AI Estimate and Intake Assistant for Solar Installers in Plano, TX

Your designer’s first look at a Plano property, collected before anyone drives out

Picture the questionnaire your most careful site surveyor would send every homeowner if there were time to walk each one through it. That is what an AI estimate and intake assistant does for a solar company: it asks for the roof history, the usage file, the panel and meter photos, the access details and the constraints, checks that each answer is usable, and assembles a single structured file for the person who will design and price the system.

It is deliberately not a sales tool. Booking the survey, scoring the lead and following up after the proposal belong to other systems or to your people. The intake assistant owns one thing, the completeness of the estimator’s file, and hands off to a human as soon as the homeowner asks something only a designer or salesperson should answer.

Plano changes the order of the questions. In most of Texas the natural opening is the electric bill. In Collin County, the question that most often reshapes a design is when the roof was last replaced and whether hail has hit it since.

Why a Plano intake asks about hail before it asks about the bill

North Texas sits squarely in hail country, and spring storms cross Collin County often enough that many Plano roofs have been replaced at least once through an insurance claim. A new array on a roof that will be torn off in two years means paying to remove and reinstall every panel, so the assistant opens with a roof-history module:

• The year the roof was last replaced, and whether that replacement followed a hail claim.
• Whether there is an open claim right now, or an adjuster visit on the calendar.
• Whether a roofer or adjuster has looked at the roof since the most recent storm.
• The roofing material, including impact-rated shingles if the homeowner knows they chose them.

The answers become flags, not advice. “Open claim, roofer not yet chosen” tells your estimator to talk sequencing before design; “replaced two springs ago” tells them the roof is probably not the obstacle. The assistant never says whether the roof is damaged, whether insurance will pay for anything, or whether the homeowner should wait. Those are conversations for your team, and on the insurance side, for the homeowner and their carrier.

Four kinds of Plano solar inquiry, four different intake paths

One opening question, “What brings you to us today?”, sorts each inquiry into a path, and each path lands on a different desk.

The detach-and-reset lane matters more in Plano than in most markets. The homeowner usually arrives with a roofer’s timeline already moving, and capturing that contact and date on the first touch keeps your crew from becoming the bottleneck.

Office and retail rooftops get their own intake

Plano has a deep bench of commercial property, from the corporate campuses along the Dallas North Tollway and around Legacy to the retail centers and professional offices on its major arterials. When a conversation shows that the property is a business, the assistant switches to a commercial question set and routes the file to a commercial estimator instead of the residential queue:

• Who owns the building, who pays the electric bill, and whether a landlord must approve rooftop work.
• Roof type (single-ply membrane, modified bitumen, built-up or metal), roof age, and whether a manufacturer’s roof warranty is in force.
• Rooftop equipment such as HVAC units and where they sit.
• Recent bills showing demand charges, or interval data if the facility manager can export it.
• The building contact for roof access, plus any hours when work is off-limits.

The file lists every person named in the chat and what each controls: the roof, the bill, the lease or the keys.

Plano’s 1970s-to-1990s housing and what a panel photo reveals

Plano grew from a small town into a major suburb mostly between the 1970s and the 1990s, so many of its houses are now thirty to fifty years old, and some original panels deserve a closer look before anyone plans an interconnection. The photo module asks for:

1. The main panel, door swung open but the inner cover still fastened.
2. A close-up of the label sticker inside the door.
3. The main breaker, so its rating is readable.
4. The meter and the wall around it.

The assistant reads the label text and places the brand and ratings in the file. When the brand matches legacy names that many electricians flag, Federal Pacific or Zinsco for example, it adds a “designer review” note. It never tells the homeowner their panel is unsafe, and the instructions tell them not to touch anything inside it.

Alleys, gates and second stories

Many Plano neighborhoods are built around rear alleys with back-entry garages, and the meter often sits on a side or rear wall. So the access questions are specific: can a surveyor reach the meter from the alley, is the backyard gate locked, are there dogs, is there a pool or equipment pad in the way. Two-story homes with steep roofs get a note for the survey crew’s ladder plan, and older neighborhoods with mature shade trees get a request for photos of any tall trees on the sunny side of the lot.

Oncor wires, a retail plan and a usage file the designer can trust

Plano is in the retail-choice part of the ERCOT grid: Oncor owns the wires and meter, and the homeowner buys electricity from a retail provider. That arrangement shapes the usage step in three ways.

Better data is available. Homeowners in Oncor territory can download their history from Smart Meter Texas, often in fifteen-minute intervals, which says far more about evening use than twelve bill totals. The assistant walks them through the download and falls back to bill photos when that is easier.

Export value depends on the plan. What surplus solar energy earns depends on the retail plan the household chose, if the plan credits exports at all. The assistant records the provider and plan name exactly as printed and makes no comment on whether the plan is a good fit for solar.

Paperwork needs identifiers. Your team files Oncor’s interconnection application, and the assistant collects the ESI ID and meter number that form asks for.

It also asks how the house and the water are heated, and whether an EV or pool is coming. In an all-electric Plano home, winter can be a large share of annual use, so the file should hold a full year, not one summer bill. When a bill shows an electric cooperative instead of Oncor, as it can for some surrounding Collin County addresses, the file says so, because interconnection terms differ.

The file that reaches your estimator

Every completed intake produces the same layout, which is what makes the file fast to read:

• A summary block at the top: address, lane, roof status, usage source, panel label text, HOA, heating fuel, planned loads and every open flag.
• A labeled photo gallery, grouped as roof, panel, meter, access and trees, with retakes replacing rejected images.
• The usage file as uploaded, with the retail plan name beside it.
• A missing-items list naming exactly what the homeowner could not provide.

The file goes into the CRM you already use, whether Salesforce, HubSpot or a solar-specific platform such as Enerflo, and a design request opens in Aurora Solar or OpenSolar where their integration options allow. Plano households speak many languages at home; the assistant can run in Spanish and other languages you choose, and estimators read an English version with each original answer kept beside it.

What it refuses to do, even when asked twice

• It does not diagnose hail damage from a photo, in either direction.
• It does not speak to insurance coverage for panels, roofs or reinstallation.
• It does not offer a system size, price, production figure, savings amount or payback period.
• It does not tell anyone which incentives or credits they can claim.
• It does not judge panel capacity, structure or roof condition.
• It does not collect Social Security numbers, bank details or anything a lender collects.
• It does not forecast HOA decisions.

After a storm, some chats come from owners whose existing array has broken glass or hanging wires. The assistant pauses intake, tells them to stay clear and not touch the equipment, gives your service number, and advises calling 911 for smoke or fire. That conversation goes to your service team, not the design queue.

Building a Plano installer’s intake assistant with EVOTECH

EVOTECH IT LLC is a US-based team in the Houston area with more than 20 years of web, software and AI work behind it and a 5.0 rating on Google. We build remotely and keep no office in Plano; the work happens on video calls, shared documents and your own systems.

1. A free consultation by phone or video. We like to look at a handful of recent jobs where survey day turned up a surprise, such as an open claim, an unreadable panel or a locked alley gate, because those show where the intake needs to be stricter.
2. A fixed-scope written quote listing the lanes, the photo list, the integrations and what is out of scope.
3. The build, with your design lead approving every question and every flag rule.
4. A pilot on live Plano intakes, reviewed file by file with your estimators.
5. Ongoing support as your equipment lines, lanes or CRM change.

See how this fits other trades in intake assistants across Texas contracting trades, compare the full range of solar-installer chatbots statewide, or look at tools for other local trades on AI chatbots for contractors in Plano.

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