Frequently Asked Questions

Solar-Estimate.org is owned by Solar Investments Inc, a Nevada-based company with its main office located in Denver, CO, and satellite offices in New Jersey, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Solar-Estimate.org has two sources of solar panel cost data being the Lawrence Berkeley Labs solar cost data. This is a government funded initiative that collects data in most states on residential solar panel installations.

The second source of data is the pre-screened solar pros that provide accurate estimates to users of the solar calculator that request competing solar quotes in order to compare solar prices.

The Berkeley Labs data is generally between 12 and 18 months out of date when it is published on our website.

Solar panel cost data from the 500 or so solar companies that provide accurate solar quotes to users of the Solar-Estimate price comparison service is current and so this is why we use this data in preference to the Lawrence Berkeley data.

Please see the article outlining the limitations of the accuracy of solar calculators.

Approximately 2% of the users of the solar panel calculator wish to get accurate competing solar quotes from solar providers near them and these people choose to enter their data.

They get to select how many individual solar companies they want to see live pricing from (they can select a maximum of 4).

When this happens Solar-Estimate earns a small fee from these solar companies for providing the lead to them. This fee averages around $50. Solar companies do not add this fee to the cost of a system they quote you because they face lead generation or marketing costs from all different avenues they gather leads from. Even their own website has costs to run and solar-estimate.org is actually a high-quality lead source for these solar companies because homeowners have seen an estimate first before deciding whether or not to request a quote.

For the other 98% of users of our site Solar-Estimate.org is simply a free consumer education site with easy to use educational tools and calculators, giving ballpark answers to the most common questions people have about solar panels for their homes. These people can get a ballpark estimate of the number of solar panels they need, how much power they will produce on their roof and lifetime savings without entering any personal details.