How much solar capacity does your business actually need?

Most disappointing solar installations were sized by budget or by guesswork. A system that carries your load properly starts from four numbers.

1. What must stay on?

Separate critical loads — servers, cold rooms, security, lighting, medical equipment — from loads that can wait. Sizing storage for everything is what makes projects unaffordable.

2. How much energy do those loads use per day?

Multiply each load in kilowatts by the hours it runs. A 2 kW cold room running 10 hours a day is 20 kWh. Add them up. Your electricity bill in kilowatt-hours is a good cross-check.

3. How long must it run without sun or grid?

This decides the battery bank. Four hours of autonomy and twenty-four hours of autonomy are entirely different projects.

4. What is the largest thing that starts at once?

Motors, compressors and pumps draw several times their running current at start-up. Inverter capacity has to cover that surge, not just the average load.

Grid-tied, hybrid or off-grid?

Grid-tied reduces your bill but gives no backup. Hybrid reduces the bill and carries critical load through an outage — which is what most Ghanaian businesses actually want. Off-grid suits sites with no reliable supply at all, and costs accordingly.

Send us a list of your loads and run hours and we will size a system against them, rather than quoting a package.