Review for Energy Consultants Group, LLC

Office location: 9635 230th Ave - Office 9663 239th Ave - Shop, Anamosa IA, 52205

05/19/2022
Nick Becker Cedar Rapids, IA

Disclaimer: ECG incentivized me to leave this review, but I've done my best to keep my review accurate and honest. My solar system was installed on June 14th, 2021 and (finally) powered on July 17th, 2021 after being approved by Alliant. ECG did a great job throughout the entire process. They adequately sized my system based on my needs, and the panels have effectively eliminated my electricity bill (minus monthly service fees) over the past year. Prior to installation, they provided an extremely detailed report with information about the expected performance, utility savings over time, expected ROI, and environmental impact. I've attached some pictures showing the end result at my home. ECG subcontracted a lot of the electrical work, but I thought they did a great job making the conduit not stand out too much. Initially I wasn't too happy about how they routed the conduit up and over the roof, but I rarely notice this anymore. They also removed a large chunk of drywall to run some of the conduit into my breaker. It would have been nice if they patched this up afterwards. One minor complaint is that the estimated utility savings in the report provided by ECG assumed that the power company had a policy of "net metering", but Alliant switched to an "inflow-outflow" tariff for systems (like mine) that were connected after December 30th, 2020. In particular, the inflow-outflow tariff does not include a "True-Up" payment to reconcile net-meter credits accumulated during the year, which was assumed in ECG's analysis. So currently I don't have a solid understanding of how much money I'm actually saving, but I assume it is comparable to what ECG estimated I'd be saving under net metering. It was disappointing how long it took to actually turn on the panels after they were installed, but this was no fault of ECG, and I was warned of this ahead of time. After the panels were running, I discovered that Enphase offered some optional hardware to enable consumption monitoring. I reached out to ECG and they were able to install this optional feature within a week or two. It makes it much easier to see how much energy I'm using and producing, and also makes it easier to verify that Alliant is billing me correctly. Overall, I'm very pleased with my experience with ECG and would recommend them to anyone interested in solar. I will definitely be reaching out to them in the near future when I decide it's time to add batteries to my setup.