Alectrona
Commercial solar by sectorA distribution shed pairs the region's largest unshaded roofs with a steady weekday load from MHE charging, conveyors, lighting and HVAC, so a high share of generation tends to be used on site rather than exported.
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.
Warehousing and logistics covers distribution sheds, fulfilment centres, cross-dock depots, parcel hubs and cold-chain pick operations. These are large single-storey buildings designed around throughput, and the electricity bill follows the same logic: forklift and MHE charging, conveyors and sortation, racking-aisle and yard lighting, dock-leveller and HVAC plant, all running through the working day.
It is the lead sector for commercial solar in the region, and for a straightforward reason. The roofs are the biggest and simplest we work with, and the load underneath them is heavy, steady and largely daytime. That combination is exactly what makes a system worth modelling properly: plenty of usable array area sitting directly above demand that lines up with when the sun is on the roof.
An on-site drone survey and a PV*SOL model before anything is specified.
Solar pays best when the electricity is used on site rather than exported, because an exported unit is paid far less than the unit you would otherwise import. So the question is not how many panels the roof can hold, it is how much of the generation the building consumes as it is produced. Warehousing tends to read well on that test. A shed running picking and despatch shifts draws a broad, sustained daytime load, and MHE charging, conveyors and lighting keep pulling power right through the middle of the day when generation peaks.
Operations that carry weekend and night shifts, or a chilled or frozen pick face with refrigeration running around the clock, flatten the demand curve further and tend to self-consume more of what the array produces. A round-the-clock shed shares more of its load shape with a cold store than with a single-shift unit, and we size for the pattern we find. The match is rarely perfect, and it varies with the shift pattern, the charging regime and the seasonal swing in throughput, which is why we read your half-hourly metering data rather than quote a sector average. Where the daytime fit is strong we say so. Where battery storage would shift surplus generation into an evening or night shift, or an export limit shapes the design, we look at that on the real numbers before anything is specified.
The typical shape here is a large, unshaded flat or shallow-pitch roof with long uninterrupted runs and few obstructions, the kind of deck a modern distribution shed is built with. That gives the most usable array area per site of any sector we cover, which is why the indicative band sits at roughly 250 kWp to 1 MWp and above; a single large shed often sits in the 1 MWp+ band, while a smaller depot or a run of trade units reads more like our industrial-units sector. Treat that as orientation only. The real figure comes from the on-site survey and the PV*SOL model, sized to your actual load rather than to the roof. Older or extended units can carry mixed roof pitches, large rooflights or plant decks, and structural loading on a long-span roof is the first thing the survey checks before any layout is fixed.
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.