Door-to-door solar sales: your rights at your own door

The rule applies even when you asked them to come

The definition of a door-to-door sale is the single most misunderstood sentence in the rule, and getting it wrong costs people their cancellation window.

The Cooling-Off Rule defines a door-to-door sale as one "in which the seller or his representative personally solicits the sale, including those in response to or following an invitation by the buyer, and the buyer's agreement or offer to purchase is made at a place other than the place of business of the seller".

Read the two halves. The first says an invitation from you does not take the sale outside the rule. You can fill in a form on a website, request a quote, book the appointment yourself and choose the time, and the rule still applies. The second says what actually matters is where you signed, not where you were pitched and not where the panels end up.

The definition then gives its own examples of places that are not the seller's place of business: "sales at the buyer's residence or at facilities rented on a temporary or short-term basis, such as hotel or motel rooms, convention centers, fairgrounds and restaurants, or sales at the buyer's workplace or in dormitory lounges".

So a signature at your kitchen table is covered. So is one at a home show booth, a hotel conference room, a county fair table, or your desk at work. What is not covered is a sale made after you visited a permanent showroom where the goods are on display on a continuing basis, which is rare in residential solar.

Saturday counts, and that makes the window shorter than you think

The rule defines a business day as "any calendar day except Sunday or any federal holiday". Saturday is a business day for these purposes. Most people assume the opposite, and the assumption costs a day.

Work an example. You sign on a Thursday evening. Friday is business day one. Saturday is business day two. Sunday does not count. Monday is business day three, so your right expires at midnight on Monday. If you had assumed Saturday and Sunday were both excluded, you would have believed you had until Wednesday, and you would have been two days wrong.

This is exactly why the rule requires the seller to write the actual deadline date on the notice rather than leaving you to count. If your notice has a blank where the date should be, you are missing something the seller was required to give you.

State law can count differently. Some states exclude Saturday as well, which makes their window longer in real time even when the number of days is the same. We cover the state-level variation separately.

The financing detail that changes which law applies

The financing carve-out is the part almost nobody explains, and it is the part that occasionally rescues someone who is already past day three.

The Cooling-Off Rule contains a carve-out at 429.0(a)(2): it does not apply to a transaction "in which the consumer is accorded the right of rescission by the provisions of the Consumer Credit Protection Act". That is a reference to the Truth in Lending Act. The two regimes are mutually exclusive by design, so exactly one of them governs your contract.

Which one depends on what secures your loan. TILA rescission attaches only where a security interest "is or will be retained or acquired in any property which is used as the principal dwelling" of the borrower. In practice that means a solar loan secured by a mortgage or deed of trust on the house, a home-equity product, or a PACE assessment recorded as a lien on the property. A solar loan that is unsecured, or secured only against the equipment, does not create an interest in your home and so does not trigger TILA. The FTC rule governs instead.

Both regimes happen to give three business days, so this can look like a distinction without a difference. It is not, because they start the clock differently.

The FTC clock runs from the date of the transaction. The TILA clock runs from the latest of consummation, delivery of the rescission notice, or delivery of all material disclosures. And if the notice or the material disclosures were never properly delivered, the right to rescind does not expire in three days. It expires three years after consummation, or on sale or transfer of the property, whichever comes first.

There is one more consequence worth knowing if work has been scheduled fast. Under Regulation Z, during a TILA rescission period "no money shall be disbursed other than in escrow, no services shall be performed and no materials delivered until the rescission period has expired". A crew arriving the next morning on a home-secured loan is not a sign of good service.

And your state may fill the gap the federal rule leaves. Kentucky is the clearest case we found. Its statute gives a buyer ten business days to rescind a home solicitation sale "on loans in which a security interest is taken in the principal dwelling of the buyer", running from the later of loan consummation or delivery of the material disclosures required under the Truth in Lending Act. That is precisely the fact pattern the federal rule pushes out to TILA, and Kentucky more than triples the period there.

So do not conclude that financing shortened your window without checking your own state. In at least one state, a loan secured by the house makes the window longer rather than shorter, and North Dakota separately gives buyers aged sixty-five or over fifteen business days on an ordinary solicitation sale. We cover what we verified state by state on a separate page.

We are not telling you which regime covers your contract, because that depends on documents we have not seen. We are telling you the question to ask: is this loan secured by my house? The answer decides which law you are under, and in one branch it decides whether your deadline was three days ago or three years from now.

What the FTC has actually alleged about solar door-to-door selling

We searched the FTC's case library rather than relying on secondary summaries, and the picture is narrower and more specific than the general reputation of the industry suggests.

The first finding is a negative one, and it is genuinely useful. We found no FTC enforcement action against a solar seller under the Cooling-Off Rule itself. The rule is the source of your rights, but it is not where the federal cases have been brought. The actions that exist were brought under the Telemarketing Sales Rule, FTC Act section 5, and a mortgage advertising rule.

In July 2023 the FTC and the State of Arizona filed a complaint in the District of Arizona against Vision Solar LLC, Solar Xchange LLC and an individual. As alleged in that complaint, Vision Solar paid telemarketers to book in-home sales appointments; those telemarketers placed calls to numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry; agents falsely claimed affiliation with an electric utility or a government entity; and savings claims of 20% to 50% off current bills were made without substantiation. Solar Xchange and the individual defendant settled by stipulated order with a suspended civil penalty judgment and conduct bans. Vision Solar LLC did not settle, and the case page records the matter as pending. Everything in this paragraph is an allegation in a complaint, and nothing here should be read as a finding against any defendant.

A 2022 action concerned PACE financing rather than the panels. The complaint alleged that a financier trained and authorised home-improvement contractors, explicitly including solar-panel installers, to sell PACE financing door-to-door, and that contractors told homeowners the resulting first-priority property-tax lien would not interfere with selling or refinancing the home. That matter settled with $3 million dedicated to consumer relief, of which the FTC reported distributing more than $2.9 million to 960 consumers in July 2025. The settlement did not remove the liens.

An earlier action, filed 2016 and settled 2017, concerned a solar lead-generation robocall operation rather than a seller: prerecorded calls telling consumers to press one to lower their electric bill, after which the consumer was transferred and their details sold to an installer as a lead.

Read together, these describe a pattern about how the appointment gets made rather than about what happens once someone is in your living room. The lead generator, the telemarketer and the closer are frequently three different businesses, which is a structural point we cover separately.