Solar Information Built for Homeowners

HyreSolar publishes independent guides, original research and free calculators on residential solar for US homeowners, and connects a homeowner with solar professionals serving their area when they ask. It does not install, finance, service or sell solar, and it does not rank or endorse the companies it can introduce. Its research is computed from primary sources — chiefly Form EIA-861, the annual electric utility report filed with the US Energy Information Administration — and every figure is labelled as a published statistic, a HyreSolar calculation or an estimate.

Why HyreSolar exists

Residential solar is a large, irreversible purchase that most people make once, under time pressure, from a salesperson who is paid on the outcome.

The information available to a homeowner at that moment is mostly produced by companies selling systems. It is not usually false. It is selective in a direction, and the direction is always the same.

So we publish the other half: what makes a quote expensive, what a twenty-five year warranty actually covers, what happens when the company that sold you the system no longer exists, and what the numbers look like when nobody is rounding in their own favour.

What we do

• Publish guides on solar costs, incentives, equipment, financing, the work itself and installer selection.
• Cover how the answers change by property type and by state.
• Run original analysis on federal utility filings, and publish the method alongside the finding.
• Build free calculators that show their formula and their assumptions on the page.
• Connect homeowners with solar professionals serving their area, when the homeowner asks us to.

What we don't do

What HyreSolar does not do matters more than what it does, because it is what separates an information platform from a company selling you a system.

• We do not install solar. We have no crews, no trucks and no equipment.
• We do not finance solar. We do not originate loans, leases or power purchase agreements.
• We do not service or maintain systems. No repairs, no monitoring, no warranty administration.
• We do not visit your property. Nothing we publish is a site assessment.
• We do not guarantee savings, payback, or that solar is right for your house. Anyone who does, without having seen your roof, your bill and your utility tariff, is guessing.
• We do not sell solar equipment, and we take no position on which manufacturer you should choose.

How we research

We work from primary sources: federal agency data, state agency rules, utility tariff filings, and manufacturer documentation. Where a figure comes from our own analysis rather than from a published statistic, the page says so in those words.

Most of our state-level work is computed from Form EIA-861, the annual electric utility report filed with the US Energy Information Administration. It is slow, it lags by roughly two years, and it is the only source that counts the same thing the same way in every state.

Every cost figure on this site carries a source and a retrieval date. If a number cannot be sourced, we publish the shorter page without it rather than the longer page with an estimate dressed up as a fact. Our research methodology sets out the source hierarchy and how the derivation was validated, and the underlying datasets are downloadable.

How we handle commercial relationships

HyreSolar intends to earn revenue by connecting homeowners who ask to be connected with solar professionals who serve their area. That is the business model, and you should read everything here knowing it.

What that money does not buy: placement in a guide, a favourable comparison, the removal of a warning, or a mention in our research. The editorial side of this site does not take requests from the commercial side. Our editorial policy is the longer version of that sentence.

The specific commercial terms — pricing, exclusivity, how enquiries are routed — are not settled yet, and the partner FAQ says which ones are open rather than inventing answers.

How we connect homeowners with professionals

Nothing is routed anywhere unless you fill in a form and tick a box saying you want to be contacted. There is no hidden tracking pixel that hands your address to a sales team because you read a cost guide.

When you do ask, we match on the things that determine whether a company can actually do your job: where they work, what services they offer, and the kind of property involved. How HyreSolar works walks through the whole sequence, including who contacts you and what we cannot promise.

Our editorial standards

• Every page states when it was last reviewed. Not when it was generated — when a person checked it.
• Sources are named inline, with dates, so you can check our work rather than trust it.
• We distinguish source data from HyreSolar analysis from HyreSolar interpretation, and we label which is which.
• We do not publish "best solar panel" or "best installer" rankings, because we have no objective methodology that would support one.
• We do not invent credentials, awards, certifications, customer counts or review scores.

Our commitment to accuracy

Solar policy moves quickly. Federal credit deadlines shift, states rewrite export compensation, and utilities change tariffs on their own schedule. Anything we publish on those subjects carries an effective date and a review date, and we update the page in place rather than publishing a new one with a year in the URL.

If you find something on this site that is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it. We would rather be corrected than cited incorrectly. The FAQ answers most of what people write in about.