Solar installers who stop buying leads do not replace them with better SEO. They replace them with five lists they build themselves, and four of those five target homeowners who already own solar.
That is the whole shift. A purchased solar lead is a bid for the attention of someone shopping for a first system, and Wood Mackenzie and SEIA forecast that pool shrinking 21% in 2026 after Section 25D expired on December 31, 2025. Meanwhile the United States crossed 6 million solar installations in 2026, 97% of them residential rooftops. Nobody sells you those addresses, because they are not "leads." They are customers, and most of them belong to a company that is gone, distracted, or charging them $700 to look at an inverter.
The short answer
Build these five lists, in this order: the fleet list from public records, the inverter clock inside it, the orphan list from installer bankruptcies, the battery retrofit list, and the density list around jobs you have already completed. Keep buying leads while you build. Step the purchase budget down only when the owned lists are producing booked appointments you can count.
What you are actually buying when you buy a solar lead
You are buying position in a queue for someone's interest, not for a trigger. That distinction shows up in close rates.
Ipsun Solar, a 60-employee installer doing about $12M a year in the DC metro, published its own funnel by lead source. Company-wide it books appointments on roughly 50% of leads and closes 30% of those, under 15% top to bottom. By source, the spread is enormous:
| Lead source | Net close rate |
|---|---|
| Solarize campaigns | 33% |
| Radio ads | 30% |
| Referrals | 29.2% |
| Yelp | 23.5% |
| Inbound phone, source unknown | 17% |
| Google and website organic | 15% |
| Lead-gen marketplaces (SolarReviews, EnergySage, Angi) | lowest of any source run |
| worst performing |
Read the top of that table again. The three best sources are a community group-buy program, a radio ad, and a referral. None of them are purchased leads, and all three are things you build rather than buy.
By the numbers
Ipsun books almost 80% of referral leads and closes 37.5% of those, for a net 29.2%. Its purchased marketplace traffic sat at the bottom of the same table. Cost per lead is not the number that matters. Cost per install is.
The reason marketplace leads convert badly is structural, not a quality complaint. Homeowners go there to window shop, receive four to six quotes with different equipment and different layouts, and stall out comparing them on price alone. You are paying to enter a comparison you did not design. We ran the same math on the marketplace side in our breakdown of whether Angi leads are worth it for solar.
The trap that kills owners who quit cold turkey
Self-generated channels take six to eighteen months to reach mature volume. That lag, not the tactics, is why most installers who announce they are done buying leads are buying again by month four.
The math is unforgiving. If bought leads currently produce 60% of your installs and you cut them on the first of the month, your revenue does not drop next month. It drops in the month your current pipeline would have converted, which in solar is a long way out, and by then you have already cut the marketing that would have filled it. Solar makes this worse than most trades because the gap between signature and payment is measured in months of permitting and interconnection, not days.
The rule: fund the list build out of margin while the purchased channel keeps running, and only reduce lead spend in proportion to booked appointments the owned lists actually generate. Not leads. Booked appointments.
List 1: the fleet list, which is a public record
Every grid-connected system in your territory left a paper trail, because it had to be interconnected and in most states it had to touch an incentive or SREC program.
Berkeley Lab's Tracking the Sun public data file is the single largest version of that trail. The current file includes roughly 3.3 million PV systems installed through year-end 2024, with 79 data fields per system, and it is free to download as CSV. Berkeley Lab compiles it primarily from state agencies and utilities that administer PV incentive programs, SREC registration systems, and interconnection processes. Earlier editions represented 81% of all US residential and non-residential systems installed in the covered period, which tells you how close to a census this gets.
Add two local sources on top:
- Your building department's permit records. Solar permits are public in nearly every jurisdiction and they carry the address, the contractor of record, and the date.
- Your utility's interconnection queue. Application and PTO dates, which is the only reliable way to know when a system actually energized rather than when it was sold.
What comes out is a spreadsheet of homes in your service area that already own solar, with install dates and, in most records, the installing company. That is the raw material for the next three lists. No lead vendor sells this because it does not fit the product. Vendors sell intent to buy a first system.
Tip
Start with one county, not your whole state. A list of 4,000 addresses you can actually work beats a list of 400,000 you cannot. Sort by install year descending and start at 2016.
List 2: the inverter clock
Roofing companies buy roof age. Solar's equivalent trigger is the inverter, and unlike roof age you do not have to buy it, because the install date is already in List 1.
String inverters and hybrid inverters typically carry 10 to 12 year manufacturer warranties and last roughly 10 to 15 years. Replacement runs about $1,500 to $4,000 including labor and any updated interconnection paperwork. Now line that up against the install curve: the US had crossed 1.25 to 1.3 million PV installations by the end of 2016, on the back of a 2016 that nearly doubled the prior year's national volume.
Every one of those systems is now at or past ten years old. In 2026, the entire pre-2017 fleet is inside the replacement window, and a good share of it is already outside warranty. Those homeowners do not know it yet. Their inverter is quietly derating or about to fail, and the first company to tell them, credibly and without a sales pitch, gets the work.
This is the closest thing solar has to storm data, and it costs nothing. Sort List 1 by install year, filter to string inverter models where the record carries equipment data, and you have a queue ordered by probability of failure.
Most installers who want out of bought leads know the tactics and stall on the sequencing: which list first, how fast to cut lead spend, what to measure in month two. That is the plan we build. Tell us your territory and your current cost per install and we will map the ninety days.
List 3: the orphan list
Between 2024 and 2025, a large share of the industry's install base lost its installer. SunPower had nearly 600,000 customers nationwide when it filed for bankruptcy in August 2024. Titan Solar Power shut down in June 2024, leaving roughly 150,000 households across 16 states with warranties that may not be honored. Sunnova and Mosaic followed. Customers of liquidated companies are unsecured creditors, which in practice means they get nothing.
These homeowners are not hypothetical, and their frustration is public. On r/solar, a homeowner who bought a house with an existing array wrote that "everything in SolarEdge is managed by the installer, and the original installer has gone out of business," then described being quoted $3,000 for a five-year warranty package, $1,600 for a one-time reconnection service, and finally $1,300, by a company that reached him through the manufacturer's installer network. Another owner of a customer-owned Sunrun system whose inverter had sat dead for a year reported being told the diagnostic visit would be $700 flat, on a remote determination made without anyone visiting the house.
Two things follow from that. First, these are paid service calls, not free lead generation, so the list funds itself. Second, an out-of-warranty system with a dead inverter and a homeowner who has been stonewalled is the highest-intent battery and system-upgrade conversation in the market.
Watch out
The service call is the lead. Do not run this as a marketing campaign that offers a free inspection. Price the diagnostic normally, do the work well, and let the upgrade conversation happen on the roof. Installers who treat orphan service as a loss leader end up with a service department that loses money and a sales team that ignores it.
How you get on the list: register as a service provider with the manufacturers whose equipment dominates your territory, because SolarEdge, Enphase and Tesla all route stranded homeowners to in-network installers, and that referral is free. The ex-industry seller who ran an AMA on r/solar after leaving the business described the standard experience bluntly: with most installers relying on the manufacturer warranty, a homeowner waits "between 3 to 8 weeks to get it fixed" and then pays a truck roll fee on top. Beating three to eight weeks is not a hard bar.
List 4: the battery retrofit list
The national residential solar-plus-storage attachment rate hit 45% in Q1 2026, up from 38% a year earlier, and California is at roughly 69%. Residential storage set a record 1.3 GWh in Q1 2026, up 86% year over year.
Now invert it. Attachment on the pre-2020 fleet is close to zero, because those systems were sold under net metering rules that made a battery pointless. Those rules changed. The economics changed with them. Every system on List 1 installed before about 2020 is a home where solar is already proven, the electrical work is already done, the customer already trusts the technology, and the one thing missing is the product with the best attach economics you sell.
This is also the answer to the 25D problem. The residential credit died for new expenditures after December 31, 2025, and the market is contracting because of it. A retrofit conversation with an existing owner does not depend on a first-system tax credit decision, which is exactly why it holds up in a down year.
List 5: the density list
There is a measured, published coefficient for the thing every solar veteran says about neighborhoods. Bollinger and Gillingham, in Marketing Science in 2012, found that at the average number of owner-occupied homes in a zip code, one additional installation raises the probability of another adoption in that zip code by 0.78 percentage points.
That number is the argument for working tight and deep instead of wide and thin. Every job you complete measurably raises conversion for the next one nearby, which means the array itself is media you already paid for. Practically: canvass the completed street rather than cold territory, put the yard sign where the commute sees it, and route your service trucks to cluster.
Two force multipliers sit on top of density:
Solarize campaigns. These are community group-buy programs run by local nonprofits and municipalities, and in Ipsun's data they were the single highest-converting source at 33% net, ahead of referrals. The homeowners arrive pre-educated by a trusted third party. You pay organizer fees of up to 5%, which is a fraction of what a purchased lead costs per install. Find the energy nonprofits and sustainability commissions in your counties and get on the installer list.
Referrals, asked for on a schedule. Texas Tech research found that 83% of satisfied customers are willing to give a referral and only 29% actually do. That 54-point gap is not a satisfaction problem, it is an asking problem. We covered the specific mechanics of earning them in our ranking of solar lead sources by tier, so the short version here: ask at PTO, when the first full-savings bill lands, and at the one-year mark.
By the numbers
Homeowner-written buying checklists circulating on r/solar now tell shoppers to ask installers whether they have "supplemental work to keep them busy during solar industry busts," specifically naming maintenance of existing systems. The service arm these five lists require is also the credential the market has started screening for.
What this does not replace
Be honest about the limits, because the generic guides are not.
- It will not produce a volume spike. These lists produce steady, compounding, geographically concentrated demand. If you need forty installs next quarter to cover payroll, you still need a purchased channel or paid search.
- It requires a service capability. Lists 2, 3 and 4 are service-led. If you have no service department, no truck, and no licensed electrician with capacity, these are not leads, they are complaints you cannot answer.
- It is bounded by your territory. The density effect and the fleet list are both local. You cannot build this into a new state overnight.
- It does not fix a broken follow-up process. If your existing leads die from slow response, these will too. That is a separate problem and we wrote it up in why solar leads are not converting.
The four numbers to run this on
Track these or the whole exercise turns into activity without a scoreboard.
- Cost per install by source, not cost per lead. This is the only number that ranks channels honestly.
- Booked appointment rate by source. Ipsun's 50% company average is a usable benchmark. A source under 40% is wasting sales capacity.
- Service-to-sale conversion. Of paid service calls on other companies' systems, what share become a battery, inverter upgrade, or expansion within 12 months? If you do not measure this, the service arm looks like a cost center.
- Installs per zip code per quarter. The density metric. If it is flat while total installs rise, you are spreading thin and giving up the 0.78-point compounding effect.
The 90-day build
Days 1 to 30. Download the Tracking the Sun file and filter to your counties. Pull permit records from your two or three highest-density municipalities. Merge on address. Sort by install year. Register as a service provider with SolarEdge, Enphase and Tesla. Do not cut lead spend yet.
Days 31 to 60. Work the pre-2017 slice of the list with an inverter-health offer at a real price. Identify which failed installers dominate your territory and build the orphan segment specifically. Contact every energy nonprofit and municipal sustainability program in your service area about Solarize participation. Start the referral ask at PTO for every job closing this month.
Days 61 to 90. Layer the battery retrofit offer onto pre-2020 systems you have now serviced, where you have earned the right to have the conversation. Measure service-to-sale. Reduce purchased lead spend by the dollar value of booked appointments the lists generated, and not by a dollar more.
We build the lead generation systems that make this run: the list build, the outreach sequences, the tracking that tells you when it is safe to cut lead spend. If you are tired of renting your pipeline from a marketplace that halved its own supply, let us map the alternative against your actual numbers.
The honest summary
The reason to stop buying solar leads in 2026 is not that leads are expensive. It is that purchased leads point at the only part of the market that is shrinking, while six million installed systems sit in public records with aging inverters, dead installers, and no batteries. That inventory is not contracting. It grows every year, it is documented, and it is sold by nobody.
The trade-off is real: you exchange a supply you can turn on with a credit card for one you have to build over six to eighteen months. Start it while you can still afford to keep buying, and you get to make that switch on your terms instead of the market's.
Sources
- SEIA and Wood Mackenzie, US Solar Market Insight, 2026 residential forecast and Q1 2026 data
- SEIA, 6 Million Solar Installations milestone, 2026
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Tracking the Sun public data file and User Guide, 2025 edition
- Bollinger and Gillingham, "Peer Effects in the Diffusion of Solar Photovoltaic Panels," Marketing Science, 2012
- Ipsun Solar, published close rates by lead source
- Bloomberg Law and industry reporting on SunPower, Titan Solar, Sunnova and Mosaic bankruptcies
- Wood Mackenzie and American Clean Power, Q1 2026 residential storage data
- r/solar threads on orphaned systems, service pricing, and installer selection