Alectrona
Commercial solar by areaYorkshire-based and quick to a Northallerton site for commercial solar over 50 kWp, from the County Hall office estate to the Standard Way trade units and the Leeming Bar food plants. We have not installed in Northallerton yet, so we lead with an on-site drone survey and a load-matched design, not a local job count.
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.
Alectrona is the commercial arm of RVTC LTD, working across Northallerton and the wider North Yorkshire area for rooftop and ground-mount solar above 50 kWp. We cover the DL6 and DL7 districts, from the DL6 1 town centre out through the DL6 2 trade estate and across to Romanby and the Leeming Bar cluster on DL7 9, and we reach Thirsk, Bedale, Stokesley and Darlington from the same base. A site visit here is part of our normal coverage rather than a special trip.
A system at this scale earns the engineering behind it. Above 50 kWp the work sits outside the domestic MCS route, where structural loading, the single-line electrical design, half-hourly load matching and a Distribution Network Operator application all decide whether a roof pays back. We are honest that we hold no completed installs in Northallerton, so this page is about coverage, capability and the survey we bring. Every enquiry starts with an on-site drone survey, a PV*SOL model built against your real load and a design to BS 7671, before anyone discusses a panel count.
Northallerton's commercial roof stock is shaped first by the public sector, because this is the county town. County Hall, opened in 1906, is the headquarters of North Yorkshire Council and now the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority, which makes local government one of the largest employers in the town and puts a substantial office estate over a steady weekday daytime load. The Friarage Hospital, part of South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, is an acute hospital of 189 beds serving a rural population of roughly 135,000, and a building of that kind draws power around the clock from lighting, ventilation, medical plant and heating. We name these to describe the local economy and the building stock, not as customers of ours, but the load shape behind a hospital or a county office estate is the profile where a well-sized array is consumed on site rather than exported.
The trade and warehousing strand sits on Standard Way Industrial Estate and the adjoining Thornfield Business Park in the DL6 2 area, the town's principal estate for builders' merchanting and B2 to B8 units, with the broad, lightly-shaded roofs that take a clean panel layout. The energy-intensive end of the catchment is at Leeming Bar Industrial Estate, just west of the town off the A1(M) on DL7 9. The estate's postal addresses are post-town Northallerton, so it sits squarely in the town's commercial base, and it is a genuine food-and-drink manufacturing cluster: Froneri's ice-lolly plant on Plews Way, the Cawingredients soft-drinks site of around 112,000 square feet and Dalepak Foods. Manufacturing and cold-storage loads of that kind run a heavy, near-continuous daytime demand, which is the shape that gives the strongest self-consumption on a system this size.
The town centre adds modern commercial roof stock through the Treadmills regeneration, the retail, business and leisure scheme on the former Northallerton Prison site that includes an Everyman Cinema opened in 2023, while County Business Park, North Riding Business Park and Terry Dicken Business Park carry managed offices and further employment land. Northallerton station sits on the East Coast Main Line between Thirsk and Darlington, and the A684 and A167 tie the estates into the A1(M) and A19, so the district's logistics and distribution roofs are well placed. Each of those load profiles is different, which is why we model the actual half-hourly demand for a building before sizing anything rather than working from a single Northallerton template.
Every Northallerton design starts with an on-site survey rather than a satellite estimate. Our in-house drone pilot is fully insured and holds the A2 Certificate of Competency and the GVC, and flies a 3D survey of the roof to capture pitch, orientation, shading, parapets and the real usable area. That model feeds a PV*SOL simulation run against your half-hourly consumption, so the array is sized to what the building actually uses through the working day and the layout is only fixed once the roof and any structural limits are accounted for.
The survey travels to Northallerton the same as anywhere in Yorkshire, whether the roof is a County Hall office block, a Standard Way trade unit or a food plant out at Leeming Bar. The pilot comes to you, and the design is built from what the drone records on the day.
The distribution network operator for Northallerton is Northern Powergrid, whose Yorkshire licence covers the town, and any system over 50 kWp connects under a G99 application to them rather than the simpler notification used for small domestic installs. G99 is the engineering approval that lets a generator of this size run in parallel with the grid, and it governs how much you are permitted to export. We prepare and manage that application and the technical correspondence as part of the project rather than leaving it with you.
There is no specific named constrained primary substation in Northallerton, and we will not invent one. The honest position is that this is a market town on a more rural network than the loaded West Yorkshire primaries, and export headroom is assessed site by site against Northern Powergrid's local capacity. Where that headroom is limited, particularly on the rural feeders out towards Leeming Bar, we design in an export limitation scheme so the array can run at full output for self-consumption while capping what reaches the network, and we confirm the available capacity for the actual site before any commitment.
A number of commercial and agricultural roofs across the Northallerton area already carry solar from the Feed-in Tariff years, much of it installed roughly between 2012 and 2016 and now well into middle age, with inverters reaching the end of their service life and monitoring that has often gone dark. Through our sister operation Solar Tech Support we provide independent, brand-agnostic operation and maintenance and the takeover of those older systems, whoever originally fitted them and whatever the panels and inverters are.
That covers performance monitoring, fault diagnosis, inverter and string repair, cleaning and a proper assessment of an inherited array that may be quietly underperforming. As a Yorkshire-based team, an orphaned or drifting system on a Standard Way unit, a North Yorkshire farm building or a Leeming Bar plant is a routine call-out for us. We will not publish a fixed response time or service level we cannot stand behind for Northallerton specifically; we set the maintenance scope against the site once we have seen it, and tell you honestly what an older array is realistically still producing.
How the team engineers rooftop solar for a football stadium, matching a large venue roof to an event-driven match-day load. A representative example of the team’s stadium work.
Read the case studyA representative large flat-roof distribution-centre array designed to a daytime logistics load, using half-hourly modelling, an in-house drone survey and an export-limited G99 design to maximise self-consumption.
Read the case studyLast updated June 2026
Yes. We are Yorkshire-based and cover Northallerton and the DL6 and DL7 districts, out to Thirsk, Bedale, Stokesley and Darlington, for commercial solar over 50 kWp. We have not yet completed an install in Northallerton itself, so we are honest that our case rests on coverage, the on-site drone survey and a PV*SOL design matched to your own half-hourly load, rather than a local track record.
The town is the county administrative centre, so it carries a large public-sector estate at County Hall and the Friarage Hospital with steady, around-the-clock daytime demand. Leeming Bar adds an energy-intensive food-and-drink manufacturing cluster, with Froneri, Cawingredients and Dalepak running heavy daytime loads. Those load shapes give strong self-consumption, where most of what the array generates is used on site rather than exported, which is what makes the economics work at this scale.
Northern Powergrid is the distribution network operator for Northallerton, and a system over 50 kWp connects under a G99 application that we prepare and manage. There is no town-wide constraint we would claim here; export headroom is assessed for each specific site against the local network, and where it is limited, particularly on the more rural feeders towards Leeming Bar, we design in an export limitation scheme so the array runs at full output for self-consumption while capping export.
Yes. Through Solar Tech Support we provide independent, brand-agnostic operation and maintenance and take over older systems, including FiT-era arrays from around 2012 to 2016 on commercial and farm roofs across the area whose original installer may no longer be contactable. We assess the system on site first, report honestly on what it is producing against what it should, and agree a maintenance scope rather than quoting a fixed service level up front.
We do not publish a per-kWp price or a from-figure, in Northallerton or anywhere else, because an honest number for a system over 50 kWp comes from the survey, not a rate card. The cost of a County Hall office roof, a Standard Way trade unit or a Leeming Bar food plant turns on the roof structure and condition, the array size your half-hourly load actually justifies, the inverter and any export limitation or battery, and the G99 connection works. Our figure comes from the on-site drone survey and the PV*SOL model built against your metered consumption, so we can show you a generation and self-consumption figure and a payback you can put in front of a board, rather than a headline price that gets revised later. The survey itself is how we cost the job, and we are upfront that we have not yet installed in Northallerton, so the case rests on that engineering rather than a local job count.
Quickly. We are Yorkshire-based, so a survey at a Northallerton site is part of our normal coverage out through the DL6 and DL7 districts to Thirsk, Bedale, Stokesley and Darlington, not a special trip, and the drone pilot comes to you. The survey and PV*SOL design follow soon after. The longer pole in the programme is not travel but the G99 connection with Northern Powergrid: the application, the network's assessment of export headroom on the local feeders, and any export limitation scheme set the realistic timeline, more so on the more rural feeders out towards Leeming Bar. We prepare and manage that application as part of the project, and we give you an honest programme for your specific site once the survey and the connection position are known, rather than a fixed lead time we cannot stand behind.
Wherever you are in the region, the on-site drone survey comes to you and the PV*SOL model sets the figure. Send us the site and the half-hourly load, and we will come back with a designed system.
