norman bates

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A friend of ours went this route. She seems a little disappointed. I think most of this could have been avoided with some advice given before the purchase.

One complaint is that the geyser and stove aren't backed up. She's not a technical person, and the sales staff should have assumed that she was not so minded and should have explained to her that a 5kW system isn't going to back up an entire house. She probably wouldn't have opted for a different solution, but she would have had more realistic expectations.

The second complaint was that they arrived, and immediately and without any explanation installed on the kitchen wall. OK... that's where the DB is, but it's also a busy room in this house. Now she has fans whirring in the room where she does lots of entertaining and two big, ugly lumps on the wall. They then moved everything to the garage. After she agreed to pay an extra R2500 up front. Again this should have been discussed beforehand. The kitchen wall still needs patching.

The system she got seems OK. I'm not sure about the financial proposition, but she says she took advice and it's the best solution for her.

But my observation should be that a lot of people who opt for these solutions want just that: a solution. They don't know what a kWh is, nor do they care about peak loads and managing SOC. They just want to be spared load shedding and save a bit of money. GoSolr should be doing some explaining up front and managing expectations.

I had a neighbour ask me to review their contract and have looked into them for friends.

Most important detail some people miss:  GoSolr is rent-only.  i.e. you never pay off the system, you never own it.  
The main take-away is that at the moment it seems their initial sales and installation are great, the equipment they install is great, but once it's installed it's very very difficult to get hold of them, especially if they need to make any changes/fixes to the system.  Hello Peter will give you a lot of stories along those lines too.  2 different neighbours who have them said the same thing.
Having read through their terms and conditions, I highly recommend you read any contract in detail.  There's quite a few 'gotchas' that may or may not be of concern to you.  In particular these stood out for me:
The monthly cost will increase "based on CPI".  It's generically worded enough that they could abuse it with pretty high increases annually if they wish. They reserve the right to at any stage switch to billing you based on the kWh the panels produce instead of the fixed monthly fee.  If they do this, you have 30 days to _notice_ they've done this and demand they change the billing back, if you don't notice it, then you're stuck with being billed for the power the panels produce regardless of whether you use it or not. If they ever decide to connect the system to export power, they get the full financial benefit of all exported power.  i.e. you sign away rights to that "income". If you cancel the deal - including e.g. if you sell your house and the new owner doesn't want the system - they will come and remove the system but will not do any maintenance on the building such as filling holes or anything like that.  I get that it's to protect them from owners demanding they repaint walls and excessive stuff, but the way it's worded makes it sound like they'll do the bare minimum when removing and leave you with the effort of cleaning up.  On the bright side though, the penalty for cancellation and even early cancellation is not high, something like R10k (I can't quite remember amount, but I know it was way less than I thought it would be) Doing some maths, if you plan on living in your house for more than 5 years, you're better off finding a rent-to-own solution or getting financing.  If, like my neighbour, you plan on selling in 2 years time anyways, then it's not a bad solution.