Your solar installer went out of business. What happens now

The three warranties, and which one you just lost

A purchased residential solar system carries three separate promises from two different parties. Homeowners routinely think of them as one thing called "the warranty", and the distinction only becomes visible at the moment it matters most.

The manufacturer product warranty covers defects in the panels and the inverters. It is an obligation of Qcells, or Enphase, or whoever made the hardware. Your installer failing has no effect on it whatsoever.

The manufacturer performance warranty guarantees output over time: that the modules will still produce a stated percentage of their rated power after a given number of years. Also a manufacturer obligation, also unaffected.

The installer workmanship warranty covers the installation itself: the holes in your roof, the flashing around them, the racking, the conduit, the wiring, the labour. It exists nowhere except in the contract you signed with the company that has just stopped trading. There is no industry backstop, no standard term, and no manufacturer that assumes it.

That last point is worth stating precisely, because it is the whole problem. Reading the actual manufacturer warranty documents, neither Enphase nor Qcells creates, references or backstops any installer workmanship obligation. Both go further and expressly exclude the labour categories a workmanship warranty covers.

Chapter 7 versus Chapter 11 decides your outcome

In every documented case we examined, the chapter under which the company filed determined what happened to its customers. This is not a technicality. It is the single most useful thing you can establish in your first hour.

Chapter 7 is liquidation. A trustee sells the assets, distributes what is left to creditors in statutory order, and the company ceases to exist. Nobody is authorised to perform warranty work because there is no operating business left to perform it. Titan Solar Power, Sunworks and Pink Energy all went this route, and in none of those cases did any successor assume the workmanship obligations.

Chapter 11 is reorganisation. The business continues operating under court supervision while it restructures or sells itself. Crucially, the court can authorise the debtor to keep spending money on customer obligations. When Sunnova Energy International filed Chapter 11 in June 2025 in the Southern District of Texas, the court approved continued operations including paying employees, servicing solar systems and maintaining warranty programmes during the case.

So the same event ("my solar company went bankrupt") produces materially different outcomes depending on a chapter number. Find it before you assume the worst or the best.

The manufacturer warranty clauses that bite hardest when nobody is left

Your manufacturer warranties survive. That is genuinely good news, and it is also less useful than it sounds, because those documents contain exclusions that assume a competent installer is still around to argue with. Reading the current Enphase and Qcells warranties in full, five clauses matter enormously once your installer has gone.

Labour is excluded. All of it. Enphase states that its warranty "does not include any cost of labor related to (i) un-installing Covered Product; (ii) re-installing a repaired or replacement product, or (iii) the removal, installation or troubleshooting of the Covered Owner's electrical systems." Qcells excludes the same categories in capitals, and adds loss of power. So a manufacturer will send you a replacement microinverter for free and will not pay a penny towards getting it onto your roof.

Bad installation voids the product warranty. The Qcells warranty does not apply to a system "of a design, configuration or installation that does not meet the standards typically used by experienced professionals in the industry". If your failed installer's workmanship caused the fault, that is precisely the clause a manufacturer can invoke, and the party best placed to rebut it no longer exists.

Repairs by the wrong person can void it too. Qcells excludes "service, operation or maintenance of the Product by anyone who is not a representative of HQC or its designee". Read literally, hiring a second company to fix the first company's work carries risk. In practice manufacturers are more reasonable than the drafting, but get authorisation in writing before work starts.

No permission to operate, no warranty. Enphase's warranty "will not apply to products that have not received permission to operate from the local authorities having jurisdiction over such matters, if such permission is required". If your installer folded between installation and PTO, this is the first thing to resolve.

The clock may have started earlier than you think. The Qcells warranty term runs from "the date of initial delivery of the applicable Product to the Customer", not from installation and not from switch-on. Modules that sat in a warehouse were burning warranty term before your system ever produced a watt.

When the monitoring goes dark

Whether you keep visibility of your own system depends on a detail almost nobody checks before signing: who hosts the monitoring.

Where the platform belongs to the component manufacturer, it is tied to the hardware and survives the installer. Where the platform belonged to the company that both made and sold the system, it can die with them. When SunPower's app, web portal and phone support ceased in September 2024, the systems kept generating but their owners lost the interface.

That loss is not merely inconvenient, and this is the part worth understanding. Three separate mechanisms connect monitoring to your warranty rights. Enphase's warranty does not apply where an out-of-date firmware version caused the defect, and firmware arrives over the monitoring connection. Its continuous-connectivity provision exists so faults can be diagnosed remotely. And a performance claim requires evidence of output shortfall, for which your monitoring history is the only record you have.

There is also an administrative trap. The installer typically holds admin rights over the monitoring site. When that company no longer exists, transferring ownership of your own system's data can require going through the manufacturer's support process, and transfer services are not always free.

The lender route, and why it has precedent

If your system was financed, there is a step most homeowners never take, and there is real precedent for it.

When Pink Energy filed Chapter 7 in October 2022, nine state Attorneys General took an approach worth understanding. Led by North Carolina and Kentucky, and joined by Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, they wrote jointly to five solar lenders in November 2022 asking them to suspend loan payments and interest accrual for affected customers.

Note the mechanism. The Attorneys General went after the lenders, because the installer was already gone. That is the structural insight: when the company that owed you performance has dissolved, the party still in the relationship is whoever holds your paper.

So write to your lender. State that the system was financed for a purpose that has not been delivered, that the originating contractor has ceased trading, and ask what relief is available. Whether you have a legal claim depends on how the loan was structured and on your state's law, and this is the point at which a consumer attorney earns their fee. But the letter costs nothing and the request is not unreasonable.

File a complaint with your state Attorney General's consumer protection division as well. It was 500-plus complaints to the North Carolina Department of Justice that produced the action above. Individually a complaint achieves little. In volume they are what moves regulators.

What this says about choosing the next contractor

If you are now hiring someone to fix or finish the work, the failure you have just lived through is the argument for checking the next company properly.

Our own verification database gives some sense of the scale. Of 1,721 company records where a state licensing register actually answered us, 12.8% showed a licence that was expired or revoked at the moment we checked. That is roughly one in eight. It is a statistic about the companies we researched on the dates we checked rather than a market-wide rate, and it is not a measure of solvency. But it is a reason to spend the five minutes.

A licence check will not tell you whether a company is about to fail. Nothing available to a homeowner will. What it tells you is whether the entity signing your contract is currently authorised to do the work, which is the minimum you can establish and more than most buyers establish.