Alectrona
About Alectrona · Commercial solar over 50 kWpAbove 50 kWp, there is no domestic badge to hide behind. The assurance is the engineering itself, the named standards behind it, and the contract you sign. That is the company we built, and it is the company you are buying.
These are representative example reviews, not yet-collected customer feedback. They are written to illustrate the kind of feedback Alectrona aims to earn and are shown as design placeholders while we gather and verify reviews from our first commercial clients. Alectrona is the commercial solar trading brand of RVTC LTD.
What set Alectrona apart was the documented design pack. We had quotes from three installers, but only Alectrona handed us a full set of drawings, a single-line diagram and a design referencing BS 7671 and the G99 connection process. The whole thing read like an engineering submission rather than a sales brochure. Our M&E consultant reviewed it and signed it off without a single query. That gave the board the confidence to release the capital.
Other firms priced our roof off a satellite image and a desktop guess. Alectrona flew an in-house drone survey, fully insured and flown by a qualified commercial drone pilot, and built a 3D model of the actual roof. It picked up plant, vents and a parapet line that a flat aerial photo had completely missed, which changed the panel layout. I would rather find that out at design stage than on the day the scaffold goes up. The accuracy of that survey is the reason I trusted everything that followed.
As a finance director I was wary of being oversold a system bigger than we could use. Alectrona modelled the array against our actual half-hourly consumption data rather than an annual total, so it is sized to what we genuinely draw on site during the day. They were honest that exporting surplus is worth far less than self-consumption, and built the design around that. The capital case stacked up because the engineering was honest, not because the numbers were inflated.
We were undecided between buying outright, leasing and a PPA. Alectrona laid out all three side by side with the pros and cons of each against our balance sheet, instead of pushing the one that pays them best. They were clear about where a PPA makes sense and where capex wins, and pointed us at our own accountant for the tax treatment. The survey and design took a little longer than I expected, but the thoroughness was worth the wait. Genuinely consultative.
The install crew were tidy and well run, and worked to a clear CDM 2015 plan with a proper site induction and RAMS. What impressed me most was the handover. We received a full commissioning pack with the IEC 62446-1 test results, certification, O&M documentation and an as-built record for our maintenance team. As the people who have to live with this asset for the next twenty years, having that paperwork in order matters enormously. Nothing was left loose.
I expected the usual hard sell and got the opposite. After surveying our site Alectrona told us one roof section was not worth covering because of shading, and that a smaller, well-sited array was the better investment than filling every square metre. There was no commission-driven upselling and no pressure. For a six-figure capital project, that straight talk is exactly what you want from the people advising you. We will be using them again on our second site.
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A commercial solar array is a six- or seven-figure asset bolted to a working building and wired straight into your distribution board. It runs for around twenty-five years and it has to earn for every one of them. That is an engineering problem with a return attached, and it is the problem we set out to solve. We are not a sales operation with engineers on the payroll. We are an engineering company that designs, installs and stands behind commercial solar.
What that means in practice is that the technical decision is never overruled by the commercial one. The roof, the structure, the shading, the daytime load profile, the inverter sizing, the grid headroom: none of that gets sold to you, it gets solved for you. We tell you straight whether your site stacks up, and we will tell you when it does not. A director evaluating a capital project does not need a pitch. They need figures they can take to the board and an engineer who can defend every line.
So we do the work first and quote second. Every meaningful step is written down, quantified and put in your hands, because a finance director should never have to take a solar installer's word for anything.
MCS is the domestic certification scheme, and it caps at 50 kWp. Commercial systems are larger than that by definition, so MCS does not apply and it is not the thing that should reassure you. Anyone waving a domestic badge at a commercial project has misunderstood the work. The real assurance is the engineering stack that governs systems this size, and it is named, auditable and contractual.
We design and install to BS 7671, the wiring regulations. We commission to IEC 62446-1, the international standard for inspecting and testing a PV installation. We connect under the G99 grid code, with G100 export limitation applied where needed. Every project runs under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015, with a Principal Designer and a Principal Contractor appointed; Alectrona is typically the Principal Contractor. And the whole job is delivered under a JCT or NEC contract with a twelve-month defects period backed by an Insurance-Backed Guarantee, not a handshake.
The detail matters at this scale. Field-made DC connectors are a well-known weak point in rooftop PV and a recognised cause of arcing and heat faults, so every connector we crimp on site gets a sealed, weatherproof enclosure. Every array is earthed and bonded to BS 7671 with surge protection fitted as standard, because a large metal structure on an exposed roof feeding your switchgear needs it. That is the base design, never an upsell.
We do not quote from a desktop or a satellite image. Our own qualified, fully insured pilot, holding an A2 Certificate of Competency and a General Visual line-of-sight Certificate, flies a 3D drone survey of your roof. We then build the design in PV*SOL, half-hourly, bankable-grade modelling software used for finance-grade project assessment.
That gives full shading analysis from the actual building geometry rather than a guess off an aerial photograph. The generation, the self-consumption and the payback are calculated from the real roof and your real consumption profile, and we do it on every quote. Self-consumption is where the value sits, because exported power is paid far less than imported power is charged, so sizing the array to your daytime load is the difference between a project that pays back and one that disappoints. A quote is only as good as the survey behind it, and ours starts on your roof.
The economics we put in front of you come from that model, not from a rule of thumb. We frame them conservatively, we show the assumptions, and we leave the precise figures to your own surveyed numbers rather than printing a flattering headline you cannot rely on.
Our Qualifying Supervisor is a fully AM2-trained electrician, and on every single job they personally review the install report before commissioning sign-off: the photographs, the test certificates, the torque-check log and the commissioning data, all filed and checked by someone other than the person who did the work. That is the discipline of an engineering company. The installer never signs themselves off, because independent review is how mistakes get caught before they reach your roof.
Behind the install sits a group of three companies, each covering a different part of the asset's life. Alectrona designs and installs. Sentinel is our own monitoring platform, built in-house, that watches a system's performance so a fault is found early rather than at the next bill. Solar Tech Support is our independent, brand-agnostic diagnostics and repair arm, the team that fixes orphaned systems whose original installer walked away. For a commercial client that means one accountable group across survey, build, operations and maintenance, and the diagnostic depth to keep the asset performing for its full life.
The contracting entity today is RVTC LTD, registered at Companies House under number 16980210; Alectrona is its trading brand for commercial solar. We hold no accreditation badges and we claim none. What we offer instead is the named engineering stack, a real contract, independent sign-off and a phone that gets answered.
Tell us about your building and your electricity use. We will arrange an on-site survey and come back with surveyed, modelled figures and three funding routes, so you can take a decision to the board on facts rather than a sales pitch.