Alectrona
Commercial solar by sectorAn office runs its heaviest load through the working day, exactly when the roof is generating, so a well-matched array self-consumes most of what it makes rather than exporting it cheaply.
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.
Offices and let commercial property cover a broad estate: single-occupier head offices, multi-let business parks, serviced buildings and the landlords who own them. What ties them together is a demand shape that is concentrated on weekday daytime, lighting, ventilation, comfort cooling, server and IT load, lifts and small power, the same hours a rooftop array is at its most productive.
That overlap is the reason commercial solar is worth modelling here. For an owner-occupier the generation offsets an expensive import bill across the working week. For a landlord the array is also a building asset: it improves the EPC and answers a real and growing question from tenants about the carbon of the space they take. Both cases turn on getting the self-consumption right, and that is a design decision, not a roof-area sum.
Sized from your half-hourly load, not a sector average.
Solar earns most when the power is used on site. A unit consumed in the building offsets an expensive import unit, while a unit exported to the grid is paid far less. An office load lines up with daylight unusually well: the demand ramps up as people arrive, holds through the working day, and tails off in the evening, which is the same curve a south-facing or east-west array tends to follow. Where comfort cooling and server rooms carry the load, the summer demand peak sits right on top of the summer generation peak. That tends to give a strong daytime match and a high self-consumed share through the working week.
The honest counterweight is the calendar. Offices empty at weekends and over the holiday weeks, so generation on those days is more likely to be exported. We do not paper over that. We model the real weekly and seasonal shape from your half-hourly data and size the array to the demand you actually carry, rather than overbuilding a roof that would export cheaply on a quiet Saturday. For a let building there is a further wrinkle worth naming early: who is metered for what. The landlord-tenant metering split decides how the benefit of the generation is shared between the freeholder and the occupiers, and the design and the commercial structure have to account for it from the start. We work that out with you before anything is specified.
Office and let-property roofs vary more than an industrial shed. They run from a single flat roof on a head office to the mix of pitched and flat roofs across a business park, often with plant, rooflights and parapet shading to design around. For orientation only, offices and let buildings in this sector tend to sit in an indicative band of 50–250 kWp, though that is a starting reference rather than a quote. The real figure comes from the on-site survey and the PV*SOL model of your specific roof and load. A multi-let estate may also point toward sizing across several buildings rather than maximising any one roof, so the array tracks the demand across the portfolio. Our commercial case studies show how this sizing logic plays out across flat-roof and multi-let layouts of the kind common to offices and let property.
We model your half-hourly consumption against a system sized from an on-site drone survey, so the figure you get is yours, not a from-price. No obligation, no MCS gatekeeping on systems this size.