Solar Cancellation Companies Charge for What You Can Do Free

First the solar company, now the cancellation company

You signed a solar contract that turned out to be worse than the pitch. You started searching for a way out, and within days the ads and calls started: companies promising to cancel your contract, void your loan, or get your money back, for a fee. That timing is no accident. These businesses exist because the solar industry left a lot of homeowners desperate, and desperate people pay.

Nothing a cancellation company does for you is unavailable to you. There are four routes that cost nothing, and a paid service would start with the same four.

Check your cancellation window. 16 CFR 429.1 gives you until midnight of the third business day to cancel a sale of goods or services for $25 or more that was solicited at your home. Treasury tells solar buyers the same thing: the right to cancel lasts for at least three days from signing. Your own contract may run longer, often to permit submission. The cancellation page covers how to send a notice that sticks.

Put non-performance in writing. A system that was never finished, never inspected, never interconnected or never switched on is not what you agreed to buy. Write to whoever bills you, with dates.

File the complaints. Treasury’s advisory routes solar consumers to the FTC, the CFPB, and their state consumer protection office. Every significant case against this industry grew out of complaint volume.

If you are selling, start the transfer. A lease or PPA transfers to a qualified buyer. That is free and it ends your obligation.

Those four take an evening. Do them before you read the rest of this page, and before you give anyone a credit card number.

What you would actually be paying for

A cancellation company sells the running of that list, plus follow-up calls, plus the relief of feeling that someone else is handling it. After being worn down by a solar contract that is miserable to read, that relief is exactly what these companies are counting on you wanting badly enough to pay for.

They have no special access. There is no registry, no special standing, no back channel to a lessor. The company writes to the same servicer you would write to, citing the same contract provisions, and files the same complaint forms.

Watch how the pitch runs. If someone tells you they have a relationship with the lender, or a legal strategy they cannot describe, or a success rate they will not document, ask what specific contract provision or statute they intend to rely on. A company that can answer is at least doing real work. A company that cannot is selling your own phone calls back to you at a markup.

Why we are not naming any of them

Search this topic and you will find a dozen firms competing for your attention. We are not going to list them, and the reason is a rule.

This cluster names a company only where a public record supports a specific claim about it: a regulator’s release, a court docket, a bankruptcy filing. For the solar cancellation industry, that record does not yet exist. The firms ranking for these terms have not, as far as we can find, been the subject of enforcement actions that would let us tell you anything factual about them.

A high search ranking reflects marketing. It says nothing about whether a company will help you. So rather than rank companies on nothing, this page gives you the questions that let you judge one yourself.

The twin industry already has a record

Solar cancellation is a young industry selling an old proposition. Timeshare exit has sold it for years to people trapped by timeshare developers, and that industry does have a record.

Washington State’s attorney general obtained a consent decree in King County Superior Court requiring Reed Hein & Associates, a Kirkland-based timeshare exit company, to stop its deceptive practices and pay $2.61 million, with an additional $19 million due if the company violated the decree, a total judgment of $22 million. One key issue was that Reed Hein deceptively advertised a 100 percent money-back guarantee. In a separate matter, a federal court ordered the operator of a timeshare exit scheme to pay $140 million following FTC allegations about a scheme the agency said took more than $90 million.

Two different businesses, two different regulators, one shape: money taken up front to perform an exit, against a promise the company could not keep.

That is not a finding about any solar company. It is the reason to examine an up-front fee and a guarantee harder than anything else in the pitch, because those two features sit at the center of both cases. Our timeshare exit companies page has the longer version.

Questions to ask before you pay anyone

Ask these in writing and keep the answers. A company that will not put its answers in writing has told you what you need to know.

What exactly will you do, step by step? If the answer is a list you recognize from this cluster, you now know what you would be paying for.

Which provision of my contract, or which statute, are you relying on? A specific answer is a good sign. “We have our methods” is a reason to end the call.

What do you charge, when is it due, and what happens if it does not work? Up-front money with no defined failure condition is the structure at the center of both cases above.

Do you guarantee a result? Nobody can guarantee the outcome of a contract dispute they have not read. Treasury’s scam list for this industry flags promises and pressure generally, and a guarantee about a legal outcome is a promise.

Are you a law firm, and if not, who does the legal work? If your situation needs legal advice, you want a licensed attorney you can hire directly, without a referral chain in between. See hiring a solar attorney.

Will you tell me to stop paying? Be very careful here. Stopping payment has real consequences that fall on you, and none on the company advising it, and they are set out on their own page. Advice to stop paying, from someone collecting a fee from you, needs a second opinion from an attorney before you act on it.

Can I see the written agreement before I pay? Then read it, including the refund terms, with the suspicion the solar contract should have gotten.

Where this leaves you

You already paid once for a sales pitch that did not hold up. There is no reason to pay a second company for letters you can send yourself. You cannot tell a competent operator from a predatory one by its website. You can tell a lot from the answers above, and you can remove most of the need for either by spending one evening on the four free routes first.

This is general information, not legal advice. What your contract permits and what any company can actually achieve for you turn on documents and state law we cannot see, so before you sign a service agreement or pay a fee, put your solar contract in front of an attorney licensed in your state.