Numbers first. Hardware second.

We begin with at least twelve months of your municipal or Eskom bills. They reveal your annual consumption, seasonal swings, tariff category and the fixed charges that solar cannot touch. For households this is often enough to model well; for businesses it is the entry point to deeper metering.

Annual kWh says how much; the load profile says when, and when is where solar value lives. For commercial sites we work from interval meter data or install temporary metering to capture the real curve: weekday versus weekend, day versus night, season versus season. The profile decides system architecture more than any preference does.

A physical assessment verifies what the desktop cannot: roof condition and structure, orientation and shading, mounting options, cable routes, distribution board capacity and space for inverters and batteries. Structural certainty comes before panel count, always.

The same kWh saved is worth different amounts on different tariffs. We analyse your exact tariff (energy charges, time-of-use windows, demand charges, fixed costs) and model how solar, storage or both interact with it, including your municipality's SSEG rules and export arrangements.

Generation is modelled hour by hour from local irradiation data against your load profile, giving realistic self-consumption, export and offset figures with winter shown honestly. From that model comes the recommended design: technology mix, sizing, phasing options and an upgrade path.

Capital cost, maintenance, insurance, degradation and tariff escalation combine into payback, internal rate of return and a multi-year cash-flow view. We model conservatively; a study that only survives best-case inputs is marketing, not engineering. Where the honest answer is a smaller system, efficiency first, or not yet, that is the answer you get.

The cheapest kWh is the one you stop using. Assessments flag efficiency wins (lighting, geyser control, timers, refrigeration settings, power-factor issues on commercial sites) that shrink the system you need before it is designed. Reducing demand first is often the highest-return line in the whole study.