The Steiner Ranch Solar Rescue
Three months of zero production, an installer that no longer existed, and wiring chewed by rodents. What a real solar diagnostic found — and how the system came back.
The situation
A Steiner Ranch homeowner called us with a system that had produced nothing for three months. They'd tried the company that installed it first — out of business, unreachable. That's what we call an orphaned system, and it's one of the most common calls we get: panels on the roof, nobody standing behind them.
What we found
We started the way we always do on a non-Aether install: a full assessment before anyone works on the system. The diagnostic traced the outage to something no monitoring app will ever tell you — rodents had nested under the array and chewed through the wiring. The damage was extensive enough to take the whole system offline, and the kind of thing that only gets found by getting up there and looking.
What we did
We repaired the damaged conductors and restored the system to safe operation — licensed electricians doing electrical repair, to code, on equipment we didn't install. That last part matters: plenty of companies won't touch another installer's work. Servicing orphaned systems is a core part of what we do.
The result
Production back to normal. Three months of a dead system ended with a diagnostic visit and a proper repair — no finger-pointing at a company that no longer exists, no pressure to "just replace it."
If your installer has disappeared and your production has too, that's exactly what our orphaned solar service exists for. A diagnostic tells you what's actually wrong before anyone talks about what it costs to fix.
Related: Solar Repair — Austin · Maintenance Plans