Rana — Solar Engineering, Abuja

The problem

What a phone quote cannot know

A number given without seeing your house is a guess with your money on it.

How it usually goes

The WhatsApp quote

Someone asks how many bedrooms you have and then names a system. It sounds decisive. It is arithmetic done on nothing.

Sized on bedrooms, not on what you actually switch on

Nobody counted the night load, so the battery is a guess

Nobody measured the roof, so the panels may not physically fit

The kettle and the pressing iron are ignored until they trip it

When it browns out at 8pm, the fault becomes your usage

How we do it

The measured quote

The same answer, except every number in it came from something you told us or something we put a tape measure on.

Every appliance counted, with the hours it really runs

The night load sized separately — that is what the battery carries

Your roof drawn to scale, with the actual panels laid on it

High-surge appliances named, and priced or deliberately left on grid

If your roof cannot carry your load, we say so before you pay

The sizing desk

Size my system

Three steps. Each one feeds the next, and nothing is rounded up to make the sale bigger.

This is the same calculation our engineers run before they quote. It takes about a minute, it gives you a real number, and you are welcome to take that number somewhere else.

How this works. Three steps, about a minute. We have filled in a typical Abuja home already — change only what is different about yours, and watch the number at the bottom of your screen move as you do. Nothing is sent to us until you ask for a survey.

01

Count the load

Hours are what it really runs, not what the label says

Start from

How the house runs

Battery autonomy

Daily energy0kWhEverything you switched on, over 24 hours

Peak demand0kWAfter diversity — you never run it all at once

Night load0kWhAfter 7pm. This is what sizes the battery

Panels needed0× 585WAt Abuja's 5.2 peak sun hours

Nothing here is sent to us.

02

Draw the roof

Tap a slope to take it out — a tree, a tank, a neighbour's storey building

House type

Roof covering

The long roof faces

Panel Slope in use Slope excluded Tap a slope to switch it in or out

Slopes in use

Pick a house type to draw your roof

The panels are laid out to scale — 2278 × 1134mm each, each kept 500mm clear of every edge and of the ridge, which is what a fitter actually leaves.

03

The number

Line items, not a lump sum

Installed, all in

—

Supply, mounting, cabling, changeover and commissioning

Pays for itself in —

Tell us what you spend now and we will work it out

Diesel & grid now, ₦ / month

Book a survey with this spec

Prices are a band, not a quote. They move with the exchange rate and with what we find on the roof. Nothing is charged until an engineer has been on your roof and you have seen the drawing.

What we install

Three components decide whether this works. We publish all three.

We do not carry a “budget” range. There is one specification, because the cheap version of any of these three is the reason people say solar does not work in Nigeria.

01 · Panels

585W bifacial monocrystalline

Tier-1 cells, 3.2mm tempered glass, aluminium frame. Bifacial because on a stone-coated or aluminium roof the reflected light is worth another few per cent for nothing.

Rated output585 W

Annual degradation≤ 0.4 %

Still producing at year 25≥ 87 %

Performance warranty25 years

02 · Batteries

LiFePO4, in 5kWh modules

We stopped selling lead-acid to homes. It is cheaper on the day you buy it and roughly three times more expensive across five years, because you replace it twice.

ChemistryLiFePO4

Cycles at 80% depth6,000

Usable depth90 %

Warranty10 years

03 · Inverters

Hybrid, with the grid still behind it

Sized on your peak demand, not on a round number. Two MPPT trackers so an east slope and a west slope can run on the same inverter without dragging each other down.

TypeHybrid, grid-tied

Transfer time< 10 ms

MPPT trackers2

Warranty5 years

The hour that matters

At 2am

Daylight is the easy part. Anybody can run your house at noon.

The real question is what is still alive at two in the morning, in the middle of August, on the fourth cloudy day in a row. That is a battery question, and it is the one most quotes quietly avoid.

Autonomy on your night load —

Size your system above and this fills in from your own numbers.

We publish what we switch off

A system that claims to run everything at 2am is either oversized and overpriced, or it is about to disappoint you in August. So we draw the line in the open, before you buy.

The water heater and the pressing iron stay on grid. Between them they would add roughly ₦2.4m of battery and inverter to carry loads you use for forty minutes a day, at an hour when the sun is up anyway.

The borehole is held until 6am unless you ask otherwise. Pumping into a tank at 3am costs you a night of air conditioning, and the tank does not care what time it was filled.

Installations

Three houses, three completely different answers.

Same city, same sun. What changed was the load, the roof and how honest the owner was willing to be about the pressing iron.

Guzape · 4-bed duplex

Two ACs through the night

Family of six, both master bedrooms cooled overnight, borehole on a timer. The night load was 60% of the daily total, which is what made this a battery job rather than a panel job.

Array11.7 kWp

Battery20 kWh

Inverter10 kVA

Generator0 hrs

Wuse II · dental practice

The compressor decided it

Six workstations, an autoclave and a dental compressor that draws a hard surge every time a chair is used. Daily energy was modest; the inverter had to be sized for a machine that runs for nine seconds at a time.

Array8.8 kWp

Battery15 kWh

Inverter12 kVA

Downtime0 / 14 mo

Lugbe · 3-bed bungalow

Deliberately partial

The roof could not carry the whole load and the budget could not carry the battery. So the ACs stayed on grid and everything else moved to solar. The owner has the number we gave him and the option to add later.

Array4.7 kWp

Battery10 kWh

Inverter5 kVA

Diesel saved₦96k/mo

Afterwards

What we stand behind

And the five things we will talk you out of buying.

25years of panel performance, in writing

10years on the battery, replaced not repaired

5years on our workmanship, leaks included

48hours to a callout anywhere in the FCT

What we will tell you not to buy

A system big enough to run your water heater and pressing iron off the battery. Put them on grid and keep roughly ₦2.4m in your pocket.
Lead-acid batteries, at any price. Cheaper on the day, about three times the cost across five years.
Panels on a north-facing slope because it happens to be the biggest one. It will produce about 70% of what the same panels make facing south.
A 20kVA inverter for a 6kW house because the bigger number sounds safer. It costs more, idles worse and does nothing you need.
Solar at all, if your roof needs replacing inside three years. Do the roof first — taking an array down and putting it back is real money.

Questions

The ones people ask on the roof, answered before you climb up.

Yes, and more than most people expect. Through December to February a dusty array in Abuja typically loses 8–12% of its output, and an array that is never cleaned can lose more than that permanently as the film bakes on. We clean twice during harmattan and it is included for the first two years. After that it is ₦25,000 a visit, or you can do it yourself with a soft brush and no detergent.

Abuja averages about 5.2 peak sun hours across the year, but a bad week in July or August can sit closer to 3.8. Every system here is sized on the annual figure with the battery carrying the gap, not on the worst week. Sizing on August alone would cost you roughly 40% more for the eleven months you did not need it — and on the fourth grey day in a row you would still be reaching for the generator.

On long-span aluminium we clamp to the standing seam and do not penetrate the sheet at all. On stone-coated steel we fix into the batten with a butyl-sealed bracket, and every penetration is sealed twice. On a concrete deck we use ballasted frames wherever the parapet allows it, so nothing is drilled. Our five-year workmanship warranty names leaks at our fixings explicitly — it is the one thing people are right to worry about.

Keep it for the first year. We wire the changeover so the generator is still available and you will find out honestly how often you reach for it — most of our customers stop using theirs within three months and sell it in the second year. Anyone who tells you to sell it on installation day is asking you to bet on their arithmetic.

Band A improved how many hours you get. It did not make them cheap. At roughly ₦209 per kWh, a house using 12kWh a day is spending about ₦75,000 a month on grid alone, before a single litre of diesel. Band A makes solar pay back faster, not slower, because the thing you are replacing got more expensive.

Yes, but only if the inverter and the roof layout are planned for it on day one. Adding a battery module to a system designed for it takes an afternoon. Adding it to a system that was not means a new inverter, and you have paid for the first one twice. Tell the engineer on the survey that you intend to expand and it costs you nothing now.

No. We take 60% to order and 40% on commissioning, and that is the whole arrangement. We would rather size a smaller system honestly than sell you a large one on terms — a partial system that works is a much better position than a full one you are still paying for when the battery warranty runs out.

Book a survey

An hour on your roof with an engineer and a ladder. Free, and you keep the drawing.

The survey is where the numbers you just produced get checked against the building. We measure the planes, look at the shading through the day, check what the roof structure will actually take, and open your distribution board to see how the circuits are split.

You get the drawing and the specification whether or not you buy from us. If we think you should not be buying solar this year, that is what the survey will say.

Where we workAbuja municipal, Gwarinpa, Guzape, Maitama, Asokoro, Wuse, Jabi, Lugbe, Kubwa, Lokogoma and Karsana

Lead timeSurvey within five working days. Installation two to three weeks after the drawing is signed.

Carried over from your sizing

Nothing sized yet—

Booked — we will call to confirm.