After the job

Whose warranty pays for the ladder?

Published 2026-08-22 4 min read

The short answer

Every part of the system has its own warranty from its own manufacturer, and none of them covers the visit. Say who pays for the labor years from now, before anyone signs.

No other system in a house is assembled from this many manufacturers. Panels from one company, an inverter from another, mounting hardware from a third, monitoring from a fourth, and the work itself from you. Each of them warrants its own piece, on its own terms, for its own length of time.

The customer hears one number, usually the longest one, and assumes it applies to everything he can see on the roof. It does not, and the place where that misunderstanding becomes an argument is entirely predictable.

The gap nobody puts in writing

Something fails. The manufacturer honors its warranty and sends a replacement part, which is exactly what it promised. Now somebody has to drive out, set up, get on the roof, swap it and commission the system again — and that labor is not in the manufacturer’s warranty, because the manufacturer never employed anybody with a ladder.

So the question that decides how that day goes is not whether there is a warranty. It is who agreed, years earlier, to pay for the visit.

One failure, two costs. The first has an owner from the day it is installed; the second only has one if somebody wrote it down.

Put the table on the page

One table, one row per component: what it is, who warrants it, how long, and — the column that matters — who pays for the labor to replace it. Fill it from the documents, not from memory, and let the blanks be visible where there are blanks.

It will not be a tidy table. Some rows will have different lengths, some will have conditions, and the labor column may say different things in different years. That untidiness is the honest picture, and showing it is more persuasive than any headline number, because the customer has never been shown it before.

What this does to your competition

A quote with one long number on it and a quote that lays out five components with five different terms look, at first glance, like the worse deal is the detailed one. That lasts about as long as it takes the customer to ask the other company the labor question and get a vague answer.

You are not competing on length. You are competing on whether somebody will still be answering the phone, and what he already committed to in writing.

Five sections and what each prevents. Our own reasoning, from where the second decade of a system actually goes wrong.
What the page says	What it prevents
A row per component, with who warrants it and for how long	One long number standing in for five different promises.
Who pays labor for a replacement, by year	The argument on the day something fails.
What happens if a manufacturer is no longer trading	A warranty that turns out to be a piece of paper.
What you charge for a service visit after the labor period	A customer who assumed “still covered” and finds an invoice.
Who to contact first — you or the maker	Weeks lost to a customer phoning the wrong party.

The warranty block — copy it and fill the brackets from your own paperwork, not from memory

Heading, in his words: “What is actually covered, and for how long?”
The honest opening: “There is no single warranty on a solar system. There are several, from different companies, with different lengths. Here they are.”
The table: “[Component] — warranted by [company] — [length] — labor to replace paid by [who], for [how long].” One line per component, including the mounting and the monitoring.
The column people skip: “Labor is the part that is usually left out. Ours is covered for [period]. After that a replacement visit costs [what].”
If a maker disappears: “If a manufacturer stops trading, [what you do, honestly — including if the answer is that the warranty is gone].”
Who to call: “Call us first. We deal with the manufacturer; you should not have to.”
What is not covered at all: “[Storm damage, roof work, animals, anything you exclude] — those belong to [insurance, the roofer, you].”

The fifth point is the one competitors avoid because it admits a real risk. Saying it plainly is what makes the rest of the table believable — a page with no bad news in it reads as a page that left some out.

Why there are no numbers in this article

Not one warranty length appears above, and that is deliberate. The lengths belong to the products you actually fit, they change between models and revisions, and a figure printed here would be repeated by somebody who had not checked. The whole point of the page is that the numbers come off the documents in your hand. It would be strange for the article recommending that to do anything else.