Notes from the roof.
Thoughts on commercial solar O&M, UK solar industry context, and the engineering decisions behind the platform.
What we shipped in Q1 2026: Solis parity, mobile sign-off, push alerts
A short, honest account of what landed in SolarFleet between January and April 2026. The big ones, the small ones, and the things we're still working on.
Why string-level fault detection matters more than you think
Site-level monitoring hides string faults for weeks. On a 500 kWp rooftop, that's worth about £1,800 in lost revenue per month — and it's almost always avoidable.
Introducing SolarFleet: O&M software by operators, for operators
We've been running commercial solar portfolios on spreadsheets and six different inverter portals for too long. SolarFleet is what we built to stop doing that. Here's what's in it today, and what isn't.
The spreadsheet-as-CMMS tax: what it actually costs
Every O&M operation we've inherited from a previous provider has had a shared Excel file at the heart of it. The hidden cost of that file is usually larger than the cost of the platform that would replace it.
Weather normalisation: how Open-Meteo stops false alarms on clipping days
Raw string-current comparisons fire false alarms on hot, sunny days. We use Open-Meteo's hourly irradiance and temperature data to weather-normalise our detections. Here's the maths and the gotchas.
O&M pricing benchmarks for the UK C&I market in 2026
What people are actually charging for commercial solar O&M in 2026, broken down by site size and scope. Ranges, not testimonials — and what's driving the spread.
Picking inverters for serviceability: a UK installer's bias list
After seven years of installing and maintaining commercial PV, we've developed opinions about which inverter brands are pleasant to look after and which are a pain. Here are ours, with reasoning.
The economics of fault-detection latency: turning days into minutes
Every hour a string sits offline has a price. The interesting question isn't whether your O&M tool catches faults — it's how quickly. The arithmetic is steeper than most operators expect.
Your monthly client report should not take a whole Friday
If you're losing a working day each month exporting CSVs, pasting them into a deck and reconciling numbers between three portals, the report is doing less for the client than you think.
BS EN 62446-1 in practice: what auditors actually look for
We've signed off a lot of 62446-1 reports and watched a few get pulled apart on audit. Here's the bit between the standard and the clipboard that nobody writes down.