How the Honesty Index is built.
A transparent, independently verifiable rating system for residential solar installers and financing companies. Six public data sources. Five weighted subscores. Quarterly refresh. No company can pay to improve its grade — and the source data is published in full.
Guiding Principles.
The Solar Honesty Index exists to answer a single question: which residential solar companies are safe to do business with, and which are not?
Five principles govern how the Index is built and maintained:
- Public records only. Every input is sourced from publicly accessible regulatory databases, court filings, or independently administered consumer-protection registries. We do not source from anonymous reviews, third-party scrapers, or paid databases. Methodology can be independently reproduced.
- Companies cannot pay. No solar installer, financier, or PACE administrator has paid, can pay, or has been offered the opportunity to pay for inclusion, exclusion, or modification of their grade. The Index is funded by Insolar's marketplace operations and B2B licensing revenue.
- Quarterly refresh. Grades update every 90 days. Material grade changes are timestamped and historical trajectories are preserved on every company profile page.
- Subscore transparency. Every grade decomposes into five public subscores. Companies and consumers can see precisely which dimension is driving the composite score up or down.
- Right of correction. Companies named in the Index may submit documented corrections via the published Appeals process (Section 7). Corrections are reviewed within 30 days and either accepted with evidence, partially accepted with footnote, or declined with reasoning published.
The Six Data Sources.
The Honesty Index is constructed from six independent public-record sources. No single source can move a grade by more than 35% — the composite is designed to be resilient against any individual data-source error or gap.
CFPB Consumer Complaint Database
The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's complaint database. Verified consumer complaints against solar lenders, including dispute outcomes. Normalized to complaints-per-1,000-originations to account for company scale.
State Attorney General Enforcement Records
Active and settled enforcement actions filed by U.S. state attorneys general against solar installers, financiers, and PACE administrators. Includes consent orders, restitution agreements, and unresolved investigations. Sourced from each AG office's public records portal.
PACER Federal Court Filings
U.S. federal court dockets indexed via PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). Class actions, bankruptcies, securities cases, and TILA disclosure disputes involving residential solar entities are coded by case type and disposition.
BBB Business Profile Data
Better Business Bureau profile data for accredited and non-accredited businesses. Letter grades, complaint volume, and resolution rates are pulled at each quarterly refresh and normalized to a 0-100 scale for use as a subscore input.
State Contractor Licensing Boards
State-level contractor licensing board records — primarily California CSLB, Texas TDLR, Florida DBPR, Arizona ROC, and equivalent state authorities. License status, disciplinary actions, and contractor complaints are aggregated quarterly.
Insolar Proprietary Consumer Survey
An anonymized, opt-in customer satisfaction and contract-clarity survey distributed to Insolar marketplace users who have completed solar installations with rated companies. Survey methodology and response rates are published in the Annual Report.
The Five Subscore Dimensions.
Each rated company receives five subscores, each itself letter-graded A+ to F, and the composite Honesty Grade is computed from a weighted blend of the five.
Contract Clarity
Measures the readability, transparency, and disclosure quality of the contracts the company asks consumers to sign. Inputs include: redacted contract specimens filed in regulatory actions, TILA-disclosure compliance scoring, the presence or absence of standardized cancellation rights language, escalator-clause readability, dispute-resolution clause fairness, and §1632 Spanish-language compliance where applicable.
Sales Practice
Measures the integrity of the pre-sale customer interaction. Inputs include: door-to-door sales practice complaint volume normalized to install count, regulatory findings on misrepresented savings claims, false urgency complaints, elder financial abuse cases, and the proportion of sales conducted through W-2 employees vs. third-party dealers (the latter is a structural risk factor).
Post-Install Service
Measures the company's track record of supporting customers after installation. Inputs include: warranty claim resolution rates, system performance dispute outcomes, customer service response time data from CFPB and BBB records, and complaint volume related to monitoring, repairs, and tax-credit assistance.
Financing Honesty
Measures the integrity of the financing structure presented to consumers. Inputs include: dealer-fee disclosure quality, APR-to-cash-price spread transparency, undisclosed lien filings, PACE assessment fairness for property-tax-based financing, and ability-to-repay compliance under federal and state statutes.
Legal Track Record
Measures the company's documented legal exposure. Inputs include: active state AG enforcement actions, settled consent orders within the last 5 years, federal class actions with certified classes, PACER docket activity coded by case type, and bankruptcy or restructuring exposure where applicable.
Weighting & Composite Score.
Each subscore is converted from its letter grade to a 0-100 numeric value (A+ = 100, A = 95, A- = 90 ... F = 0), then weighted as follows to produce the Composite Score:
Why these weights? Sales Practice and Legal Track Record are heaviest because they correlate most strongly with documented consumer harm and downstream regulatory action. Financing Honesty is weighted third because lending disclosure failures produce the largest dollar-magnitude per consumer. Contract Clarity and Post-Install Service are weighted equally because they are correlated with the heavier dimensions but provide independent signal at the margins.
Letter-Grade Scale.
The Composite Score maps to a letter grade on the following scale:
Refresh Cycle.
Grades update quarterly on a fixed schedule:
- Q1 Edition — published March 31
- Q2 Edition — published June 30
- Q3 Edition — published September 30 (annual report companion)
- Q4 Edition — published December 31
Between quarterly refreshes, individual grades may be moved only in the event of a material regulatory development — for example, the filing of a major state AG enforcement action, a bankruptcy petition, or a CFPB consent order. Such "interim grade movements" are timestamped, footnoted, and published on the affected company's profile within 7 business days of the triggering event.
No solar installer, financier, or PACE administrator has paid, can pay, or has been offered the opportunity to pay for inclusion, exclusion, or modification of their grade.
Appeals & Corrections.
Any company named in the Index may submit a documented correction request. The process:
- Email appeals@insolar.com with the subject line "Honesty Index Correction Request — [Company Name]"
- Attach the specific public-record citation or documented evidence supporting the requested correction.
- Insolar reviews within 30 calendar days. Outcomes: (a) accepted with grade update, (b) partially accepted with explanatory footnote on profile, or (c) declined with documented reasoning published.
- If the requestor disputes the outcome, an independent third-party review is available via the BBB or relevant state consumer protection bureau.
Customers and former customers of rated companies may also submit documented issue reports through the form on each company's profile page. Submissions become inputs for the next quarterly refresh but do not move a grade in isolation — they are aggregated with the six primary data sources.
Governance & Independence.
The Solar Honesty Index is governed by Insolar's Research & Standards team, which operates independently of Insolar's marketplace and sales organizations. The Research team's compensation is not tied to marketplace transaction volume, installer partner revenue, or any single company's inclusion or exclusion from the Index.
Insolar's marketplace business may, separately, refer consumers to installers that appear on the Honesty Index. Insolar's marketplace algorithms incorporate the Honesty Grade as one input, but the Grade itself is not modified to favor any installer for marketplace purposes. The Research team does not have visibility into, and is not consulted on, individual marketplace transactions or partnership negotiations.
The Index is reviewed annually by an independent advisory committee that includes consumer-protection counsel, an academic researcher in residential lending disclosure, and a former state regulator. The advisory committee's recommendations are non-binding but are published in full in each Annual Report.
Methodology Changelog.
- Volume I, Q2 2026 — Inaugural publication. 20 companies rated across installer, financing, and PACE categories.
- Q3 2026 (planned) — Companion Annual Report publication. Methodology refinement RFC opened to public comment Sept 15 - Oct 31.
- Q4 2026 (planned) — Expansion to 35+ companies; addition of regional installers in TX, FL, GA, NC, AZ.
- Volume II, Q1 2027 (planned) — First major methodology revision; updated weighting reviewed by advisory committee.