[RE-wrenches] Roof layout and proposal tools

[Jason Szumlanski]

We have found that most of the commercial cloud based offerings meet some
of our needs, but none of them meet all of our needs. Each package has a
ton of bells and whistles that we will never use in our sales presentation
and workflow. And none of them are particularly accurate because of skewed
aerial or satellite imagery not necessarily taken from directly overhead.

They are all a bit clunky to use (because of the bells and whistles they
want to offer require a lot of inputs unnecessary to our workflow).
ModSolar, Helioscope, Aurora, Sighten, Solargraf, and many others are
crowding the space. Some are trying to be CRMs. Some are trying to be
Project Management tools. Some try to be everything to everyone. While
there are huge advantages of an integrated product, none seem to do
everything well... like a TV with an integrated VCR.

For that reason, we have developed an in-house process using Trimble
Sketchup Pro (formerly Google Sketchup). We can pop up roofs in 3D using
techniques we have developed over the last several years to achieve amazing
accuracy. These sales drawings flow through to the engineering/permitting
phase for sold contracts, saving time. Between the renderings, plan views,
and line drawings we get from a single panel layout effort, it's easily the
best solution for the way we work.

On the other hand, it does take skilled in-house resources to accomplish
this. It's not the kind of thing you would train a typical salesperson to
do. You need a trained sales support staff/person to do this. And you can't
really do it effectively on the fly in a customer's home (unless your
trained designer is on site or able to do it remotely on demand).

Sadly, Trimble's deal with Google to provide imagery has just run out, and
they are replacing it with a far inferior imagery product. So we can no
longer use the native imagery from within Sketchup. This adds an annoying
step to source imagery elsewhere, import it, scale it, and orient it first.
Fortunately we can source excellent imagery from local property appraisers
or elsewhere via paid and free resources, but it does increase the time
required to get a sales presentation prepared.

J
ason Szumlanski
​

On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 5:53 PM, Carl Adams <swingjunkie at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Wrenches,
>
> I've been using ModSolar for preliminary estimated and roof layout.  While
> it works OK, it can be a bit kwirky at times and the aerial imagery is at
> times less than ideal.  I'm looking to see what else is out there?
>
> Carl Adams
> SunRock Solar
> NABCEP Certified PV Installer
>
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