Category
Systems & Compliance
Publish Date
1 November 2026
Every call your advisors make and every text your system sends rides on one question: can you show this homeowner said yes to hearing from you, by name? That question sits under most of the TCPA for a US solar dealer, and it's why we build consent like plumbing, not paperwork.
The Consent Chain
Quick note before anything else: this is education for US dealers, not legal advice. Rules change and every business is different, so run your own wording and your call flow past your counsel.
Here's the base layer. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act says a call to a cell phone made with an autodialer or an artificial or prerecorded voice needs the homeowner's prior express consent, and the FCC's rules require prior express written consent when that call is telemarketing. The FCC reads “call” to include a text. And the statute lets a homeowner sue for $500 per violation, and a court can raise that to as much as 3 times if the violation was willful or knowing.
So we don't treat consent as a box on a form. The Empire OS Consent Chain has 6 links: the form, the record, the exit, the hours, the lists and the review. Every automated touch is only as defensible as the weakest one. Your advisors don't need to be lawyers, but every one of them should know these links, because they're the ones on the phone. Here's each link and the rule behind it.
Consent has to name the seller
The FCC defines prior express written consent as a written agreement, signed by the person called, that clearly authorizes the seller to deliver marketing calls or texts to them using an autodialer or an artificial or prerecorded voice, at a phone number the agreement names. It needs a clear and conspicuous disclosure, and signing it can't be a condition of buying anything. An electronic signature counts where federal or state law recognizes it.
That's why the first link is the form. Every homeowner form carries a consent line that names your dealership, or the company the homeowner will actually hear from. Appointment messages and promotional messages get 2 separate checkboxes, and neither one is ticked in advance.
The second link is the record: the consent wording, the time and the source, saved on the contact and kept. When a homeowner says, “I never signed up for this,” the record answers, not your setter's memory.
Now think about a bought data list. Names, numbers, maybe an address, sold in bulk. Nobody on it signed anything that names your dealership, right? So there's no written consent for automated marketing calls or texts. And for the numbers on it that sit on the National Do Not Call Registry, the FCC's rules say permission to call has to be evidenced by a signed, written agreement stating the consumer agrees to be contacted by this seller. A data record doesn't say that. So our rule is short: no consent that names you, no automated touch. Simple as that.
The one-to-one rule is gone. Naming the seller isn't.
You might have read that consent has to cover one seller at a time. That was the FCC's one-to-one consent rule. On 24 January 2025, the Eleventh Circuit vacated it, along with a second restriction that consented calls be logically and topically associated with the interaction that prompted the consent, and sent the matter back to the FCC.
In the court's words, “One-to-one consent is not required.” Consent has to be given clearly and unmistakably before the call, and a single consent can cover multiple companies.
Here's the part people miss. The court threw out the new restrictions, not the old definition. The definition on the books today still says written consent has to clearly authorize the seller, and the vacatur didn't put consent into a list that never had any. For a dealer, the practical version hasn't changed: name the company the homeowner will hear from, on the form they actually filled in. If they pick up and go, “Who's this?”, the form should have told them already.
Stop means stop, and an AI voice is still a voice
The third link is the exit. Since 11 April 2025, under the FCC's rules, a homeowner can revoke consent by any reasonable method, and the revocation has to be honored within a reasonable time that doesn't exceed 10 business days. You can't make one method the only way out, and text replies like “stop,” “quit,” “end,” “revoke,” “opt out,” “cancel” or “unsubscribe” count automatically.
One piece of that rule, making an opt-out given in reply to one kind of message apply to every other kind from the same caller, has been pushed back by the FCC to 31 January 2027. Don't wait for it. Make every STOP, every “don't call me” on a call and every opt-out email feed one suppression rule that blocks every channel. And someone owns it: STOP, HELP and START get tested with a test contact on a schedule, because a handler nobody checks is a handler that quietly breaks.
Now the AI part. In February 2024, the FCC ruled that AI-generated voices count as artificial voices under the TCPA. A call that uses one needs the homeowner's prior express consent, and written consent when it's telemarketing, and the ruling says the TCPA doesn't allow a carve-out for technology that claims to be the equivalent of a live agent.
So your AI setter can sound as human as you like. Under the TCPA it's an artificial voice, and it only calls homeowners whose consent covers it.
Do Not Call, calling hours and the states on top
The fourth link is the lists. Anyone who hasn't given you consent gets checked against the National Do Not Call Registry before a telemarketing call, and the FCC's rules point callers to a copy of the registry pulled no more than 31 days before the call. Break those rules with 2 or more calls to the same homeowner inside 12 months and they can sue for up to $500 per violation. And anyone who asks you to stop goes on your own do-not-call list, which the rules expect you to keep.
The fifth link is the hours. The FCC's rules keep telephone solicitations between 8am and 9pm, the homeowner's local time, and some states draw it tighter. Texas and Florida are good examples of state law sitting on top of federal law.
In Texas, since SB 140 took effect on 1 September 2025, a sales text message counts as a telephone solicitation under the state's telephone solicitation chapter, and a violation of that chapter is a deceptive trade practice that private remedies can enforce. The state's own hours for unsolicited sales calls to a residential number are 9am to 9pm Monday to Saturday and noon to 9pm on Sunday. And the Secretary of State says a business that texts with the consumer's prior consent doesn't have to file the state's telephone solicitation registration, which is one more reason consent comes first.
Florida limits commercial telephone solicitation calls to 8am to 8pm in the homeowner's time zone, and to 3 calls to the same person in 24 hours on the same subject, whatever number they come from. It requires a homeowner to reply STOP before suing over solicitation texts, and it presumes a call to a Florida area code is a call to someone in Florida.
So the hours and the attempt limits get built into the dialer and the automations by the homeowner's state, not left to whoever's on shift. And the sixth link, the review, is your counsel signing off on the wording and checking it again on a schedule. Most of the rules in this post carry a date for a reason: they move.
Build the chain once, into the flow
You can build all 6 links yourself: the form, the record, the exit, the hours, the lists and the review, with your counsel reading every word.
Or we can build it for you. Empire OS builds the consent capture and the texting registration into the funnel, so your team only contacts homeowners through a flow built to the rules. It all lives in your own CRM and accounts, so the records stay with your dealership, and the sit system's reminders and follow-up run inside the same consent rules, by the homeowner's state. Your counsel still rules on the rules.
The point isn't paperwork. It's qualified homeowner appointments sitting on your closers' calendars, market after market, from a flow you own and can stand behind.
If that's what you're building toward, book a call below and we'll see how we can help.
