Solar install quote broken down: a 9 kilowatt system at the baseline rate of $2,450 a kilowatt is $22,050 in additions; then the four pick-one answers — a high-efficiency panel plus 12, DC optimizers plus 6, an asphalt shingle roof plus nothing and two storeys plus 7 — pool into one plus 25 percent applied once to all of it for a midpoint of $27,562.50, and a plus-or-minus 9 percent band gives a gross contract price of $25,082 to $30,043 before any tax credit or rebate The same account, drawn as a mechanism: her answers go in on the contractor’s own site — a number, a slider, a dropdown, a yes or no, an optional photo that is flagged rather than attached and never moves the price, then her name, mobile, email and ZIP — one submit is priced server-side on the rates the owner set, and the result forks two ways. Her screen shows a range with a low end and a high end and never a single number, or a plain-English reason instead of a figure when the engine will not price, such as outside the area, a site-visit service, a waitlist, booking ahead for the season, or over the owner’s ceiling. The dashboard gets the lead either way, carrying her name and mobile, her email if she gave one, her ZIP, every answer labelled as she gave it, the range or the reason it did not price, and her thread, so her call and her quote sit together

Kilowatts set the number. Four other answers set what a kilowatt costs.

A solar office is a sales calendar and a stack of paperwork. There are roofs to survey, shade reports and layouts to draw, permit packets and utility interconnection forms to file, equipment orders to time with the crew, inspections to book, commissioning photos to keep for the customer’s records, and, in the evenings, people who have just opened a summer electric bill and want to know what an array would cost.

A solar price is kilowatts times a dollars-per-watt figure, and the dollars-per-watt is not a constant. It moves with the panel you are quoting, the inverter architecture, what the roof is covered with and how far off the ground it is. That is one multiplication the engine cannot do — no rule multiplies one answer by another answer — so our demo account does what a fencing contractor does with linear feet: it runs a baseline rate on the size question and carries the other four as percentages on the whole job.

The consequence is honest and worth saying out loud rather than hiding: those percentages are big. A concrete tile roof is plus 26 and slate is plus 34, because lifting, hooking and setting tile back without breaking it really is a slower day than lagging into a shingle rafter. A page that pretended a roof covering was a rounding error would be a page a real installer could not use.

The demo installer runs NapkinPrice™ as three services on one account. The install card asks eight questions and puts a gross contract price on the screen, the service call prices a system that has stopped producing off its own rate card, and ground mount, commercial and new-build work goes down a third path that never shows a number at all. Every figure any of them returns is the price of the work — the contract price, before any tax credit or rebate she may go on to claim and before any financing she may arrange.

  • Kilowatts in, a gross contract price out — panel tier, inverter, roof covering and height all off rates you own
  • No trip charge inside the install number, because on planned work the survey is what sells the array
  • A real floor under the smallest array and a ceiling past which it stops guessing and hands you the lead
  • The credit question asked and priced at nothing, because the engine does not know her tax bill and never will

The last question asks whether she has a photo of the roof and of the inside of the main panel door, and her lead says so, so you can ask for them when you call back. The pictures coming through with the lead is on the roadmap, and that list does not claim it.

The eight things that set an array’s number

One size question, four pick-ones, two yes/nos and a photo, plus the ZIP. Seven of them move money and one deliberately does not. Each rate is one you type into the dashboard, and change the week your panel supplier does.

A real array, start to finish

The demo’s install card asks these eight in this order, here for a 9 kW system on a two-story asphalt-shingle house in York, PA 17402: high-efficiency panels, DC optimizers, no service upgrade needed. The live engine priced those answers; nobody typed the gross price into this page.

# What she is asked What she answers What it does to the price
1 How big a system are you after, in kilowatts? 9 kW 9 × the baseline rate — $2,450 a kilowatt on the demo — is $22,050, and nothing else here multiplies
2 What panel are we quoting? High-efficiency mono, 440 to 460 W +12% on the whole array. Standard mono is the baseline at +0%, premium all-black +22%
3 Inverter DC optimizers +6%, pooled with the panel. A string inverter is +0%, microinverters +11%
4 What is the roof covered with? Asphalt shingle Nothing; it is the baseline. Metal is +5% or +8%, a flat roof +14%, tile +26%, slate +34%
5 How far up is it? Two stories +7%, pooled with the panel and the inverter. Three stories or a pitch over 7/12 is +15%
6 Does the main electrical panel need upgrading? No Nothing. Yes adds a flat $2,850 for the panel, the meter work and the utility coordination
7 Do you expect to claim a tax credit or rebate on this? Yes Nothing whatsoever, and that is the design. Answer No instead and the number below does not move by one dollar
8 Got a photo of the roof, or of the main panel? Offered Nothing; it tells you there are pictures to ask for
The arithmetic, in the order the engine runs it 9 kW × $2,450 = $22,050, no trip charge on top, then the four percentage answers pool into one and +25% applies once to all of it → $27,562.50
She sees $25,082 – $30,043
What lands in your inbox, the second she submits Her name, mobile and ZIP, each of her eight answers, and the photo flag

The $2,450, the $2,850 and the percentages above are the demo installer’s, and Tailgate Office keeps no solar price list; yours go in the dashboard. Three details in it are worth knowing before you copy it. The percentages pool rather than compound, so plus 12, plus 6, plus nothing and plus 7 make plus 25 and not the plus 27 you would get by multiplying them out, and on a job this size that difference lands in her favour. The base fee is zero on this service and that is deliberate: there is no trip charge buried in the number, because on planned work the survey is what sells the array. And the pooled figure lands on the whole additive subtotal, so when the service upgrade is answered yes the panel and height bands are charged across it too — $22,050 plus $2,850 is $24,900, and the same plus 25% makes the midpoint $31,125 rather than $27,562.50 plus a bare $2,850. The total is the engine’s own: $25,082 to $30,043 for those eight answers at that ZIP, and the demo gives you the same back in about a minute.

Our example solar installer has a website of its own, with NapkinPrice quoting there live from the real engine, on a page that is not ours. Size its York array the same way and the same gross range comes back.

Try the live demo site (opens in a new tab)

The number is the whole job. The credit is hers, and it is not in it.

A quote form in this trade is one typed minus sign away from lying, so this is where the demo draws its hardest line, in plain words.

Solar used to be sold on the net number: for years every proposal led with a figure after a thirty percent federal credit. That homeowner credit is gone for systems placed in service after 31 December 2025 (IRS (opens in a new tab)), and a widget that still prices it in would be selling a number nobody can claim. Our demo never did, for a reason that outlives the credit: a credit depends on her own tax bill and on owning the system rather than leasing it, it is claimed months later on her return rather than on your invoice, and the law can end it, as it did this one. None of that is a fact about her roof, and a quote form only knows about her roof.

The honest version of the technical claim is sharper than the usual one, and it is worth getting right. The engine knows base fees, per-unit rates, flat adds, percentages, a minimum, a season and a travel zone. There is no credit field, no rebate rule kind and nothing anywhere that expresses a finance term — but a percentage is only a number, and nothing in the software would stop somebody typing a minus thirty into one and labelling it with the credit. So this is a rule of authorship rather than a feature we can claim, and it is written into the demo account’s own fixture file, in capitals, addressed to whoever edits it next. The test it gives them is readable off a label in one second: does the contractor’s invoice get smaller? A cheaper panel does. A string inverter instead of microinverters does. A tax credit does not.

What the demo does instead is ask the question and price nothing off it. “Do you expect to claim a tax credit or rebate on this?” is the seventh question on the install card, it carries no rule at all, and its help text opens with no effect on the price before it says what the answer does change. You can prove that from outside: run the worked example above with Yes and it returns $25,082 to $30,043; run it again with No, changing nothing else, and it returns $25,082 to $30,043. That is the same discipline the insulation page keeps for utility rebates, and it lands in the same place: a prospect who works out for herself that her real cost will be lower has been sold honestly, and one shown a net figure the widget cannot reproduce has been sold a bug.

There is one more thing this rule quietly decides, and it is not obvious. The demo account carries no seasonal rate at all, which on a trade with a famous year-end rush looks like an empty field somebody forgot. It is not. A roof in March and the same roof in September are the same crew day, so there is no capacity constraint for a season to price. The thing that looked seasonal here was people trying to get energised before a tax year closed — the credit again, wearing a calendar. Encoding it as a seasonal percentage would put the prohibited subject straight back on the page through the one door left open, so the field stays empty and every figure on this page is the same in January as it is in June.

Rooftop install — quotes instantly

The card that does the selling, and it shows a GROSS contract price: the number on the contract, the number on the invoice, and the number this engine actually computes. No trip charge inside it, a band of plus or minus 9%, a real floor and a real ceiling. The 9 kW two-storey asphalt job above is $25,082 to $30,043; put the same array on a concrete or clay tile roof and it is $30,299 to $36,292; add the main-panel and meter upgrade to the asphalt version and it is $28,324 to $33,926. The cheapest thing on the list — 5 kW, standard panels, a string inverter, one storey, asphalt — has an arithmetic of $12,250 and quotes at $13,000 to $14,170, because the floor clamps the low end UP rather than sitting under it. And there is a ceiling: 14 kW of high-efficiency mono with microinverters on a standing-seam two-storey reaches $47,334 and the widget stops pricing, because past $45,000 that is a job you want to quote with your own eyes on the roof.

Service call, the array stopped producing — quotes instantly

The other half of this trade, and the half that rings the phone. Its own $185 base fee for the trip, the ladder and the diagnostic, its own $285 minimum, and a band of plus or minus 8% — TIGHTER than the install, on purpose, because a fault on an existing array is a better-known job than a new one. A dead out-of-warranty inverter on a 24-panel two-storey array, at the next opening, is $2,399 to $2,817. The cheapest possible call — birds under a four-panel array, one walkable storey, no screen, this week — floors at $332 to $390. Twenty panels, ninety-six feet of critter screen and needed today because it is producing nothing is $3,685 to $4,326. Push it far enough — a dead inverter on sixty panels, three storeys, three hundred feet of screen, today — and it reaches $16,439.50 and routes, because past $6,500 that is a re-install decision rather than a repair.

Ground mount and commercial — we come and scope it

Site-visit mode captures the whole spec and shows no number at all, which is the only honest answer to a field array, a pole barn, a commercial roof, a house that is not built yet or a carport. It asks what it is looking at, roughly how many kilowatts, how far it is from the array back to the meter, whether the service is three-phase and whether anybody has quoted it already — and not one of those answers moves money. The distance question is the one that proves the point: on a ground mount the trench, the conduit and the copper can be the second biggest line on the job after the panels, and no six-answer form is going to price a trench it has not seen. In place of a figure she reads that you like to see a job like this first, and you get a lead worth a site visit. Notice the service NAME says so, because the name is the only place the widget can tell her before she starts.

A floor of thirteen thousand dollars, and why a number that big is the honest one

The solar demo sets its install minimum at $13,000, the largest instant-service floor anywhere in our demo estate, roughly double the next one. That is a decision rather than a default, and the reasoning is in the fixture file where the next person will find it: a 5 kW array — standard panels, a string inverter, one storey, asphalt — computes to $12,250, and a crew that owns a rack truck, a permit runner and an electrician does not roll out for less than thirteen. The visible consequence is that the smallest jobs quote AT the floor, so a 3 kW array and a 5 kW array both come back $13,000 to $14,170. That is not a bug in the band; it is the floor doing exactly what a floor is for, and it is better than a website quoting somebody $8,000 for an array nobody will build.

The travel zones stack on top of all of it, and they are the same engine run on the same eight answers with nothing changed but the ZIP: York 17402 is $25,082 to $30,043, a Baltimore ring ZIP is $25,391 to $30,414, a ZIP in the catch-all zone out west is $26,558 to $31,812, and a ZIP outside every zone you serve gets no price at all — a polite decline, with the lead still captured. Those gaps are small and they should be. The install card has no base fee, so it is the $13,000 minimum that let it go live, and the service call carries its $185 base fee and $285 minimum: a priced service with neither could show her $0.

One thing our own scan says about this trade, because it changes who you should be linking to rather than just who you are. Of the contractors we have labelled solar, more than four in five also carry another trade label — most often electrical, then roofing, a long way ahead of anything else. Solar is not an island business; it is usually the second or third thing on somebody’s truck. If that is you, the electrical page and the roofing page describe the other cards you would run on the same account, and one account carries all of them. That figure is ours, measured on 16 September 2026, and it counts labels rather than businesses — a shop labelled both is one shop.

Illustration of missed-call text-back as it will work once texting is switched on: the business’s reply to a missed call, and the customer answering with the job details The rules behind that reply, drawn in the order they run: on a logged missed call, three stages. One, is there already a message to this number from the past hour — if there is it stops there, one reply per number per hour, and nothing is composed. Two, which of your five messages: vacation switched on gives the vacation message, one of six US holidays the holiday message, a day your hours mark closed (Saturday and Sunday, unless you give them hours) the weekends and closed days message, and otherwise that day’s own opening hours decide between the business and the after-hours message; they are tested in that order on your own clock, the first match wins, and a message you left blank falls back to your business one. Three, may it go at all — three gates, in order: not opted out, which is permanent and nothing overrides it; not on your own suppression list; and not in quiet hours judged where the caller is rather than where you are, 8am to 9pm in every zone their area code touches. Then one of two things. The reply is written and goes on her thread, and because the key is her number a later quote from her lands on that same thread. Or a rule stops it, and the reason goes on her thread in plain words: quiet hours where she is, she has opted out for good, her number is suppressed, a rule we could not check, or another compliance rule. Every rule above is built and running today, and you wrote the five messages yourself.

The call that decides a five-figure job comes in at half past seven

A solar office is a desk and a sales calendar, not a dispatch board, which is why our demo shop keeps the narrowest hours in the estate: 9 to 5, and it says so. Nobody’s array is an emergency at six in the morning. But the call that actually matters in this trade is the evening one — somebody has just opened a summer electric bill, or watched a monitoring app show zero on the hottest week of the year — and at half past seven plenty of the installers in the search results are shut. Only 52% of callers to home-service businesses speak with a person (Invoca, 2026 (opens in a new tab)), and fewer than 3% of callers sent to voicemail leave a message (Invoca, 2024 (opens in a new tab)). On tickets this size a missed call is not a lost afternoon. It can be the quarter.

What a missed solar call is worth On the demo account
9 kW, high-efficiency panels, optimizers, two-storey asphalt$25,082 – $30,043
The same array on a concrete or clay tile roof$30,299 – $36,292
Dead out-of-warranty inverter, 24 panels, two storeys$2,399 – $2,817
Birds under the panels, 96 ft of critter screen, needed today$3,685 – $4,326
Callers sent to voicemail who leave a messageUnder 3% (Invoca, 2024 (opens in a new tab))
One recovered install pays for126 months of the bundle
One recovered inverter swap pays for12 months

That first row is more than a decade of the whole front office off one recovered job, which is the arithmetic nobody in this trade actually runs. Once texting is switched on, CallMitt™ answers the call you missed with a text that names your company, which a text-back must do before it can be saved, and her reply joins her array quote on one thread. The message is picked by the hour and the day against the hours you actually keep, so a 7:30pm call gets the after-hours version — which on this demo is written for exactly that caller, asking for her address and what the last bill was so somebody can come back to her first thing.

Plainly, about where this stands: we have no SMS gateway on our side yet, so nothing we compose reaches a phone today — you log the missed call and the reply is written, compliance-checked and held in your outbox where you can read it. Already running: your five messages, the 9-to-5 hours, the weekend, holiday and vacation messages, opt-outs, and the thread her reply goes on. Two things that wording usually leaves out, and both are permanent: texting runs 8am to 9pm where the caller is, read off their area code, and no setting on our side relaxes it, so a call outside that window is recorded as blocked with the reason rather than queued and nothing re-attempts it in the morning; and a reply held longer than an hour is retired rather than delivered when sending switches on, because nobody wants a month-old “sorry we missed your call” landing on a customer’s phone.

How CallMitt Works Run Your Own Numbers

An installer is hired on one question, and it is about July

The man you want is on a south-facing shingle roof in a harness in the third week of July, carrying modules up a ladder all day. Plenty of people will tell you they are fine with roofs in April. Finding out in the first week of a heat wave that they are not costs you the day, the crew around him and the install date you promised. The second thing a résumé never makes clear is the difference between somebody who has carried panels and somebody who can actually commission the system — strings, an inverter, a rapid-shutdown device — and that gap is a large part of what you are paying for.

Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the van and on the sign in front of every house you put an array on. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, is he up for full days on a roof in a harness in July, has he wired PV strings and commissioned an inverter, how many years has he done solar install work, how far out does he live, can he start inside two weeks, and what was the last job he worked on. Three of those are knockouts — under 18, not up for the roof work, or living more than thirty miles out — and three come back as a weighted fit score, years in the trade heaviest and the start date next.

On the demo job the thirty miles only knock out, since a weighted number would put the installer with the longest drive at the top, and the last-job answer is free text with no weight, since any answer at all there would score full marks. Every question is in Spanish as well.

Until your carrier registration clears, he applies on your screening page and not by text, to the same seven questions, the same knockouts and the same score; once it clears, the keyword on the van takes applications by text.

  • Screens for roof work in summer and for real commissioning experience before you give up an afternoon
  • English or Spanish on each question, as he prefers
  • Installers who apply are listed beside your array leads, each with a fit score
  • Part of the Tailgate Office Bundle — on Indeed a sponsored job is billed per click or per started application, at a price set by your market and the job (Indeed, checked October 2026 (opens in a new tab))
See how CrewFunnel works
Text-to-apply hiring flow showing an applicant texting a keyword to a business’s texting number and answering screening questions about years on a crew, license and start date The applicant one-pager in the owner’s dashboard, on any trade — the detail behind an interview that is already booked. The card carries the applicant’s name, a status of interview, the role and the job keyword, and the date they applied, beside the fit score the dashboard shows in its orange tile, 8.4 out of 10 here. A strip under the header records the interview against one of the owner’s own open slots, with the calendar invite ready to download. Then every answer is listed in three columns — question, answer, and what it scored. Years in the trade, answered six, carries weight four and scores sixty per cent, because a number answer is measured against a ten-point ceiling. A driver’s license question and a start-date question carry weight three each and score full marks on Yes. The age question and the free-text question show a dash. Three notes explain the scoring rather than leaving the dash to be guessed at: a dash means the weight is zero, and only weighted questions move the number; knockout and weight are separate settings, one ending the conversation and the other moving the score; and a text answer earns full marks whatever it says, so graded scoring has to come from a yes/no or a number question. Underneath sit the decisions the dashboard still offers once an interview is booked: re-book to another of the owner’s own open slots, keep the applicant in the talent pool, or pass. The screening also lands on the owner’s inbox thread for that phone number, beside everything else from it. The questions, the weights and the knockouts are the owner’s own; the set drawn here is only an example
Illustration of a review request, drawn as a text from an example plumbing business: a phone showing a short message asking the customer to share her experience, with a link to the business’s Google review page, beside a card that reads Write a review. Review requests are not switched on for new accounts yet. Once they are, the request goes by email, and a text goes as well where the customer ticked the box on the quote form or visit booking agreeing to a review-request text, once texting is switched on for the account The HurraBell log for the same example business, drawn as it appears in the owner’s dashboard: every finished job with what went out and what happened next. One customer was asked by text and by email and opened the link, so no reminder was needed. One had not agreed to texts, so the request went by email only and the one email reminder followed. One job was skipped, and the log shows the reason and who skipped it. Once review requests are switched on, every finished job is either asked or skipped with a reason

An array gets its review the day it is switched on, not when the first bill comes

The inspector has signed, the utility has swapped the meter, and on commissioning day she stands in the side yard watching it run backwards for the first time. That afternoon she has a photo she wants to show somebody. The first bill is weeks away, and by then the array is just part of the roof and the credit on the statement belongs to the sun. The installer with sixty reviews does not install sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, on commissioning day.

HurraBell™ does the asking. Once review requests are switched on, you mark the job done — from the inbox, from your phone, or from your job software through Zapier — and the customer gets one request in your words, with your own Google review link, after a delay you pick: an hour, unless you change it. Three days later, one email reminder, unless the link has been opened or the customer has since texted you, messaged you from your website or had a call logged on her thread.

Review requests aren’t switched on for new accounts yet. When they are, the request goes by email once your Google review link is saved on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page. A text goes as well where the customer ticked the box on your quote form or visit booking agreeing to a review-request text, and only once your carrier registration clears, the same wait as every text on this site; until then it is email only.

  • Once requests are on, every finished job is asked — skipping one needs a logged reason, because asking only the happy ones is review gating
  • Nothing offered for a review, and wording that steers is refused when you save it
  • A log of every request and every open, with a CSV export — and every skip with its reason
  • Part of the Tailgate Office Bundle — Podium’s entry plan (Core) is listed at $399 a month on a 12-month term (Podium pricing page, checked October 2026 (opens in a new tab))
See how HurraBell works

One recovered install covers 126 months

And a single recovered inverter swap covers 12 of them. In a trade where one missed evening call is a five-figure job, that is the arithmetic that matters.

The Tailgate Office Bundle

$199 PER MONTH · ALL FOUR TOOLS AND THE OFFICE

Instant quotes on your website, missed-call text-back and text-to-apply hiring (texts go out once texting is switched on), and, once switched on, a review request after every job, plus customers, jobs, estimates and invoices in one place. 30 days free, no credit card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.

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Only need one of the tools? After the trial you can keep just that one at its own price; the office stays with the Bundle.

Solar questions we get asked

No, and it never will be. Every figure on this page and in the widget is the GROSS contract price — what the contract says, what the invoice says, and what the engine actually computes. The credit depends on her own tax liability and on owning the system rather than leasing it, it is claimed months later on a return rather than on your invoice, and the law can end it, as it ended the federal homeowner credit for systems placed in service after 31 December 2025 (IRS). A quote form knows about a roof. It does not know about a tax bill, and a website that pretends otherwise is writing a number the homeowner cannot reproduce and you cannot honour. What the demo does instead is ask whether she expects a tax credit or rebate, price nothing off the answer, and say beside the band that this is the price of the work before any credit she goes on to claim. If she works out for herself that her real cost will be lower, you have been honest and she still called you.

Not through this widget, and that is a limitation worth stating rather than working around. There is no finance term anywhere in the engine — no rate, no term length, no field that expresses either — so anything monthly on your site would have to be a number typed by hand beside a number the engine computed, and the two would drift apart the first time you changed a rate. The band is a planning figure for the contract price. Finance is a conversation you have at the kitchen table with a lender’s own numbers in front of you, and it is a much better conversation to have after she already trusts your price.

She sees a range, never one figure, and on this trade the range is a genuine plus or minus 9%: the four things that set the price (how many kilowatts, what panel, what the roof is covered with and how far up it is) are all knowable from the kitchen table. What is NOT knowable is the shade report, the exact roof planes and what is actually in the main panel, which is why the disclaimer says the price is confirmed after the survey and why the panel-upgrade question tells her to answer no if she is not sure. She stops shopping, and the person who wanted a 12 kW array for nine thousand dollars never fills in your callback form at all.

Because a solar price is kilowatts times a dollars-per-watt figure, and the dollars-per-watt is set by four other answers. No pricing rule multiplies one question’s answer by another question’s answer — a per-unit rate multiplies a number by a FIXED amount — so the shape that works is a baseline rate on the size question with the qualitative answers carried as percentages on the whole job. That is the same shape our fencing demo uses, with kilowatts in place of linear feet. The result is that a slate roof reads as plus 34% rather than as a different dollars-per-watt, which is arithmetically the same thing and looks stranger. It is also true: slate really is a slower day than shingle, and it breaks.

Because the cheapest array the form can describe — 5 kW, standard panels, a string inverter, one storey, asphalt — computes to $12,250, and a crew with a rack truck, a permit runner and an electrician does not roll out for less than thirteen. It is the largest instant-service floor in our whole demo estate, roughly double the next one, and it was set deliberately rather than left at a default. You can see it working: a 3 kW array and a 5 kW array both come back at $13,000 to $14,170, because the floor clamps the low end up rather than sitting under it. A website that quoted somebody $8,000 for an array nobody will build costs you the callback and the reputation at the same time.

Because the engine cannot carry it honestly, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with a product that does not do what the website said. A ground mount is priced by the trench, the conduit and the copper back to the meter, frost-depth footings, and a county setback somebody has to go and read. A commercial roof, a pole barn and a house that is not built yet are each their own version of the same problem. So they route to a site visit, the service is NAMED "we come and scope it" because the name is the only place the widget can warn her before she starts, and nothing on this page prints a per-watt figure for a ground mount. Same discipline the chimney page keeps for a stainless reline.

Yes, on the second service, which has its own $185 base fee for the trip, the ladder and the diagnostic, its own $285 minimum and a tighter band. A dead or out-of-warranty inverter on a 24-panel array, two stories up, at the next opening is $2,399 to $2,817. Tell it the array is producing nothing and she needs you today, and the 30% for the rush takes it to $3,054 to $3,585.

A percentage of the whole job, because more electronics on the roof is more hardware and more labor. On the demo a string inverter is the baseline, DC optimizers add 6% and microinverters 11%. The 9 kW York array above is $23,878 to $28,601 on a string inverter, $25,082 to $30,043 with optimizers and $26,085 to $31,245 with microinverters. The help text says what each one buys her, such as one shaded panel no longer dragging the string down, as well as why the other two cost more.

It asks her, and it tells her how to look. The panel-upgrade question's help text says to read the big breaker at the top of the panel, and to answer no if she is not sure, because you check it at the survey. A yes adds a flat $2,850 for the panel, the meter work and the utility coordination, and because the pooled percentages land on it too, the York array goes from $25,082 to $30,043 to $28,324 to $33,926.

About fifteen minutes for your text-back messages and your office hours, and about an hour to write the eight install questions and load one rate card: your dollars-per-kilowatt baseline, your panel and inverter percentages, your roof-covering bands, your height bands and your service-upgrade amount. Most of another hour goes on the service call, which has its own base fee, its own per-panel rate, its own urgency question and a tighter band. Neither priced service goes live without a floor under it. Then, once review requests are switched on for your account, a minute more is enough to paste your Google review link on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page. The Bundle is $199 a month for all four tools: no setup fee, no contract, no onboarding call.

Wire service upgrades or reroof as well? The electrical page and the roofing page are written for those, the trade pages list the rest, and for anything else, ask us.

Give her the real number before she closes the tab.

Put your per-kilowatt baseline in tonight. Try it free for thirty days, with no card and no setup fee, and cancel from the dashboard if you need to.