What happens when your solar company goes out of business

Florida has had a long run of solar companies that sold hard, installed fast, and then disappeared. Titan, Lumio, ADT Solar, Sunnova, Expert Solar, and a stack of local names are on that list. WPTV’s 2026 investigation found hundreds of complaints at the Attorney General’s office against a handful of door-to-door operations. The pattern is not mysterious. Cheap capital dried up, the federal residential credit ended after 2025, and companies that lived on new sales rather than service ran out of cash.

If your installer is one of them, the useful question is not “is solar a scam.” It is: which contract still exists, who still owes you something, and who do you still owe.

You were never dealing with one company

Sales literature pretends there is a single “solar company.” There were at least three:

• The equipment. Panels, inverters, and batteries are warrantied by the manufacturer (Qcells, REC, Enphase, SolarEdge, Tesla, and so on). That contract is with the product owner. The installer’s bankruptcy does not cancel it.
• The money. A cash job ends at the paid invoice. A loan is with a lender (GoodLeap, Mosaic’s successor, a credit union). A lease or PPA is with a finance vehicle that often sat one legal entity away from the installer on purpose. Those obligations survive.
• The labor. Permits, roof penetrations, wiring, commissioning, the 5- or 10-year workmanship promise, the phone number for a service call. This is the piece that dies with the company.

Treat those as three files on the kitchen table. Mixing them up is how people stop a loan they still owe, or throw away a 25-year panel warranty they still have.

Operations: the array and the utility do not care

A permitted, interconnected system keeps producing. Grid-tied inverters still follow UL 1741: they export when the line is live and they shut down in an outage. None of that required the original salesperson to still have a job.

Net metering in Central Florida is not an installer program. For Duke Energy Florida, FPL, and TECO it is Florida Administrative Code Rule 25-6.065 and Florida Statute 366.91. The interconnection agreement is between you and the utility. Permission to operate stays with the meter and the account. Monthly retail credits, the 12-month bank, and the year-end true-up at avoided-cost do not reverse because a contractor dissolved. OUC’s TruNet is a municipal tariff. Same idea: the utility, not the installer, runs the billing.

What can break in operations is the view of the system, not the system. Installer-branded monitoring portals go dark. Enphase and SolarEdge apps usually keep working if the hardware is still reporting, but you may need to claim the system as owner in the manufacturer’s portal. OUC has already warned that app kilowatt-hours (total generation) are not the same number as “customer-supplied” kilowatt-hours on the bill (export only). That confusion gets worse when nobody is left to explain the bill.

Call the utility only if: you never received permission to operate, a disconnect was tagged, or production dropped to zero on a clear day and the solar breaker is on. Ask for the interconnection file under your name and address. You are the customer of record. The installer was a vendor.

If the job was never finished

A closed company with a hole in the roof, a half-wired array, or a deposit and no permit is a different problem from a finished system whose service line went dead.

Stop. Photograph everything. Pull the permit status at the county or city building department (Orange, Seminole, Osceola, Lake, and the rest publish this). If a permit is open, the building official can tell you what inspections remain. A new Florida-licensed solar or electrical contractor can take over the permit in many jurisdictions. That is ordinary construction practice, not a special solar trick.

Deposits and unfinished work are where Florida’s contractor statutes matter. Chapter 489 is the licensing chapter. Abandoning a job, financial mismanagement, and certain false statements are the kinds of conduct that can, after a judgment or a Construction Industry Licensing Board restitution order, feed a claim on the Florida Homeowners’ Construction Recovery Fund (sections 489.140 through 489.144). The Fund is not a first stop. You generally need a licensed contractor, an owner-occupied residence, actual damages, and a judgment, arbitration award, or board restitution order. Unlicensed sellers are usually outside the Fund. For Division II trades (solar is a Division II classification), contracts entered on or after July 1, 2024 are subject to a $30,000 per-claim cap; older Division II contracts sit under the earlier, lower cap. Aggregate limits per licensee also apply. It is a backstop, not a refund window.

File a complaint with DBPR against the license if there is one. Look the license up before you assume there was. WPTV’s reporting on door-to-door solar in Florida included companies that were selling without a proper contractor license. That changes your remedies. It does not change the physics of a half-installed array. Hire a licensed contractor to make the roof weathertight first. Then argue about money.

Financing: the loan does not die with the installer

If you borrowed, you borrowed from a lender. Mosaic’s 2025 bankruptcy did not wipe Mosaic-originated loans. Servicing moved (accounts have been reported under Solar Servicing LLC). GoodLeap loans are GoodLeap loans. A credit-union note is still a credit-union note. The original installer was often just the storefront that handed you the application.

Keep paying unless a lawyer looking at your documents says otherwise. Stopping payment because you are angry at a defunct LLC is how a performing system becomes a collections problem and a credit hit, with a UCC filing still sitting on the equipment.

There is a federal rule that sometimes lets you raise the seller’s failure against the lender. The FTC Holder Rule (16 C.F.R. § 433.2) requires a notice on many consumer credit contracts: any holder of the contract is subject to the claims and defenses you could have asserted against the seller. Recovery under that notice is capped at amounts you have already paid. Look for the all-caps “ANY HOLDER OF THIS CONSUMER CREDIT CONTRACT…” paragraph. The FTC has used solar as a modern example of why the rule still exists. This is not a DIY cancellation button. It is a reason to sit with a Florida consumer-protection attorney if the system was never finished, never permitted, or never performed as sold, and you are still being billed.

PACE assessments, if any, travel with the property through the tax bill. They are not installer receivables. A closed contractor does not pull them off.

Leases and PPAs: the contract usually gets a new landlord

A lease or power-purchase agreement means you do not own the array. A finance entity does. Those contracts are often parked in bankruptcy-remote vehicles so the parent’s Chapter 11 does not automatically kill the monthly bill.

Sunnova’s June 2025 Chapter 11 is the current textbook. The company had on the order of half a million customers and billions in debt. The court kept servicing running. Substantially all of the relevant assets were sold. By late 2025 / 2026, SunStrong Management was the name on a large share of former Sunnova lease, PPA, and related accounts. The panels kept making kilowatt-hours. The escalator in the contract did not vanish. Buyout schedules, if the original agreement had them, still have to be requested from the current servicer, in writing.

If a lessor ever rejects a lease in bankruptcy (possible in other cases, uncommon when the contracts are the valuable asset), you can be left with equipment on the roof and no counterpart. That is a lawyer-and-building-official problem, not a YouTube-removal problem. Do not cut the array off the roof to “be done with it.” You can damage the roof, void remaining manufacturer coverage, and still owe money.

Home sale: a lease or PPA has to be assumed by the buyer or bought out. A dead original brand name does not delete the UCC-1 fixture filing. Title companies will find it. Get a payoff or assumption package from the current servicer before you list.

Cash purchases: simpler money, same labor hole

If you paid cash, you do not have a lender. You also do not have a company to call for a roof leak at a flashing. Manufacturer warranties still apply. Workmanship does not. Budget for a licensed service visit the way you would budget for an HVAC company after the original installer retired. That is the whole difference, and it is not small on a tile roof in hurricane country, but it is not a total loss of the asset.

Warranties: what survives, what does not, who files

Panel product and performance warranties (commonly 25 years) run to the owner of the modules. Inverter warranties run to the owner of the inverter: often 10-12 years on a string unit, 25 on many Enphase micros. Battery warranties are their own documents (Tesla, Enphase, and others). Register serial numbers with the manufacturer now if the installer never did. Proof of purchase or the original proposal plus photos of nameplates is usually enough to open a case.

The catch, which every orphan-system shop will tell you because it is true: the manufacturer typically ships a part. Someone still has to get on the roof, isolate DC, swap a microinverter or a string inverter, and close the permit if the AHJ requires one. That labor used to be the installer’s. Now it is a line item. Enphase’s own guidance for a dead original installer is: use the installer locator, or get certified yourself. Unauthorized work can be treated as abuse of the remaining warranty. Florida Statute 489 still wants a licensed contractor for utility-interactive electrical work. Those two rules point at the same person: a licensed, manufacturer-recognized tech.

Workmanship (leaks at lag bolts, loose racking after a storm, a conduit pulled off stucco) was a promise from a company that no longer exists. Homeowners insurance may respond to a named-storm or a sudden leak, depending on the policy and the cause. A slow leak from a bad flashing is often a fight. Document. Call the carrier if water is in the house. Do not wait for the original 10-year workmanship letter to grow a new signature.

Liens: you can be current and still get a claim of lien

Florida’s construction lien law is Chapter 713. Subcontractors and suppliers who were not paid by your contractor can, if they followed the notice rules, record a claim of lien against the property even if you paid the contractor in full. The Notice to Owner form says so in capital letters. A Notice to Owner is not a lien. A recorded Claim of Lien is. Deadlines are short (among them: Notice to Owner within 45 days of first furnishing for parties not in privity; claim of lien within 90 days of final furnishing).

If a lien shows up after the company collapsed, do not ignore it and do not pay a random invoice twice without advice. A construction lawyer can check whether the lienor actually preserved rights. Before any future final payment on a takeover job, collect lien waivers.

Maintenance and monitoring without the original shop

The maintenance article on this site still applies: watch production on clear days, clean when pollen or lovebugs actually cost you, stay off wet tile, annual look at racking after storm season. The only change is who you call. Look for a Florida-licensed solar or electrical contractor who already services your inverter brand. Ask whether they will file manufacturer claims or only time-and-materials. Get it in writing.

If birds nested under the array or a squirrel chewed a lead, that was always going to be a service call. It is not a reason to scrap the system. It is also not something the manufacturer warranty covers as a product defect.

Batteries: UL 9540 listing, FBC R328, and NFPA 855 did not move. A Tesla or Enphase battery still wants its own support channel. Firmware and isolation settings are not a neighbor-with-a-laptop job.

Selling the house

Buyers, inspectors, and lenders want: permit closed, interconnection in the seller’s name (transferable), monitoring login, remaining manufacturer warranties, and a clean picture of any lease, PPA, or UCC filing. An orphaned system with a closed permit and working monitoring is sellable. An open permit, a lien, or a lease nobody can assume is a price cut or a deal killer. Start that packet before you list, not during attorney review.

Insurance

Tell the homeowners carrier the system exists if you have not. After a hurricane, photograph from the ground, then call the carrier and a licensed contractor. Manufacturer warranties exclude storm debris. Workmanship warranties, if they still existed, often excluded it too. Insurance is the layer for named-peril damage to a structure and its attached equipment, subject to the policy you actually bought.

A week-one list

1. Confirm the company is actually gone: Sunbiz.org (Florida Division of Corporations), DBPR license lookup, bankruptcy docket if any. Some firms were bought. The buyer may have assumed service, not just the logo.
2. Gather: signed contract, change orders, paid invoices, permit number, interconnection / PTO letter, equipment list with serials, loan or lease, monitoring login, photos of the array and inverter.
3. Open the manufacturer apps. Claim owner access. Screenshot a clear-day production number.
4. Call the utility only for interconnection status if PTO is missing or the account looks wrong.
5. If the roof is open or the array is unfinished: licensed contractor, then building department. Weather tightness first.
6. If you have a loan or lease: find the current servicer. Keep paying until counsel says otherwise. Read the Holder Rule notice if it is a consumer loan.
7. If you were abandoned mid-job or defrauded: DBPR complaint, Florida AG consumer complaint, and a lawyer who does construction or consumer work. Recovery Fund is later, after a judgment or board order.
8. Do not hire an unlicensed rescuer. Do not climb a wet roof. Do not yank a leased array. Do not post the loan account in a Facebook group and take the first DM.

The company going dark is a service problem and sometimes a legal problem. It is not, by itself, the end of the kilowatt-hours or the end of the utility credits. Separate the equipment, the money, and the labor. Then deal with each on its own paper.