What is this solar quote really telling you?

Cash and financed price per watt as two separate numbers, the arithmetic checked against itself, and an honest list of what the quote leaves out.

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Make sense of a solar quote

Normalise one proposal into comparable figures, and see what it does not tell you.

Drop a quote PDF here or — optional, you can fill the form by hand instead

The file is read inside your browser and never uploaded. Only PDFs with a real text layer can be read — a scanned or photographed quote is an image, and this tool will say so rather than guess.

The quote

Only what the quote actually deducts.

Warranties (years)

Leave blank if the quote does not say — blank is not zero.

If it is financed

What is included?

Mark each one. Not stated is a real answer and is treated differently from no.

Cash against financed

Does the quote agree with itself?

Questions worth asking

    Benchmark (optional)

    This tool will not tell you whether a price is high or low on its own. Solar pricing varies enormously by country, market and year, and a figure quoted here would be out of date almost immediately. Supply a benchmark you have actually seen, with its date, and the comparison is against that — not against a number invented by a web page.
    Compare several quotes →
    Your data stays in this browser. Everything on this page is calculated on your own device. Your electricity use, roof dimensions, prices and equipment details are never uploaded, stored on a server, or included in analytics.
    An organisational review, not legal advice. This is not an endorsement of any contractor, product, warranty or financing offer, and nothing here interprets the legal meaning of a contract term. Read the complete agreement, and take anything ambiguous to a qualified adviser before you sign.
    Planning estimate — not an engineering or installation plan. Results depend on the information and assumptions you enter. Output, savings and equipment behaviour vary with weather, shading, tariffs, temperature, ageing and installation. Verify equipment limits against current manufacturer documentation. Permits, structural capacity, electrical protection, conductor sizing, grounding, rapid shutdown, fire access, utility interconnection and code compliance must be reviewed by qualified professionals and the applicable authorities.
    How this is calculated

    cash price per watt = cash price ÷ (system kW × 1000)

    financed price per watt = (deposit + every payment + fees) ÷ (system kW × 1000)

    These are shown as two separate figures and one is never allowed to stand in for the other. A quote advertising a low price per watt against a long loan is not that price — the difference is the cost of borrowing, and it belongs in the open.

    cost per first-year kWh = cash price ÷ quoted first-year production · production per kW = quoted kWh ÷ system kW

    The contradiction checks compare the stated system size against panel count × wattage, and test whether the quoted production is plausible per kW. They flag disagreements for you to ask about; they do not decide which figure is correct.

    Price per watt is the only comparison that works

    Headline prices cannot be compared, because no two quotes are for the same system. Price per watt divides the cost by what you are actually buying, and it is the figure to insist on. The catch is that a financed quote's price per watt is usually calculated on the amount borrowed rather than the total repaid — which can understate the real cost by a third or more on a twenty-year term. This tool works out both and shows them side by side.

    What is missing matters as much as what is there

    A quote that does not mention the workmanship warranty is not offering nothing; it is leaving a question unanswered, and that question is often the most important one in the document. Panels rarely fail, and when they do the manufacturer usually honours it. What goes wrong is installation — flashing, penetrations, conduit — and the workmanship warranty is what covers that. It is also the one that varies most between installers, from two years to twenty-five.

    So this tool never treats a blank as a zero, and it lists what the quote does not say alongside what it does.

    Reading a PDF here

    If your quote is a normal PDF with selectable text, the extractor will find some figures and show them for you to confirm before anything is calculated. It gets things wrong — installers format documents however they like — so nothing extracted is used until you have checked it. If your quote is a scan or a photograph, there is no text to read and the tool will tell you plainly rather than producing plausible-looking nonsense. Either way the file is opened inside your browser and never sent anywhere.