Complete Solar Systems

A complete system is quoted rather than priced off a shelf, because the specification follows from your consumption, your roof and what you need to keep running during an outage. What follows is what the quote covers and how the figure is arrived at.

What a turnkey system includes

Site survey and load assessment; system design and single-line drawing; panels, mounting structure and roof penetrations; inverter and battery; DC and AC protection, isolators and earthing; cabling and containment; installation by EPRA-certified technicians; commissioning, testing and handover; and, where the system is grid-connected, the KPLC interconnection paperwork.

How the price is arrived at

We start from twelve months of KPLC bills where you have them, because consumption history is a better basis than an appliance list. From that we establish daily energy, peak simultaneous load and the portion of it you want backed up. Roof orientation, pitch, available area, shading and structural condition then set what array is actually mountable.

The two decisions that move the price most are how much of your load you want to carry through an outage, and whether you want to cover peak daytime consumption or your whole bill. Backing up a whole house including heavy resistive loads is substantially more expensive than backing up lighting, refrigeration and electronics.

Timeline

Survey to commissioning is typically three to five working days on site for a residential system, once equipment is on hand. Grid-connected systems seeking net metering have a longer administrative tail: KPLC inspection and interconnection approval, then the net metering application and bi-directional meter, which together commonly run to several months.

Questions