Documenting Solar and Lithium Before Anything Is Taken Apart

Valuation tools look up a chassis. Enter a Sprinter or a Transit by year, trim and mileage and a number comes back for a cargo van, because that is what the vehicle was titled and sold as. A conversion is invisible to that lookup. The array on the roof, the bank under the bed, the inverter charger in the wheel well and the cabinetry holding it all together are simply not fields in the record the adjuster is querying.

That is not carrier bad faith, it is a data problem, and it is fixable only from the owner side. The adjuster has to be handed something the lookup cannot produce. Owners who arrive with a build binder get a settlement conversation about numbers. Owners who arrive with a phone full of scenery photographs get a settlement conversation about whether the equipment existed, which is a much harder place to start from.

The strongest documents are the ones somebody else wrote and dated. A converter invoice itemizing panels, controllers, bank capacity and labor. A distributor order confirmation listing a Victron MultiPlus by model and a set of Battle Born modules by part number. An electrician sign off if one was involved. A commissioning report from the installer showing the system operating at handover. Those establish both existence and cost in a single document.

Owner generated material fills gaps rather than carrying the load. A load calculation showing daily consumption against array output tells an adjuster the system was engineered rather than accumulated. A wiring diagram showing MC4 runs, fuse sizing, DC to DC charger placement and the tie in to a Cummins Onan generator does the same. Keep a screenshot of the Victron portal history if the system reported to one, because months of production data is very difficult to fabricate and adjusters treat it accordingly.

• Converter or upfitter invoice, itemized by component and labor
• Distributor order confirmations naming models and part numbers
• Commissioning report or handover sheet from the installer
• Load calculation and one line wiring diagram for the system as built
• Monitoring portal history showing production and cycle count over time

A LiFePO4 bank does not announce its condition. A module with a deformed case can read normal voltage and still be internally compromised, and a bank whose battery management system has lost communication can be live at the terminals with no way to command it off. The correct sequence is isolation at the main disconnect, verification at the bus bars, physical separation of the modules, and only then anyone putting a tool near the surrounding structure.

That sequence takes hours and it is charged as hours. It is not overhead and it is not a courtesy. A technician working around a possibly damaged lithium bank is managing a thermal runaway risk in an enclosed metal box, and the mitigation is method and time rather than optimism. Where a damaged module has to leave the building, a $45 flat hazmat and disposal charge applies, the same charge that applies where refrigerant or LP is involved.

Carriers pay for this routinely once the estimate explains it. What gets pushed back on is a line that reads battery removal with no narrative attached. What gets approved is a line that names the bank, states that the management system had lost communication, and records the isolation and verification steps performed before structural access began.

A surge or a reverse polarity event usually kills silently. A Magnum or Xantrex inverter charger will pass a casual look, power up, and fail under load. An EcoFlow unit will report a fault code that means very little without the fault log behind it. So a surge claim is not established by a photograph of the front panel. It is established by a bench test that loads the unit and by the recorded fault history from before and after.

The pathway also matters. A carrier reasonably asks what the surge travelled through, and an answer that traces the path from the shore inlet through the transfer switch to the affected devices is far stronger than a list of everything that stopped working. Where a Victron smart shunt or a system monitor logged the event, that log is the best evidence in the file, because it is timestamped and nobody in the negotiation created it.

State of health is remaining usable capacity against rated capacity, and it is measured rather than inferred. Resting voltage tells you charge level, not health. A meaningful measurement is a controlled discharge at a known current with the delivered amp hours counted, plus internal resistance per module and a read of the management system cycle count and any logged cell imbalance. On a multi module bank each module is measured separately, because banks fail one module at a time.

That distinction decides who pays. A bank at high state of health with impact damage to its case and mounts is a covered repair. A bank that has quietly degraded across four hundred cycles is age, and age is not a covered loss. Measuring both puts the honest split in the file, and it protects an owner whose good bank would otherwise get written down on the assumption that lithium is lithium.

Diagnostics, scan and programming bill at $285 per hour with a one hour minimum, and that amount is credited in full against an authorized repair. On a power system claim the diagnostic time is usually the difference between a settlement and a dispute, because it produces the measured numbers the rest of the file rests on. Depowering, isolation and reinstallation hours bill from the mechanical and electrical department at $260 per hour.

Where a covered loss is established, those hours belong in the claim like any other necessary operation, and carriers including Progressive, Foremost, National General and Liberty Mutual approve them when the estimate says what each hour bought. Where the diagnosis shows the failure was degradation rather than the event, the owner pays for the diagnosis and gets a documented reason instead of a guess. Every diagnostic hour is billed, and every diagnostic result goes to the owner who paid for it.

Intake on a converted van is a written inventory, not a walk around. Roof array by panel count, orientation and MC4 run routing. Controller and inverter charger by manufacturer, model and serial. Bank by chemistry, module count, nameplate capacity and mounting method. Shunt and monitor by model, with a screen capture of the current readings. Generator tie in method where a Cummins Onan is present. Every item gets a photograph and a line in the file.

We also record what was working before anything was touched, because a claim frequently turns on that point. The array is checked for output, the inverter is loaded briefly if it is safe to do so, and the bank state of charge is logged. Then teardown starts. Anything discovered after that point is a supplement, and a supplement is far easier to justify against a baseline that already exists.

The same binder does double duty. If the repair number climbs past the point where a carrier stops repairing, the argument shifts from what the repair costs to what the vehicle was worth, and a conversion is the entire difference between a modest cargo van number and a defensible one. The comparison the carrier runs is described on the total loss page. What the binder controls is which side of that comparison the build lands on.

It also matters if you keep the vehicle. An owner retained unit carries a salvage history under California Vehicle Code section 11515, and a documented power system is the cleanest way to establish what remained serviceable after the loss. Owners who scheduled their equipment in advance have the strongest position of all, and how that scheduling works is covered on the custom build coverage page.