger problem: a property tax lien on the house that Treasury says takes priority over your mortgage.
The industry counts on you assuming you are stuck. There are eight ways out, and the first four cost nothing. Cancel inside the cooling-off window. Push on breach or non-performance, because a system that was never switched on is a deal the company failed to deliver. File a complaint with your state attorney general, which is free and is where most of the enforcement against this industry actually started. Hand the contract to the buyer when you sell the house. Only after those four does the company holding your contract get to name a price: the buyout schedule written into your lease or PPA, a loan payoff or refinance, a deliberate default with everything that follows it, and the case where your counterparty goes bankrupt and you have to find out who owns the contract now. Work them in that order and stop at the first one that works.
Search any of this and the results belong to companies that charge to get you out. Solar cancellation outfits, exit affiliates and plaintiff firms bought the front page, because they get paid on the routes that cost you money. The industry has a budget too, and it would rather you read a cheerful page about transferring your contract than the Michigan attorney general’s complaint describing a “pitch, sign, fund, fail, and collect” model. Candid Yak is on the homeowner’s side. We do not sell an exit service or take a cut of a cancellation, so this cluster reports the enforcement record and puts the free routes first.
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How to Get Out of a Solar Contract: All Eight Routes, by Contract Type
Loan, lease and PPA each have their own exits, and the company on the other side would rather you start with the paid ones. What every route costs, who it works for, and what disqualifies you. The first four are free.
Cancel a Solar Contract Before Installation
Three federal business days, a longer window in some states, and a contract clause the seller hopes you never read that can outlast both.
Solar Dealer Fees: The Markup That Never Reaches Your APR
A quarter to a third of your loan principal bought nothing on the roof, and the lender kept it out of your APR. How to find yours and what to do about it.
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Still paying a solar loan with a dealer fee in it?
Take the panels out of the picture and look at what is left: a long-term installment loan whose principal was inflated by a fee nobody showed you. That is ordinary consumer debt, and ordinary consumer debt can be refinanced. Pull three quotes and compare the all-in cost against what you are paying now.
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September 2026You pay for panels you do not own, and that rules out the exits most people assume they have. The four free routes first.
A UCC-1 filing is on the equipment. A PACE assessment is on the house and outranks the mortgage. Nobody at the kitchen table explained the difference.
The dealer fee is sunk. What you can still fight is the rate and the month-19 reset no 2026 tax credit will fund.
Common questions
Often yes, and there are three layers to check before you believe anyone who says you are stuck. The FTC Cooling-Off Rule gives you until midnight of the third business day to cancel a sale of goods or services made at your home for $25 or more, and Treasury tells solar buyers plainly that the right to cancel lasts for at least three days from the date it is signed. Some states run a longer window, and your own contract may allow cancellation at no cost until work or permitting starts, so read it before you assume the federal three days is all you have.
That depends on which kind of filing you have, and the salesperson probably explained neither. Lenders commonly file a UCC-1 lien on the solar panels themselves, which the Center for Responsible Lending describes as technically not on the property, though it can muddy the title enough that it has to be released or subordinated at a sale or refinance. PACE financing is the worse one: it is genuinely a property tax lien on your home that Treasury says takes priority over your mortgage.
Yes. The installer can disappear and the payment obligation stays. Sunnova filed Chapter 11 in the Southern District of Texas, the court approved the sale of substantially all of its assets on July 31, 2025, and confirmed the plan in November 2025, with core operations moving to SunStrong Management under Solaris Assets. The contract and your payment obligation went with the assets. Service quality may not have, which is why Connecticut sent SunStrong a civil investigative demand in 2026 after roughly 65 consumer complaints about warranties and unresponsiveness.
It is a markup the lender adds to the loan principal on top of the cash price of the system, under names like program fee, platform fee or original issue discount. The CFPB found these fees typically run 10 to 30 percent of the cash price and can exceed 50 percent, and that lenders frequently bake them into the principal without disclosing them as a cost of credit. That is how a stated APR of 1.99 percent can be arithmetically impossible. Find yours by comparing the cash price on the installation contract against the loan principal on the financing paperwork.
Look at what the bill charges you for, because the salesperson may have used both words in one visit. A lease charges a monthly fee for the use of the equipment, and Treasury says that for the life of that contract you are entitled to use all the power the system produces. A PPA charges you for electricity at a rate per kilowatt-hour, and Treasury notes you are not automatically entitled to all the power the system produces. If your statement shows a rate and a kilowatt-hour figure, it is a PPA, and the escalator raises the price of every unit instead of a fixed monthly fee.
No, not before you have worked the free routes, because those companies charge you for steps you can take yourself. Cancellation inside the cooling-off window, a breach claim on a system that was never energized, a complaint to your state attorney general, and a transfer at sale all cost nothing, and state attorneys general are where the real pressure on this industry has come from so far. This is general information rather than legal advice, and anything that turns on your specific contract belongs in front of an attorney licensed in your state.