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 <[email protected]> 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 > > _______________________________________________ > List sponsored by Redwood Alliance > > List Address: [email protected] > > Change listserver email address & settings: > http://lists.re-wrenches.org/options.cgi/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org > > List-Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. > org/maillist.html > > List rules & etiquette: > www.re-wrenches.org/etiquette.htm > > Check out or update participant bios: > www.members.re-wrenches.org > > >
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