An engineering company that happens to install solar.

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 Installations Ltd, registered at Companies House under number 17345557; 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.