Field Notes · Turnaround · Residential
How long does a solar site survey take?
Ninety minutes on the roof. Two to four weeks until engineering can start. Only one of those numbers is worth managing.
The question has two answers and people usually want the wrong one. The time on site is one to two hours. The time until you can actually do something with the survey is the number that matters, and for most installers it is measured in days or weeks, not hours.
Time on site: one to two hours
A single-family residential survey with reachable attic access and an interior panel runs about 75 to 110 minutes of actual work. Roughly:
| Phase | Minutes |
|---|---|
| Arrival, access, occupant conversation, setup | 12 to 20 |
| Roof: planes, measurements, obstructions, condition | 25 to 40 |
| Attic: structure, sheathing, penetration routing | 10 to 20 |
| Electrical: panel, service, grounding, conduit route | 15 to 25 |
| Shading capture and site staging | 8 to 15 |
| On-site photo review and upload | 10 to 15 |
| Total on site | 75 to 110 |
Things that push it past two hours: tile or slate roofing, three or more roof planes, no attic access so the structure has to be inferred and flagged, an exterior panel in a side yard behind a locked gate, a second service, or an existing array that has to be documented.
Turnaround: the number that actually costs you money
Nobody is bottlenecked by the 90 minutes. They are bottlenecked by what happens after. The real clock starts when the survey is requested and stops when engineering can begin, and for an in-house team that clock has four segments that have nothing to do with the roof.
- Request to booked visit. Dependent on crew availability and the occupant's calendar. Commonly three to ten days.
- Booked visit to completed visit. No-shows, weather, and access failures. Our own day-by-day breakdown in utilization shows how often a booked slot produces nothing.
- Completed visit to usable data. Uploads, photo review, and the back-and-forth when something is missing. This is where a survey quietly becomes a partial survey.
- Usable data to engineering start. Queue depth in the design team.
Add those up honestly and the typical in-house request-to-engineering time is two to four weeks. The 90 minutes on the roof is under one percent of it.
Where the time actually goes
If you want to shorten your survey cycle, the on-site hour is the wrong target. The two segments worth attacking are request-to-visit and completed-visit-to-usable-data, and the second one is almost entirely a capture-quality problem.
What we commit to
Our deliverable comes back within 48 hours of the site visit, with roof and electrical captured in a single trip and a 3D roof model accurate to less than an inch. If you need a permit-ready plan set, that is six days from the survey, stamped and sealed by a licensed professional engineer. We have run this over more than 50,000 surveys across seven years, nationwide.
The 48 hours is the part that surprises people, and the reason it holds is not that anyone is working faster. It is that the capture is a fixed spec rather than a judgement call, so the completed-visit-to-usable-data segment is close to zero. There is no chasing a missing bus bar photo, because the bus bar photo is on the checklist and the survey does not close without it.
If you are comparing against your in-house number
Compare the same thing on both sides. Most installers compare our turnaround against their on-site time, which is not a comparison. Measure your own request-to-engineering clock for the last twenty jobs, including the ones that needed a second visit. That is the number to hold against 48 hours, and it is usually the first time anyone has calculated it. The method is in the algorithm no one is running.
Measure your real survey cycle
Bring your last twenty jobs and we will work out your actual request-to-engineering clock.
Book a working session