What Does the Design Service Cover?

1. Understanding Your Requirements

We’ll discuss your situation and goals including your property, how electricity will be used, the number of full-time occupants and what appliances and equipment you want to run.

Importantly, we will help you to estimate how much energy you’d typically use over 24 hours in winter. If you’re planning a new home, we’ll also look at choices such as electric hot water, cooking and heating that can affect system size and cost.

Where we can, we’ll suggest alternatives.

You can find a lot more information on sizing in our article: How We Correctly Size Your Off-Grid Solar System.

2. Evaluating Your Power Use

We’ll look at two things: your daily electricity consumption in winter and your peak power demand.

Daily consumption helps determine how much energy your solar panels need to generate and how much battery storage you’ll require. Peak demand determines how much power the inverter needs to supply when several appliances are running together.

Read more about how we calculate daily electricity use in our article: What Is an Off-Grid Solar Load Evaluation?

3. Your Local Sunshine Hours in Winter

Your location makes a big difference to solar performance, particularly in winter. A house in Nelson will need fewer solar panels than a house in Dunedin with the same daily power use in winter.

We’ll consider the average official sunshine hours for your region, panel orientation, angle and shading to assess how much generation you can realistically expect in winter.

4. Sizing the System

Using this information, we’ll recommend a suitable Power Station system configuration.

Depending on your situation, this may be a base configuration or a starting point that can be expanded with additional solar panels and battery modules.

Take a look at our range of different system sizes and pricing.

5. Working Within Your Budget

We’ll look for ways to meet your requirements within your budget. That might mean reviewing appliance choices, considering different system configurations or planning for future expansion rather than buying everything at once.

There are limits, though, to what any budget can deliver.

Power Station specialises in professionally engineered off-grid systems, designed, assembled and tested in Auckland. We focus on building reliable systems that suit our customers’ needs, backed by ongoing technical support. Our focus is on providing long-term value for money than offering the lowest upfront price.

We recognise that we won’t be the right fit for everyone.

If your budget and requirements don’t align with our recommendations, we’ll explain why. You may decide to look at other suppliers or alternatives, and that’s perfectly reasonable.

Our aim is to help you understand your options, whether or not you become our customer.

What Will You Receive?

The most helpful thing you’ll get at the end of the discussion is an honest assessment of what size system you’ll need, based on the information you provide.

This includes the cost of components, installation and an approved auto-start generator (yes, you’ll probably need one).

Most of the time we can give you this at the end of the phone or video call.

If your project requires more investigation, or you’d like to take things further, we can provide a more detailed customised report with equipment recommendations and pricing.

There’s no obligation to buy and our design service is free. We’re just happy to help you with any questions.

How to Get Started

It’s easy to get started. Just click this link to book a time, or get in touch.

Start by telling us a little about your property and what you’re planning, and we’ll take it from there.