About SmallSolarCo

Why this exists

Rooftop solar is sold as a transformation with a financing agreement attached. It's not available to renters, and after the changes to how California compensates exported power, it's a harder sell to homeowners than it was.

Plug in solar is the other end of the same idea: a few hundred watts, a few hundred dollars, no installer, no contract. It doesn't transform anything. It trims a bill by 10 or 20 percent, which for a lot of households is the difference between a bill that stings and one that doesn't.

Nobody was explaining it in English. That's the gap.

What this site does

Four things, and it's only as good as all four.

Explains it. In plain words, for someone who has never thought about solar because solar was for people who own roofs.

Catalogs it. Every kit that ships to California — price, watts, what it's certified to, what actually arrives in the box. That information is scattered across manufacturer PDFs and retailer listings, and a lot of it is out of date. Ours carries the date we checked.

Works out the number. The calculator runs your balcony through a model that's published in full on the methodology page. No other site in this category shows you the arithmetic.

Cites everything. Every legal, numeric and safety claim has a primary source in the page's front-matter — bill text, CPUC filings, utility tariff sheets, UL standards. Where we couldn't find a source, we cut the claim instead of softening it.

What we're trying to be

The site that tells you when it isn't worth it.

That sounds like a slogan, so here's what it means in practice. Our calculator has a verdict that says "Honestly? Probably not," and it fires whenever the estimated saving is under about $100 a year. That happens a lot — north-facing balconies, heavy shade, empty flats. We show it because a site that says yes to everyone is worth nothing to anyone.

Every number on the site ships with its assumptions. Every legal claim carries a date, because legal statuses go stale and undated claims become wrong. Every figure is labelled either measured or estimated, and there are far more estimates than measurements.

How we make money

Affiliate commissions, mostly. If you click through to a seller from one of our kit pages and buy something, we get a small percentage — typically 3 to 8 percent depending on the brand. You pay the same price.

Some things worth saying about that:

• The savings model doesn't know who pays us. It's the same maths for every kit.
• We recommend products that pay us nothing. Bright Saver is a nonprofit selling at cost with no affiliate programme, and it's our recommendation for anyone spending under $400.
• We don't test kits, and we don't pretend to. Kit pages are catalog entries: sourced specifications, certification status with the date it was checked, and a reasoned view of who a kit suits based on the same savings model as everything else. If a manufacturer ever sends us something, we'll say so on the page and keep the right to publish a bad word about it.
• There are no ads on this site, and there isn't a lead-generation form that sells your details to an installer.

Later there may be a paid app for monitoring what your kit produces. If that happens we'll say so plainly rather than sliding it in.

The full disclosure, including every relationship →

Where the numbers come from

Utility rates come from the tariff sheets the utilities publish. Production figures come from NREL's PVWatts data for the relevant part of California. Legal claims come from the bill text and the Legislature's own record. Every one of them is linked at the foot of the page it appears on, and every legal status carries the date it was true.

Where a figure was measured rather than modelled, it says so and gives its conditions. There is far more modelling here than measurement, and the site is explicit about which is which.

Who writes it

There's a named person behind every article and data page, with a bio saying what they are and aren't qualified to tell you. Who writes it →

What we're not

Not electricians. Not lawyers. Not a testing lab. Not a solar installer, and not affiliated with any manufacturer, utility, or advocacy group. We took no position on SB 868 while it was moving through the Legislature, and we report what it says rather than what we'd like it to say.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it and say what changed. Every correction is logged publicly with the old figure next to the new one — the corrections page is the record. Tell us what's wrong →