Alternative to Brooklyn Solarworks
Hi there,
We are looking at the getting solar on the roof of our landmarked brownstone in Park Slope. We got a quote from BSW. The quote seems very high to me… more than twice the cost of the materials!! Obviously there is some labor involved, but they install this in 2 days …
Even if just as a sanity check – does anyone know of alternative companies that can install Solar on a landmarked property with a flat roof?
shollander91
in General Discussion 3 years and 3 months ago
44
Please log in, in order to post replies!
44 replies
ejcarroll | 3 years and 2 months ago
Thanks all.
andriywww1990 | 3 years and 2 months ago
with respect to selecting a better (pricier) contractor, the people (contractors and customers) in the better pond will view the customer/contractor relationship as more of a “partnership” in which when one succeeds so does the other. there will also be a lot of trust. by selecting each other this way, the customers and contractors will respect the challenges each other face in having a job done or doing a job and they will work together to ensure the other is happy. a customer no more wants a miserable contractor around than a contractor wants to work for a miserable customer.
for the customers and contractors who swim in the miserable pond, they seem to have an adversarial relationship and a lot of distrust between them. a woman once said on this board “all contractors are thieves, they cannot wait to get their hands in your pockets”. no contractor in their right mind would consider taking a job with some who thinks like that – at the same time, there are contractors who think like that about the customers (my first boss – a talented individual – used t o worry about not getting paid and customers bouncing checks. there was no trust. he was swimming in the wrong pond).
approach the situation like you would in any other relationship. choose contractors because you like them and you think they can do the job (not because you think they are cheap). you want people around you who are happy, successful, professional and like what they are doing and do it because they want to do it (not out of desperation), and you want the relationship, no matter how short it may be, built on trust.
andriywww1990 | 3 years and 2 months ago
i think my neighbor said six year recoup. he also said that coned changes the way they buy back electricity and that that change just took place and the old way was better for the customer. i am not sure about what he was talking about, so research.
ejcarroll | 3 years and 2 months ago
Impression is electric cost savings by installing solar will take many years to recover costs. True?
andriywww1990 | 3 years and 2 months ago
OK, ft greenp nut: there two ponds of customers and swimming in each of those two ponds are contractors; the water does not mix and one does not swim from one pond to the other, readily (you have to jump unless you are moving to the lower pond, that is easy. for a contractor screw up and you will end up there). the people in the pond who spend more money have better customer experiences because, as with everything else – a car, computer, restaurant, more money gets you something better. it is the same for contractors in the better pond: they charge more, can hire better help and can take their time doing things correctly and do not like when their employees taking short cuts and will demand better from their staff;. the customer experience is better (these contractors do not ever want to have an unhappy customer). that is why we consistently hear good things from those people. those people also accept responsibility for the contractors they hire and they know that contractors are not magicians: if the money is not there, the contractor can not make it ap pear.
there is another pond. people who do not want to spend the money to get things done right and they swim with shoddy contractors. OK, in emergencies maybe they do not have the money and that is understandable. but many of these people do not understand, if a contractor is giving out lower prices it is because their own reputation does not allow them to jump into the other pond. for these contractors, something has to give. they are not going to deny their own children food or new shoes. they have to cut corners on a lot of things including they way they treat their unskilled, low paid help. the customers in this pond are always unhappy because they make money the overriding factor in choosing a contractor. with these people that pattern repeats itself becuase they do not seem to understand that they chose the contractor using faulty parameters.
People on this board who have never taken a swim in the other pond may have not a clue as to what i am talking about. Cookthebooks said “most people go gold plated” and that is because cookthebooks swims in one pond and does not socialize with nor talk to the people in the other pond. if a contractor from the other pond showed up at cookthebooks house, and let a cigarette hang out of their mouth as they talked to cook the books or if the contractor’s crew was playing loud music in the truck as they contractor was made their pitch or if they contractor dropped an f bomb, cook the books would quickly realize that the contractor is not from their pond but is from the other and they would not call that contractor back.
in short, this is why you hear praise of contractors from one group and a lot of complaining from the other. People “buy” their customer experience and you get what you pay for – with just about everything – including contractors.
Dennis, i can tell you something about the better pond: when money is a factor in the choices people have to make, the people swimming in the better pond will always put their money into an asset that appreciates. Not an asset that depreciates. i cannot tell you about solar as i think it has a limited lifetime, maybe someone else can offer help on that-
Lurker | 3 years and 2 months ago
Ft Greene totally fair point on confirmation bias. For sure that’s a thing. But as someone who hired the cheap guy for a home renovation and then had to fight him via the DCA, and an electrician who walked away without finishing the work, and a mid-priced roofing guy who left me with leaks, the fault is ultimately mine.
F me once your bad, f me twice my bad. Or, as I was warned at the time: if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
Guest User | 3 years and 2 months ago
it seems like most of the solar outfits are nothing more than glorified sales offices who sub out the actual installation to random installers… they make their money on sales and a percentage of the loans that they push clients to use.. They actually have no in house staff for installation or support
Guest User | 3 years and 2 months ago
ft greene…i don’t even have solar, but i passed along my clients experiences using BSW… I couldn’t find a single complaint, unlike the competition
Fort_Green_p_nut | 3 years and 2 months ago
With the admission that yes it is justified to pay more for higher quality of service and workmanship and I’m not saying it is the case here but:
I sometimes wonder if people who paid a premium price for a service advocate that others do the same in order to justify the premium to themselves. They could feel worse off if someone else finds a new supplier that can do the job for less. I’m bracing myself for being flamed for this.
Lurker | 3 years and 2 months ago
Eh, if it’s icky I apologize! But be fair—I only posted because in the reverse position I would have wanted to know and benefit, and I was completely transparent about it—and I didn’t publicly post the link itself. This forum is all about people sharing trades and services they like (and don’t like). Note I have absolutely no connection with the company, or this field, and my only relationship was as a customer.
true | 3 years and 2 months ago
Icky! [Screen Shot 2022-03-14 at 9](//muut.com/u/brownstoner/s1/:brownstoner:1qt5:screenshot20220314at9.32.38am.png.jpg)
Lurker | 3 years and 2 months ago
Dennis. Please do us all a favor and go for the cheapest option no matter what others advise. And be sure to post here over the next 3-5 years and keep us posted on how it all went. If it goes great, you save 50% and all goes well-enough that you are satisfied, terrific! You’re a pioneer paving the way for others to stick it to the man and save tons of cash! If it goes wrong, still great! You’ll be an object lesson on what it means to learn from others’ experiences. Win-win!
Fort_Green_p_nut | 3 years and 2 months ago
Interesting thread. I for one am very interested in what Dennis finds from his 3rd quote, who he ends up choosing and how it works out.
While it is often prudent to go for the established brand name – BSW in this case – success can also sometimes lead to complacency and consumers benefit when there are multiple choice available.
Has anyone had a good experience with Sunrun? I’ve seen their cars around in park slope.
andriywww1990 | 3 years and 2 months ago
cookthebooks, while you are correct in what you are saying, as a contractor i used to see a lot of this and i used to see who makes the mistakes in selection (i have since priced myself out of the market for customers who are shopping for cheap contractors). it is often people who have never been through renovations who make mistakes with these things. once a customer has renovated a house in brooklyn or anywhere else, they know what a good contractor sounds like and they know what it will cost to hire that firm. in the case of my business, as soon as i hear that the homeowner had done a renovation 3 or 4 years previous “and now it is time for the doors” and we get to the price, they say, “that is about what i figured”; people who have never been through a renovation often get a little surprised and sometimes they think there is a way around that expense (there is not) and they shop and shop and shop themselves to the bottom and that is when the problems arise. yes, sometimes things go wrong with good contractors but with poor ones things always go wrong.
as fo r the people i used to encounter when i did more interior wood work, stair balustrades and built ins, they would call me at the end of the job after their contractor abandoned it or got dismissed (in once case because “every time” he got a progress payment he “took a trip to florida”; it was a bad winter, i guess that was a good excuse but he was spending the money he needed to complete the job). in most cases these people were not doing needed things (like a new roof or windows if the old ones were so rotted they were falling out) but were redoing kitchens or adding a basement rooms. the stress these people bring on their marriages when all this goes wrong is insane. None of these people were short of money – some of them had new cars many people could only dream about; if they applied the same standards they applied to selecting cars to their houses, they would have had no issues with the contractors. in short, contractors are best avoiding these kinds of customers and perhaps some of the comments you are seeing on here are directed at those people; people who value cars over everything else including a peaceful marriage make very poor customers for contractors. fortunately, i do not encounter that in brooklyn but i do see it over here where i live and i run from it.
in so far as who suffers when they select the lowest bid. probably not the people contracting the job or the owner of the company. they still get their money. listen to the complaints about these jobs and look at the crews working for the lower paid company. the homeowners suffer poor quality because the lowest bidder hires the cheapest, most desperate unskilled labor. that is the business model and it is wrong for the customers and the entire labor pool – including the people not working for them because those employers set a standard where other businesses think it is ok to hire human beings with little pay and no benefits (they often misclassify the labor as “contractors” and force them to provide the state mandated protections on a very low hourly wage)- conditions that all of us on this board should abhor.
of course there is no guarantee of anything. but overall, if something does not have to be done right away (a roof or sewer line) and a customer can wait and pay a little more, they are better off doing so – for their own peace of mind, sanity in their marriage, and for the dignity of the labor working for the contractor.
solehappy | 3 years and 2 months ago
i dont know of a single person that ever doesnt go with the absolute gold plated best version of a thing always if they can afford it. these kinds of attitudes make it seem like consumers without unlimited budgets are doing the trades a disservice. i have also paid top dollar for some of the most recommended trades on here and had objectively terrible work done that someone much more inexpensive found unconscionable. i would not at all be surprised that someone could do the exact same work as bsw for half the price and that bsw could completely botch a project leading to huge headaches. thats the whole problem.
lkrshacmzcy | 3 years and 2 months ago
Hey I use the Discounted Barber and love it…gets the job done just fine every time.
The Dentist I use on the hand, pretty sure I put all three of his kids through College and Grad School. But I love my teeth!
Do your Due Diligence and compare. Just please let us know how it all goes. Grandpa always taught me crossing a minefield is a lot easier than people think…just a let a few others go first.
shollander91 | 3 years and 2 months ago
Lots of doom and gloom projected … feels like I definitely need to use someone else to disproof this perception that BSW is the only company that can complete this HIGHLY COMPLEX engineering challenge
lkrshacmzcy | 3 years and 2 months ago
As a Plumber who gets told this same thing a lot, I must also give a warning of Tread Lightly but for a different reason.
About 30-40% of our Service Work Revenue is coming in after the “1/2 Market Price Plumber” to fix their mistakes. Not saying this will happen here but as everyone has said: what you see physically getting done is not the only thing you are paying for with a High Value Company.
true | 3 years and 2 months ago
I hope you’ve learned your lesson, Dennis – tread lightly when questioning the Church of Brooklyn Solar Works.