TLDR? Each section of this site documents a specific dimension of what went wrong with my Sunrun solar lease — the hardware, the installation, the monitoring, the finances. Here is the full picture in one place.
In November 2011, a previous homeowner signed a 20-year Solar Power Service Agreement with Sunrun for a residential solar system at my property in Westlake Village, California. When I purchased the home, the lease transferred to me. Under its terms, Sunrun owns, operates, maintains, and monitors the equipment. I purchase every kilowatt-hour generated at a rate that escalates 2.9% annually. Sunrun's contractual obligations include professional-grade monitoring and ongoing system maintenance for the life of the agreement.
The system consists of a Power-One Aurora UNO transformerless inverter and 17 solar panels (~250W each) producing approximately 4.25 kW DC, arranged in two strings of 6 and 11 panels. The original contract specified parameters consistent with a 23-panel design (~185W each) — same total wattage, different panel count. Sunrun's monitoring app still reports 23 panels as of March 2026, indicating their system inventory was never updated after the field change. The inverter's internal clock is 11 years behind the actual date, raising the question of when anyone last physically inspected this equipment. Full details →
When installers reduced the array from 23 to 17 panels, they left behind at least six abandoned roof penetrations — lag bolts drilled through the concrete tile and underlayment, sealed with nothing more than mastic sealant, with no metal flashing anywhere on the installation. After 15 years of sun, rain, and thermal cycling in Southern California, those unprotected penetrations represent ongoing water intrusion risk. This violates both California building code and Tile Roofing Industry Alliance standards. A drone survey in February 2026 documented every deficiency. Full details →
Beginning in March 2024, the inverter started experiencing recurring ground fault shutdowns — an automatic safety response to detected electrical leakage in the DC wiring. Over the next two years, I documented 237 fault events, resulting in 2,134 kWh of lost electricity and 1,198 lost sunlight hours. The faults follow a clear pattern: they occur during peak production hours when panel temperatures and DC voltage are highest, and they are accelerating — from 47 events in 2024, to 147 in 2025, to 43 in Q1 2026 alone. At the current pace, the system is faulting more often than every other day. Full details →
Because this is a pre-2014 system with no module-level rapid shutdown, the panels remain fully energized during every fault. High-voltage DC continues flowing through compromised wiring whenever the sun is shining. The inverter's GFDI fuse has not blown in 237 events, meaning the fault current is above the detection threshold but below the interrupting threshold — the most dangerous operating regime for a rooftop system.
Under Sunrun's balanced billing model, I pay a fixed monthly amount for estimated production regardless of what the system actually generates. On every fault day, I paid Sunrun for electricity that was never produced — and then purchased that same electricity from Southern California Edison at retail rates. This "double cost" mechanism has produced $1,749.44 in documented financial harm: $806.30 paid to Sunrun for undelivered energy, plus $943.14 paid to SCE to replace it. Full details →
Of the 237 ground fault events, 211 occurred before I reported the problem myself on February 25, 2026. Sunrun's "professional-grade monitoring" generated zero alerts, zero phone calls, and zero service visits during nearly two years of recurring safety shutdowns. I discovered the problem because my electricity bills were climbing — not because the company collecting my lease payments told me my system was failing.
After my report, Sunrun's response was equally telling: they declared the issue "resolved" five days later while six consecutive faults occurred during that same period. No technician visited. No inspection was performed. Then three weeks of silence while 18 more faults accumulated — including the three worst days in the entire dataset. A full 30 days after my report, Sunrun finally offered to schedule a service appointment, now claiming their monitoring had "detected an issue." Full details →
This is a system that was installed with code-violating roof work, tracked in a database that doesn't match reality, monitored by software that never detected 237 safety shutdowns, and serviced by a process that declared the problem "resolved" while it was actively occurring. Every data point on this site comes from Sunrun's own systems, my own utility records, or physical inspections of the equipment on my property.
All production data was retrieved from Sunrun's REST API. Ground fault events were detected programmatically from 15-minute interval data using a methodology that produced zero false positives across a 63-month control period. Roof photographs were taken by drone in February 2026. Inverter diagnostic readings were captured directly from the Aurora UNO LCD panel in April 2026. Financial calculations use Sunrun's published lease rates and Southern California Edison's retail rate schedules.