History

LightHarvest Solar started under a bridge. In 2013, Miles Heiner founded the company at Green Anchors, a seven-acre eco-industrial yard on the Willamette in Portland, just downstream of the St. Johns Bridge — a campus full of artists, nonprofits, and tiny home builders who turned out to be exactly the right first customers. They needed real power in places the grid didn't reach, and they wanted to understand the system, not just buy it.

The shop later moved a little upstream, next door to Nomadik Customs, and that proximity shaped the company more than any business plan could have. Van builders walked over with real problems — running a fridge for four days in the shade, charging off the alternator without cooking the batteries — and we solved them one rig at a time. We stocked equipment we'd trust in our own rigs, became a Victron service center, and put a counter in front of it all where anyone could walk in and ask. As lead-acid gave way to lithium, we changed with it.

Matt Chamberlain came to LightHarvest as an employee, working alongside Miles and learning the catalog, the customers, and the wiring. In August 2025 he bought the company and moved it south to Coburg, Oregon, into a shop with room for inventory and vehicles, with his son Ben alongside him. Since then we've expanded into full van and RV installations, DC air conditioning and heat pumps, and plug-in balcony solar. More than a decade on from that yard by the river, the measure hasn't changed: help people get it right the first time.