Orphaned Solar: Who Services Your System When the Installer Disappears?

There is a term in this industry that most homeowners never hear until they need it: orphaned solar.

An orphaned system is one that still sits on your roof, still has warranties attached to it, and still needs occasional attention, but no longer has anyone responsible for taking care of it. The company that sold and installed it is gone, unreachable, or simply not interested in you anymore.

If that describes your situation, this guide explains exactly who is still on the hook for what, and how to get your system adopted by someone who will actually answer the phone.

The five ways a system becomes orphaned

Not all orphaned systems are orphaned the same way, and the difference determines what your options are.

1. The installer liquidated. The company filed Chapter 7, sold off its assets, and ceased to exist. There is no successor entity and no one to call. Titan Solar Power’s 2024 shutdown is the clearest example, and it affected roughly 150,000 households.

2. The installer was acquired. Another company bought the assets and, in some cases, took on the service obligations. When SunPower went under in 2024, Complete Solar purchased key assets, adopted the SunPower name, and continued honoring existing warranties. If this is your situation, you may not be orphaned at all.

3. The installer reorganized and handed you to a servicer. In a Chapter 11 reorganization, contracts often move to a third-party servicing company. Sunnova’s 2025 filing sent its agreements to SunStrong Management, which also services former SunPower lease and PPA contracts.

4. The company still exists but will not help you. This one frustrates people the most, because on paper nothing happened. The company is technically still operating, but it has pulled out of your market, stopped doing service work, or simply stopped returning calls. A lot of national operations were sales organizations that subcontracted the actual installation, so there may never have been a real local service relationship to begin with.

5. You inherited the system with the house. You bought a home that already had solar. You have no contract, no paperwork, no monitoring login, and no relationship with whoever installed it. This is far more common than people realize, and it is functionally the same problem.

Who is actually responsible for what

Here is the part that clears up most of the confusion. Your solar system involves several different parties, and they did not all disappear.

The equipment manufacturers are responsible for the panels, inverters, and batteries themselves. Product and performance warranties come from them, commonly running up to 25 years on quality panels. These survive your installer’s collapse. Enphase, Tesla, REC, Qcells, SolarEdge, Maxeon and the rest owe you what their warranty says regardless of who installed the equipment.

Your installer was responsible for the workmanship: the mounting, the roof penetrations, the wiring, and the quality of the install. That warranty, and your service relationship, is what actually dies when the company does.

Your lender, if you financed the system, is a separate party entirely. Your loan does not disappear because your installer did. You still owe the balance, and that obligation is unaffected.

The system owner, if you have a lease or PPA, is the most important one to identify. More on that next, because it changes everything.

The fork in the road: do you actually own your system?

Before you do anything else, answer this question, because the two paths are completely different.

If you own your system (paid cash, or financed with a loan)

You own the equipment outright. You are free to hire any qualified contractor you like, file your own manufacturer warranty claims, and choose a new service provider. Nobody’s permission is required. Your path forward is simply finding a competent local company to adopt the system.

If you lease or have a PPA

This is where I have to give you the honest and slightly frustrating answer. Under a lease or power purchase agreement, you do not own the equipment on your roof. The third-party owner does, and under the terms of virtually every one of these agreements, that owner is the party responsible for maintenance and repairs.

That means you generally cannot just hire an outside contractor to fix it. Doing so can violate your agreement, and many contracts specifically allow the owner to bill you for damage resulting from unauthorized modifications or repairs. Even when the original company went bankrupt, the contract itself usually survived and transferred to a successor servicer, and that servicer inherited the duty to maintain the system.

So if you are leasing, your first job is to find out who now holds your agreement and hold them to it. Check your bankruptcy notices, your billing statements, and any assignment letters you received. Get the new servicer’s obligations in writing.

We are happy to help you make sense of your contract and tell you what we see wrong with your system. But if a third party owns it, the repair generally has to go through them, and any reputable local company will tell you the same thing. Do read your specific agreement, since terms do vary, and some include buyout options that would let you take ownership and then service it freely.

What it actually costs to stay orphaned

I understand the impulse to leave a working system alone. Here is why waiting is usually the expensive choice.

Warranty clocks keep running. A 25-year warranty that started in 2013 is a 13-year warranty now. Every year you wait is coverage you paid for and did not use.

Parts get harder to find. Inverters have the shortest lifespan of any major component, and discontinued models become progressively more difficult and expensive to source. The replacement that is straightforward today can be a scavenger hunt in five years.

You are flying blind. When monitoring stops reporting, you lose the only early warning system you have. Homeowners routinely discover a failed microinverter or a dead string months later, after a year of quietly lost production shows up on their power bills.

It complicates selling your home. Solar adds real value to a home, but a buyer’s inspector flagging an unserviced system with no documentation and no service provider creates friction right when you least want it. Having your equipment documented and your system verified protects that value. Our breakdown of how solar affects home appraisals and property value covers what buyers and appraisers actually look for.

How to get your system adopted

If you own your system, finding a new home for your system is straightforward.

Start by gathering whatever documentation you have: your original contract, equipment list, permit records, interconnection agreement with Pacific Power, and any monitoring logins. If you inherited the house and have nothing, do not worry. County permit records and your utility interconnection file usually fill in most of the gaps, and a good technician can identify your equipment on site.

Then have a licensed local company perform a full system health check. That visit should confirm what equipment you actually have, document makes, models, and serial numbers, diagnose any faults, verify your production against what the system should be making, restore your monitoring, and tell you clearly what is still covered under manufacturer warranty. From there you have a service provider and a paper trail, and you are no longer orphaned.

For a deeper walkthrough of the immediate steps right after a company folds, see our guide on what to do when your solar installer goes out of business.

We adopt orphaned systems

This is a real and growing part of what we do. We service and repair solar systems across the Rogue Valley regardless of who installed them or whether that company still exists.

We are NABCEP certified and licensed in Oregon, based in Talent and serving Medford, Ashland, Phoenix, Central Point, Jacksonville, Eagle Point, Grants Pass, and the surrounding valley. We work on all the major equipment brands, we will help you file manufacturer warranty claims, and if you are on a lease or PPA, we will tell you honestly when the repair needs to go through your servicer instead of through us.

If you are tired of owning equipment that nobody is responsible for, request a system health check and we will inspect it, document it, and tell you exactly where you stand. No pressure and no upsell, just a straight answer from a local licensed expert who will still be here next year.

You can also read more about our solar panel repair and service work in the Rogue Valley, or, if you are evaluating who to trust with the work, our contractor checklist for choosing a local solar installer.