HOW IT WORKS
From first contact to a commissioned, saving system, here is how SA Solar works.
01 / THE PROCESS
Nothing here is unusual. What matters is that the same engineers who assess your site design the system, and the same company that designs it installs, commissions and supports it.
We start with your electricity usage, Eskom tariff, site layout and goals. For commercial clients, we conduct a full load profile and demand analysis. For homes, we work from your bills and usage patterns.
No assumptions. No generic proposals. A real understanding of your energy situation.
Our in-house team designs a system around your actual needs: correct sizing, optimal layout, bankable components, and financial modelling that shows you exactly what to expect.
Every design goes through a technical review before it reaches you.
Installation is carried out by qualified electricians and certified solar engineers. We work to agreed timelines, maintain site standards, and communicate throughout the process.
For commercial and industrial projects, we manage all grid integration, municipal approvals and documentation.
Your system is fully commissioned, tested and documented before handover.
We walk you through how it works, what the monitoring shows, and what to expect in terms of performance.
We remain your energy partner after installation: monitoring, maintenance, warranty management and support.
All existing Quest Group and Sage Electrical Systems clients continue to receive the same standard of service under the SA Solar brand.
02 / INSIDE STAGE TWO
Design is where the system is decided. It is eight engineered choices stacked on top of each other, and every one of them is set deliberately, reviewed technically, and documented before the proposal reaches you. Select a layer to read how we specify it.
03 / SCALE
A house and a distribution centre run through the identical process. What changes is the depth of the assessment, the approvals we carry on your behalf, and the documentation you end up holding.
We work from your bills and usage patterns: what your household actually draws, and when. The design follows from that: the system that delivers the best financial return, not the largest one that fits the roof.
We conduct a full load profile and demand analysis before anything is designed. On these projects we also manage grid integration, municipal approvals and the documentation that goes with them.
04 / A NOTE ON QUALITY
Solar is a long-term investment. The savings case only holds if the system performs reliably for 15 to 25 years. That means the right components, correct installation, and proper commissioning, not the cheapest quote.
A quote that looks better on paper usually looks worse in year seven. Undersized cable, an inverter run at its limit, a roof penetration detailed by habit rather than by assessment. None of it shows up on handover day. All of it shows up eventually.
Our position
We will not win work by undersizing or cutting corners. We win it by doing the job properly.
If solar is not the right fit for your site, or a smaller system makes more financial sense, we will say so at the assessment stage.
GET STARTED
Tell us what you're paying, what you're running and where the site is. We will come back with an honest read on what solar can do for you.
54.74 DEGREES
Bare silicon reflects about a third of the light that hits it. A finished module is nearly black. The difference is a potassium hydroxide etch that stops on the crystal’s own {111} planes, leaving pyramids at an angle fixed by the lattice — so a ray that bounces off one facet gets a second chance on the next.
Surface
Coating
Fresnel applied at each interface, n = 1.00 / 2.05 / 3.90 at 600 nm. Facet angle derived from the (100)·(111) dot product, not tabulated.
WHAT HANDOVER DAY CANNOT SEE
Forward-bias a module in a dark room and it glows in the near infrared. Microcracks that pass every visual inspection turn black, because a severed finger cannot carry current to the area it feeds. The dark regions below are not painted on — they are the solution of a resistive network.
Cracks present
72-cell module, 2 busbars and 9 fingers per cell. Node potentials by Gauss–Seidel relaxation; emission from the diode law, n = 1, V_T = 25.85 mV. Cells are series-connected, so no current crosses a cell boundary. Rejected above 2% inactive area. Move the probe to read the local potential.
TRACE YOUR OWN SKYLINE
This is the instrument a site surveyor carries. Drag inside the dome to raise your own horizon: every tree and parapet you draw is tested against 8 760 sun positions across the year, and the number that comes back is real annual shading loss.
8 760 sun positions per solve, clear-sky beam weighted by Kasten–Young air mass. Beam component only; diffuse light is not blocked the same way.
THE POINT IT IS HUNTING
Each ridge is one current–voltage curve at a different irradiance; the dashed crest is the locus of maximum power. The marker is a real perturb-and-observe algorithm stepping and measuring, which is why it never sits still. That dither is why trackers are rated at 99.5%, not 100%.
Single-diode equation solved by Newton–Raphson at each point; the tracker is perturb-and-observe at 30 Hz.
THE PASS THAT FINDS IT FIRST
A drone flies the array with a radiometric camera. What matters is never the temperature, it is the outlier: irradiance and wind move the whole field together, so a defect is whatever stands away from its neighbours. Move the threshold and watch the defect count move with it.
NOCT baseline, per-module scatter and a wind gradient across the array. Outlier test per IEC TS 62446-3 principle.