Solentrex, August 2026
A roof-data vendor decision, proven that afternoon.
I sat on the vendor call, recommended replacing our roof-data provider outright, and had running code against their test environment before the end of the day.
What it was
Every solar proposal our platform produces starts with the shape of a roof. Planes, pitches, directions, and obstructions decide where panels fit, how much energy the system makes, and what the customer pays. If the roof data is wrong, everything downstream is wrong in a way nobody catches until a crew is standing on the roof.
We had two ways to get that data. We were building our own roof model in house, and we were buying measurements from commercial vendors. I had already put months into the in-house side and benchmarked our own model against vendor output on real homes. That is why the decision that followed was informed rather than a guess. I knew where our model held up, where it fell apart, and what a vendor would have to beat.
What I did
On 2026-08-12 I sat on an intro call with a commercial roof-data provider. I did two things that were not on the agenda. I put the limits of our in-house roof model on the table up front, with the mitigations already in place, rather than leave a vendor to find them. Then I staked the product position we would hold: 2D measurements as the standard path, 3D only on demand.
The recommendation on the table was a hybrid. Keep our geometry, layer the vendor on top. I recommended against it and called for a full swap of the roof-data provider, with the designer rebuilt around the vendor's geometry instead of translated into ours. Half a swap leaves you maintaining two models and reconciling them forever.
Then I proved it the same afternoon. I wrote a standalone bench against the vendor's test environment and pulled real measurement data through it. Not a slide deck. Running code, on the day of the call.
What it produced
A written decision with the reasoning attached, made in a day instead of a quarter, and a bench that has been running since. It parses all three of the vendor's measurement formats. Recomputing roof areas from their raw geometry matches their own reported numbers to 0.00% across 16 real homes. It draws wireframes over aerial imagery, packs panels with live count, kilowatts, and expected production, and times an outline-grade instant design lane at three to eight seconds.
The useful part is not the speed. It is that the decision was testable before it was expensive. Nothing was committed on a vendor's claim.