Seven checks before you sign

The panels on two competing proposals are usually similar. What differs is who is accredited, who holds the contract, who honours each warranty and who is standing on the roof. All seven are checkable before anyone signs anything.

Modules from the major manufacturers are a mature product. So are the inverters. Two proposals for the same roof will usually land close to each other on generation, and the hardware difference between them is rarely what decides whether the project goes well.

What varies is everything around the equipment. Who is accredited to sign the installation off. Who the contract is actually with. Which party honours each of the three warranties. Who is physically on the roof, and whether they work for the business whose name is on the quote.

Every one of those is a matter of public record or a direct question, and all seven checks below can be completed in an afternoon.

This is not a suggestion that the industry is untrustworthy. It is a recognition that solar is sold through a long chain, that the chain is invisible from the outside, and that the questions which expose it are boring rather than confrontational.

The reason the chain is long is structural rather than sinister. Marketing, sales, design, certificate administration and installation are five different skills, and very few businesses do all five themselves. A quote can pass through three companies before a crew is booked.

Treat the list as a checklist for a supplier you intend to keep, not as an interrogation. The system will be on the building for decades, and the relationship with whoever maintains it lasts about as long.

Anybody who minds being asked these has told you something useful.

These are two different credentials, they are held by different parties, and a business needs both.

Accreditation is what allows small-scale certificates to be created for an installation. The accreditation scheme operator for installers and designers under the small-scale scheme is Solar Accreditation Australia, which took the role over from the Clean Energy Council in 2024¹. An accredited person has to be involved in the installation for the certificates to exist at all².

The check is a name, not a logo. Ask which accredited person will be on site, and look the name up on the register¹. A company is not accredited. A person is.

This matters commercially as well as technically. If the accredited person's involvement does not meet the scheme's requirements, the certificates cannot be created, and the discount that was deducted from the invoice has to come from somewhere else.

The licence is separate and is state-based. Electrical work in New South Wales requires a licence, and the register is public³. That covers the wiring, the switchboard and the isolations, which is most of what can go badly wrong later.

The federal consumer guidance says the same thing in more words, and it is worth reading if the credentials are unfamiliar⁴.

Where the answer is that the accredited person will be confirmed closer to the date, treat that as the answer rather than as a delay.

The licence check has a second part worth doing. Confirm that the licence is held by the contracting entity and not only by an individual who happens to work there, because a business contracting for electrical work in New South Wales needs its own contractor licence, separate from the qualifications of the electrician on site³.

Both registers are free and take minutes. The reason they are skipped is not cost. It is that asking feels awkward, and it is the easiest question on this list to ask.

A great many solar businesses sell, and a smaller number install. Those are not always the same entity, and the distinction only becomes visible when something needs fixing.

The question is direct. Which legal entity is the contract with, and does that entity employ the people who will do the work.

This is answerable in one sentence by any business that has thought about it. New Ability Energy holds the installer role, the contract, the accreditation and the warranty. Solar Up is the renewable arm of New Ability Energy and is the authorised distributor. One of those is the party you sign with, and it is the one holding the licence.

There is a simple way to test the answer. Ask whose name will appear on the tax invoice, whose name appears on the certificate of compliance, and whose name is on the workmanship warranty. Where those are three different entities, ask why.

Where a proposal names one entity on the letterhead, a second on the contract and a third on the certificate paperwork, that is not automatically a problem. It is a structure the buyer should understand before signing, because it determines who they call.

The related question is who carries the insurance. Public liability and the relevant works cover should be in the name of the entity doing the work, and a certificate of currency is an ordinary thing to ask for.

Finally, check how long the contracting entity has been trading under that name. A workmanship warranty is a promise by a company, and a company that is a year old is making a promise about a decade it has not yet seen.

"Twenty-five year warranty" is a sentence that describes one layer of three, and it is usually the layer the installer does not honour.

Durations are the part everyone quotes and the least useful part to compare, because the three layers are frequently quoted as one headline. A module with a long performance warranty and an installer with a short workmanship warranty is not a long-warranty system.

The emphasised row is the important one. A product warranty is only as good as the manufacturer's presence in Australia, and a performance warranty is only as good as the evidence you can produce against it. A workmanship warranty is only as good as the installer, and it is the layer that covers the failures that actually happen: a leak, a loose fixing, a nuisance trip, an undersized cable run.

So the check is not the number of years. It is who will be standing behind the number, and whether the labour to make a claim good is included or invoiced.

Ask one more question. When a module fails under a product warranty, who pays for the access equipment and the labour to swap it. That is frequently not the manufacturer, and it is frequently not written down.

One practical test of the performance layer. Ask what evidence a claim requires, and check that the monitoring being installed can actually produce it. A performance warranty that needs data the system does not record is a warranty in name only.

Subcontracting is normal and is not by itself a warning sign. Undisclosed subcontracting is different, because it decides who is accountable when a detail is wrong.

The reason to ask is not quality prejudice. Good subcontract crews are common. The reason is traceability: when a fixing detail turns out to be wrong on many roofs, it matters whether one crew did all of them or whether nobody can say.

The questions are simple. Are the installers employees or subcontractors. If subcontractors, does the same crew do all the work for this business, or is it allocated by job. And who supervises the work on the day.

There is a safety dimension as well as a quality one. Roof access, edge protection, isolation procedure and the site induction all sit with whoever holds the contract, and a buyer is entitled to see the safe work method statement before the crew arrives rather than on the morning.

For any site that operates while the work happens, ask who carries the site's own induction requirements. A crew that has not been inducted is a crew standing in a car park.

And ask what the crew size and the programme are. A commercial roof installed by two people over three weeks and the same roof installed by six over one week are different disruption profiles for the business underneath, which is a separate subject: see "Plan for access, not for downtime".

Every financial figure in a proposal rests on assumptions that are rarely printed next to it: an annual yield, a self-consumption ratio, a tariff, an escalation rate and a certificate value.

The most consequential of those is the self-consumption ratio, because it decides what each generated kilowatt hour is worth. A site that exports half its output earns the feed-in rate on that half, and the feed-in rate is not the retail rate.

Two proposals can differ by a large margin on payback while quoting nearly identical hardware, purely because one assumed the site would use more of its own generation than the other did.

Ask for the assumptions as a list. It is a reasonable request, it takes a competent business very little time, and the comparison is meaningless without it. Another post covers how to run that comparison properly: see "Compare the assumptions, not the price".

The related check is the exclusions. A price that excludes the switchboard upgrade, the connection application or the access equipment is not a price for the job, and the excluded items are usually the ones with the widest range.

Where a proposal contains a single payback figure and no assumption list, the honest interpretation is that the figure was produced by a tool rather than by an analysis of this building.

A commissioned system is the start of an asset's life, and the handover pack is what makes the rest of that life manageable.

The list is short and non-negotiable. As-built drawings. A string map. The structural sign-off. The connection approval. Certificates of compliance for the electrical work. Inverter and monitoring credentials in the site's own name rather than the installer's.

That last one catches people. Where monitoring is registered to the installer's account, changing contractor means losing the history, and the history is what a performance warranty claim is evidenced with.

Ask also for the settings. Inverter configuration, export limit, and any network-required response modes are all part of the commissioned state, and they are what a future fault gets compared against.

Then ask what happens when something needs attention. What the response time is, whether monitoring is watched or merely available, and what a maintenance visit includes. A system nobody looks at fails quietly, and an inverter fault on a commercial array can run for months before anybody notices it in a bill.

Seven checks, all answerable before signature, none of them about the panels.