Solar services, and what each one actually means

A battery and inverter fitted to keep chosen circuits alive when the grid drops, with or without solar panels attached. This is what most people mean when they say they want "solar for load shedding", and a surprising number of these installations have no panels at all: the battery simply charges from the grid when power is available.

Before you sign: Ask which circuits will actually be backed up, in writing. Geysers, ovens, pool pumps and underfloor heating are usually excluded, and the disappointment when the household discovers this after commissioning is the single most common complaint in this category.

Supply and installation of the inverter itself, the unit that converts DC from panels or batteries into the AC your house uses, and in a hybrid system decides moment by moment whether to draw from the grid, the panels or the battery.

Before you sign: Inverter sizing is about instantaneous load, not daily consumption. A 5 kW inverter cannot run a 4 kW geyser and a 2 kW kettle at once regardless of how many panels or how big a battery sit behind it. Ask what happens when you exceed its rating.

Scheduled servicing of an existing installation: panel cleaning, checking DC and AC isolators, torque-checking mounting hardware, inspecting connectors for corrosion, updating inverter firmware and reviewing generation data against expectation.

Before you sign: Most South African systems are never serviced after commissioning, which is why soiling and loose connectors quietly cost owners real output. Ask for a written scope and what the report will actually contain, because "maintenance" with no deliverable is a callout fee.

A complete system designed to run a property with no grid connection at all, or with the grid treated as unavailable. Sizing is fundamentally different: an off-grid design has to survive consecutive cloudy days rather than merely reduce a bill.

Before you sign: Ask what days of autonomy the design assumes and what happens on day four of bad weather. Genuine off-grid systems normally need a generator or a much larger battery than a grid-tied household would ever buy, and a quote that omits this is a grid-tied system wearing the wrong label.

The full household installation: panels, mounting, inverter, protection, cabling, commissioning and the Certificate of Compliance for the electrical work.

Before you sign: Confirm the COC is included and issued in your name, and confirm who registers the system with your municipality or with Eskom. Both are legal requirements for a grid-tied system and both are routinely left out of the cheapest quotes.

Panels plus battery plus grid connection, with an inverter that can use all three. The common configuration for South African households, because it cuts the bill in daylight and keeps the lights on when the grid fails.

Before you sign: Hybrid inverters vary enormously in how fast they switch over, whether they can charge the battery from the grid, and whether they can export. Ask for the changeover time in milliseconds if you have equipment that objects to a brief interruption.

Systems for business premises, typically three-phase, larger, and subject to different approval, metering and depreciation rules than a household installation.

Before you sign: Commercial work needs a demonstrable track record at that scale and, usually, CIDB registration. A capable residential installer is not automatically a capable commercial one, and the failure modes on a three-phase system are less forgiving.

Fault-finding and repair on an existing system, including inverters that will not start, batteries that will not hold charge, strings producing less than expected, and installations abandoned by whoever originally fitted them.

Before you sign: Ask upfront whether the diagnostic fee is credited against the repair, and whether they will work on equipment they did not supply. Many will not, which is worth knowing before the callout rather than after.

Extending an existing installation: adding panels, adding battery capacity, or replacing an inverter that has become the constraint on the rest of the system.

Before you sign: Adding batteries of a different age, brand or chemistry to an existing bank is frequently a bad idea and sometimes a warranty-voiding one. Ask specifically whether the new capacity can be paralleled with what you have, and get the manufacturer position in writing.