Solar in Billings has a short install season and a long list of ways to talk nonsense about it. The warm weeks are when a roof can be walked, flashed, and closed. Wind off the rims loads the mounts. Hail can mark glass. Snow will sit later. None of those facts is a promise about what the equipment will do, and the array is not a plan to carry the heat through the long cold. The job is the covering, the attachments, and the electrical service, done while the weather allows the roof to be open.
Do not put feet on a slope that is already bruised, lifted, or tired. The warm season is also the roof season. Finish the covering first or the rails become an obstacle when the deck finally has to be replaced in a worse month. Ask how the mounts are flashed and how they handle the gust on an exposed Heights or West End lot. A shaded south-side roof under cottonwoods is a different site from a bare slope. Say which one you have. An aerial photo has not seen the deck.
Older panels may be small. Ask what service is there before an inverter is named. Ask who owns the equipment and who you call when it is quiet. Name the modules and the inverter. Put the equipment where it can be reached after the snow arrives, not as an afterthought. Shade from a chimney or a tree still counts on a sunny valley day. If those answers are fuzzy, do not let the clear sky become the scope.
Hail and wind are reasons to talk about glass and hardware. They are not reasons to invent a result. If a roof claim is open, settle it before attachment. The short warm season will not stretch so you can do the roof and the rails in the wrong order and still dry the house in. Leave the meter story out of it.
Say the part of town, the age of the roof, and whether hail or wind has already marked it. Mention shade and the panel. If the covering needs work, that is the first call, and it has the same deadline. Call the number on this page.