My Solar Company Went Out of Business. Now What?

Short answer: You have not lost your equipment warranties — those are held by the panel and inverter manufacturers, not your installer. What you lost is the workmanship warranty and the company that used to handle claims for you. Your monitoring can almost always be recovered. The immediate steps are: confirm the company is genuinely gone, secure your paperwork and serial numbers, regain monitoring access, and find a licensed contractor who will take the system on.

First, confirm they are actually gone

Unresponsive and out of business are different problems with different remedies, and it is worth ten minutes to tell them apart.

Check the New York Department of State entity search. A dissolved or inactive corporation is a matter of public record. An entity still listed as active may just be ignoring you.
Check their licence. NYC contractors appear in the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection register, and licence status is public. An expired or revoked licence tells you a great deal.
Check for bankruptcy filings. If there is a Chapter 7 or 11, you may be a creditor with a claim, even if the practical recovery is small.
Check the BBB and state complaint records. A pattern of recent unanswered complaints usually means a company winding down rather than one that has formally closed.

This matters because if they are merely unresponsive, a complaint to DCWP or the Attorney General’s office can still produce a result. If they are genuinely dissolved, that route is closed and you move straight to the manufacturers.

What survived, precisely

Panel product and performance warranty	Intact. Held by the manufacturer.
Inverter / microinverter warranty	Intact, and usually the most valuable one you have.
Racking warranty	Usually intact.
Monitoring data and access	Recoverable. Lives with the equipment platform.
Workmanship warranty	Gone. Flashing, penetrations, wiring, mounting.
Any promised production guarantee	Gone, if it was the installer’s own promise.
Your interconnection and net metering	Unaffected. That agreement is with Con Edison or PSEG Long Island, not the installer.

That last row is worth emphasising because it worries people unnecessarily. Your net metering arrangement does not depend on your installer continuing to exist.

The catch on those surviving warranties

Manufacturer warranties typically cover the part, not the labour to diagnose and install it. And most manufacturers will only process a claim through a qualified contractor — not a homeowner directly.

So you hold a real warranty you cannot personally exercise. Someone licensed has to diagnose the fault, document it to the manufacturer’s standard, file the claim, receive the part and fit it. Finding that someone is the actual task in front of you.

The five things to do this week

Gather the paperwork. Installation contract, proposal, any warranty certificates, interconnection paperwork, permit sign-offs. If it is in a closing file or an old email folder, get it into one place now.
Photograph the equipment labels. Panel make and model, inverter make, model and serial number. These are on the equipment itself. Everything downstream depends on them, and they are the one thing that cannot be reconstructed from records.
Establish whether the system is actually working. Compare the last twelve months of electric bills against the twelve before. If consumption jumped without a lifestyle change, the array may have been down for months. This is common and it is the real cost of losing monitoring.
Start the monitoring recovery. Contact the equipment manufacturer’s support with your serial numbers, address and proof of ownership. The account exists; it is attached to your hardware. It usually needs reassigning from the installer’s company account to you.
Get the installation inspected. Specifically the parts the dead workmanship warranty used to cover: roof penetrations and flashing, wire management, racking torque and corrosion, exposed conduit. A leak found now is cheap; a leak found via a ceiling stain is not.

Where the missing workmanship warranty will actually cost you

Be clear-eyed about this, because it is the genuine loss and it is fixable only by inspection.

The highest-consequence item is roof penetrations. A badly flashed mount can sit there for eight years doing nothing visible and then let water into a joist bay. On a flat Brooklyn roof this is the failure that turns a solar problem into a structural one. Everything else on the list — chafing cables, under-torqued clamps, corroded fasteners on coastal blocks — is cheaper and slower to bite.

If you are buying a house with solar

The same situation arrives via a different door, and the time to handle it is before closing, not two years after.

Establish who installed it and whether they still exist, whether the system is owned or leased, whether a lease or PPA has to be assigned to you, what remains of the NYC property tax abatement schedule, and get the monitoring transferred into your name at closing. A pre-purchase inspection of the array is worth far more than it costs, because you are about to inherit whatever is up there.

Choosing who takes it on

Most installers will not service someone else’s system, so you will hear no a few times. When you find someone who will, ask:

Are you licensed for both the electrical work and the roof work? Because orphaned systems routinely need both, and two contractors means the seam problem all over again.
Will you file manufacturer warranty claims on my behalf?
Will you get my monitoring back in my own name?
Will you inspect the installation itself, not just the fault I called about?

Solar Pro Inc holds New York City Home Improvement Contractor licence #2112475-DCA and Department of Buildings General Contractor licence #625000, alongside electrical licensing — which is why we can take on work that spans both trades. Both licences are public record and you are welcome to verify them.

Tell us about your system and we will tell you where you stand — or call (718) 962-7699. Bring whatever you have: make and model, install date, who installed it, and what it is or is not doing.