Ask.Understand.Compare.Choose.

It comes down to three things: whether you have unshaded roof or ground area facing roughly the right way, whether you consume meaningful energy during daylight hours, and what you currently pay per unit. The second is the one people underestimate — a property that consumes almost nothing until seven in the evening has a weaker solar case than its roof suggests, and a stronger storage case. We start every engagement with a free site survey and a look at your actual consumption before recommending anything.

Twelve months of electricity bills is the single most useful thing, because it lets us see both what you pay and how your consumption moves through the year. If you have a business with a demand charge on the bill, that detail matters enormously. Beyond that: roughly when your heaviest usage falls, whether outages are a problem, and any plans that will change your load — a new chiller, an extension, an electric vehicle. None of it is essential; we will measure what we need.

Yes, and we do. We have declined to quote wind turbines for sheltered sites, recommended clients fix controls and tariffs before buying generation, and told households to buy the array now and the battery in three years. An assessment where every product we sell turns out to be right for you is not an assessment. If the honest answer is not yet, or not this, you will get it in writing with the arithmetic attached.

For a well-sized residential system, typically four to seven years; for commercial, often three to six, because businesses consume more of their generation during daylight when tariffs are highest. Those ranges assume the system is sized against a real load profile — an oversized array serving a small daytime load will pay back far more slowly, whatever the brochure says. Payback also shortens as tariffs rise, since every self-generated unit is worth what you would otherwise have paid for it.

Usually because they are for different things, and the document does not make that obvious. Differences hide in what is left out: protection and earthing components, mounting engineered for actual wind loading, sealed roof penetrations, commissioning tests, monitoring configured at handover. They also hide in battery specification, where usable capacity and rated cycle life matter far more than headline kWh. Divide price by usable cycles and the cheaper battery frequently turns out to be the expensive one.

Often, but not always, and not always immediately. A battery does three unrelated jobs: shifting your daytime generation into the evening, shaving a demand peak your tariff punishes, and holding you up through outages. Each has a different business case and a different sizing. If you have a heavy evening load, a large demand charge, or an interruption that costs real money, storage may pay for itself. If you close at six and outages are rare, the array alone may be the right answer this year.

Modules carry a 25-year performance warranty and typically still produce around 80–85% of their original output at that point — but only the maintained ones get there. Lithium-iron-phosphate batteries are commonly rated for around 6,000 cycles, which at one cycle per day is well over a decade of useful life. Inverters are the shortest-lived major component, usually ten to fifteen years. The honest framing is that a solar system is a 25-year asset with one mid-life component replacement built into the economics.

Output falls but does not stop — diffuse light still generates, typically at a fraction of clear-sky output. The design question is what carries you through an extended overcast stretch, and that is what battery autonomy is for. On exposed sites, wind is a genuinely useful complement, because it frequently blows hardest overnight and through exactly the wet, cloudy weeks when panels underperform. A hybrid system can therefore work with a smaller battery than solar alone would need.

A domestic rooftop system is usually one to three days on site, with a brief supply interruption for the final connection. Commercial installations run longer and are sequenced around your operations — we do not stop a production line for a convenience. The longer part is usually before we arrive: survey, load logging, design, and where relevant grid-connection approvals. We would rather spend an extra fortnight measuring than install a system sized on an assumption.

Not if it is installed properly, and the qualifier matters. Mounting is engineered for local wind loading rather than assembled from generic rails, and every penetration is sealed and flashed to outlast the array itself. On membrane roofs we frequently use ballasted mounting to avoid penetrations altogether, subject to structural sign-off on the additional dead load. Where a roof is genuinely unsuitable, we will say so and propose ground mounting instead.

Less than people fear, and more than they usually do. Modules need periodic cleaning — dust costs real yield here — and the system needs scheduled inspection of connectors, mounting, protection and inverter condition. The critical piece is monitoring: renewable systems fail politely, drifting downward rather than stopping, so without a comparison against modelled yield a fault can hide for months. That lost generation is unrecoverable, which is why monitoring pays for itself before the servicing does.

Yes, and a substantial share of our maintenance work is exactly that. We will tell you plainly what we find, including where a previous installer cut a corner — with a photograph and a recommendation rather than a sales pitch. Where we hold the original design model we benchmark against it; where we do not, we model expected yield ourselves so there is a number to compare against rather than a guess.