System plans — also called permit plans, PV plans, design drawings, or a plan set — are the engineered drawings your installer produced for your solar system. Your county reviews them before issuing your building permit, and the inspector checks the finished installation against them.

Your installer created them, usually through a third-party design firm, so you may never have handled them directly. They're often in the closeout packet your installer sent you, sometimes as a single large multi-page PDF.

If you can't find yours, ask your installer for the "permit plan set" or "stamped plans" — that phrasing gets you the right document faster than "system plans."

RECmint uses your plans to confirm your system's size and equipment, which determines how many SRECs (solar renewable energy certificates) your system can generate.

Not every system needs them. If yours does, we'll ask you and tell you which pages to send:

Even where your state doesn't require them, we'd still rather have your plans — they let us confirm your system's size and equipment. We usually ask everyone for a copy at signup, so send yours if you have them.

A plan set is a series of large landscape-format sheets. Each sheet has a title block in one corner listing your name, your address, the contractor, and a sheet number. Formats vary a lot between design firms, but every set has a cover sheet carrying the essentials.

The most useful line for us is on that cover sheet, usually right in the title — your name followed by two system sizes, like "4.500kW DC, 3.800kW AC". Nearby there's a "Scope of Work" or "System Details" box giving the module and inverter make, model and count.

The remaining sheets typically include a site plan showing your property from above, a roof plan showing panel layout, mounting and structural details, an electrical single-line or three-line diagram, placard and labeling details, and manufacturer spec sheets for the panels, inverters and racking.

Send the latest revision. Plan set sheets are marked "REV: A", "REV: B" and so on. If you have more than one version of your plans, send the most recent.

Your plans show the design, not necessarily what got built. They're drawn before installation, so if panels were added or removed during the build, your finished system may differ from the drawings. Send us the most up-to-date set you have.

Two different system sizes on the cover sheet is normal. Your plans list a DC size and an AC size. DC is the panels' rated output; AC is what the inverters can push to the grid. For SREC (solar renewable energy certificate) registration we generally work from the DC figure.

A structural report is sometimes bundled with a plan set — a stamped engineer's letter confirming your roof can carry the array. That's a separate document. It's fine to send it, we just don't need it.