AI Quote Request Chatbot for Solar Installers in Fort Worth, TX

One job: gather everything a solar price depends on

A quote request chatbot lives on your website and business text line with a deliberately narrow purpose: collecting what a solar price depends on. That means a year of usage, the roof, the electrical service, the site and the options the customer wants priced. Then it stops, and a person on your team designs the system and sets the number.

It does not score leads, put a site survey on a calendar or field warranty questions from customers whose panels are already producing. Its output is a priceable file, and every question exists to make that file more complete.

Fort Worth stretches that file in several directions. Housing runs from early twentieth-century pier-and-beam homes in the central neighborhoods to subdivisions still going up on the northern and western edges, and past the city limits sit ranchettes and small acreage in Tarrant, Parker and Johnson counties. One fixed form cannot serve all three, so the chatbot branches early.

How the opening exchanges branch

1. Address first. It lets your design software pull aerial imagery and tells the chatbot whether it is dealing with a city lot or open land.
2. The goal. Lower bills, backup power, both, or solar planned into a home that is still being built. The answer decides which question sets follow.
3. Who owns what. Owner-occupied home, rental property, farm or ranch, church or small commercial building.
4. Where the panels would go. On the house, on a detached shop or barn, or on a rack in the pasture.

Roof questions come before panel questions

Few regions in the country see hail as often as North Texas, and Fort Worth homeowners know the pattern: a spring storm, an adjuster, a new roof. Panels installed on a roof that needs replacing in a couple of years mean paying to detach and reinstall them later, so an honest proposal starts with the roof rather than the array.

The chatbot’s roof branch asks for:

• Roof age, and whether the last replacement followed a hail claim, with the year if the owner remembers it.
• Any open insurance claim. When an adjuster has approved a replacement that has not happened yet, the request is flagged so your team can talk about sequencing the reroof and the solar install.
• Material. Composition shingle, standing-seam metal, concrete or clay tile, or a low-slope section over a later addition. Each takes different attachment hardware and changes labor.
• Layers. Some older houses carry a second layer of shingles, and your estimator wants to know that before proposing an attachment method.
• Photos of each side of the house from the yard, plus close-ups of any damage the owner has noticed.

If the owner says the roof is nearly due, the chatbot adds roof replacement to the options to price and leaves the conversation about sequencing to your sales team. It never tells anyone their roof is sound enough to carry panels. That judgment belongs to whoever climbs the ladder.

Bungalows, pier-and-beam houses and tired service panels

Neighborhoods such as Fairmount and Arlington Heights are full of homes built long before anyone imagined a roof that exports power. Their electrical service may be undersized by modern standards, the main panel may have been swapped more than once, and the meter can sit behind a fence or a later addition. Any of those can turn a simple interconnection into a service upgrade, one of the largest swings in a solar price.

So the chatbot requests three photos a generic contact form never asks for:

• The main panel with its door open, so the main breaker rating and any empty breaker spaces are visible.
• The label printed inside the panel door, which identifies the manufacturer and the bus rating.
• The meter and the surrounding wall, taken from a few steps back, so the designer can see where a disconnect or a battery cabinet might mount.

It diagnoses nothing in those pictures. If the owner mentions an older panel brand they have heard is a problem, the comment and photo go to your electrician, and a main panel upgrade shows up as an option to price rather than a verdict delivered by software.

Parts of the older city carry local historic designations, which can add a design review for equipment visible from the street. The chatbot asks, and when the owner is unsure it leaves a note for your permitting coordinator.

Shops, barns and pasture arrays past the city limits

Head west toward Aledo or south toward Burleson and requests change character. Owners want panels on a metal shop, a barn or a rack in open land, and their loads include a well pump, a workshop full of tools or livestock tank heaters in winter.

For a ground mount the chatbot gathers:

• A dropped pin or a quick sketch on an aerial image showing where the owner pictures the array.
• The rough distance from that spot to the meter or main disconnect, since trench length moves the price.
• Anything between the two points: driveways, fences, septic fields, buried lines the owner knows about, trees.
• Whether cattle, horses or goats will share the space, which affects fencing and how high the lowest panel edge must sit.
• For a shop or barn roof, its age, material and a photo of the service feeding that building.

Much of this area has expansive clay, and some sites hit limestone a short way down. The chatbot asks whether the owner struck rock setting fence posts, because that one answer tells your estimator to check foundation options before pricing the rack.

Whose meter is it: Oncor with a retail provider, or a co-op?

Inside Fort Worth the poles and wires belong to Oncor, and each household buys its electricity from the retail electric provider it chose. Out in the surrounding counties, some addresses are served by an electric cooperative instead. Texas has no statewide net metering rule, so what an owner receives for exported power depends on that arrangement: on the Oncor system it depends on whether their retail plan includes a buyback, and on a cooperative it follows that co-op’s own policy.

The chatbot asks which company’s name is on the bill and collects usage to match:

• Oncor territory: the owner uploads twelve months of bills, or signs in to Smart Meter Texas, downloads their interval data and uploads the file. Either way your designer sees the summer air-conditioning peak and the winter pattern instead of a single month.
• Cooperative territory: the owner uploads bills or a usage history from the co-op’s member portal, and the request is tagged so your team follows that co-op’s interconnection process.
• No history yet: for a house under construction or a recent move, the chatbot records square footage, heating fuel, pool equipment and EV plans so the designer can model usage instead.

What a buyback plan pays, or which provider to choose, stays a conversation for your sales staff.

Backup power since the February 2021 freeze

The February 2021 winter storm left much of Texas without electricity for days, and later ice storms keep backup on North Texas minds. Many Fort Worth requests now carry a battery question, and the chatbot separates its versions because each prices differently:

The chatbot makes no promise about how long a battery would carry a house through an outage. Runtime depends on the loads and the weather, and it is your designer’s number to explain.

What lands in Aurora Solar, OpenSolar or your CRM

When the conversation ends, the chatbot writes a structured record into tools you already run: a lead in HubSpot or Salesforce, with the address, usage file and roof notes passed toward a design platform such as Aurora Solar or OpenSolar. We connect through each tool’s API where one exists and fall back to a formatted email where it does not.

An illustrative Fort Worth file might read: one-story 1940s home on pier and beam; composition roof replaced after a hail claim three years ago; twelve months of Oncor interval data attached; panel photo shows no open breaker spaces; owner wants essentials backup for refrigerator, internet and furnace blower; EV charger likely next year; financing noted as wants to compare cash and loan; still missing a photo of the rear roof plane, requested by text.

That final line matters. The chatbot tracks outstanding inputs and chases them by text, so a request does not sit half-finished while the owner collects quotes elsewhere.

Lines it does not cross

It never gives prices, payments or payback periods, never promises savings or export credits, and never tells anyone they qualify for a tax credit or incentive, since those rules have changed and eligibility belongs with a tax professional. It collects no Social Security numbers and runs no credit; lenders handle applications in their own portals. And it applies no pressure: an owner who wants time to think still leaves a useful file.

Getting it built for your Fort Worth solar company

EVOTECH IT LLC builds and supports these systems remotely from the Houston area, so a Fort Worth project runs over phone, video and screen share. We have been in business for more than 20 years and hold a 5.0 rating on Google.

Work starts with a free consultation about how requests reach you today, what your designers say is usually missing and how a finished request should move into your CRM and design tool. From that we write a fixed-scope quote listing the branches the chatbot will carry (roof and hail, older panels, ground mounts, backup, cooperative usage), the integrations and the handoff format. After launch we review conversation transcripts with you and rewrite any question customers keep misreading.

To see where this fits among the other tools, browse our AI chatbots for Fort Worth contractors, the overview of AI chatbots for Texas solar installers, or the broader AI chatbots page.

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