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A panel count written on the back of a survey sheet is a guess. It gets quoted, the customer agrees to it, and the first person to find out what the roof will really take is the fitter, with the scaffold already up and the van unloaded.
The design is where the job is actually decided: how many panels, on which roof planes, which way round, how they are strung and how far the cable has to run. Installa lets you settle all of that at the desk, on the customer’s own roof, before you promise anything.
Satellite imagery and a 3D height model of the building you are quoting.
Every panel checked against the roof edges and the obstacles as you move it.
The sun placed from the site’s own latitude and longitude, for any day and hour.
What you drew becomes the priced lines of the quote, at your prices.
Fourteen panels on a drawing become eleven on the roof once you have allowed for the ridge, the hip, the vent and the edge clearance. That is a return visit, a re-quote, or a margin you swallow.
Installa builds the roof from real satellite imagery and a 3D height model of the building, so you are laying panels on the shape that is actually there. Move one too close to an edge or an obstacle and it tells you before you have finished the design, not after you have sent the quote.
The sun is placed from the site’s real latitude and longitude, and you move it with a slider for the day of the year and another for the time of day. Set it to three in the afternoon in December and you can see how low the sun sits over the roof and which planes it still reaches.
Alongside it is the heat map: a year’s sunshine on every surface, taken from Google’s annual flux data and shown in colour. It is the quickest way to see that the north-west corner is never going to be worth panelling, and the quickest thing to show a customer who wants to know why you put them where you did.
From the design, Installa estimates what the system should generate in a year. That figure carries through to the quote, so the number you put in front of them came from the roof you drew rather than from a spreadsheet somebody built in 2019. Switch on the savings for a quote and the customer also sees the saving, the payback and a chart they can follow, with the assumptions printed beside them.
The panels, the inverter, the battery and the cable runs in the design become the priced lines of the quote at your own prices.
Most design tools are fine until the roof is not in the data, or the laptop is five years old.
Not every building is in the data, and some of it is years out of date. When there is nothing to work from, draw the roof planes by hand and carry on with the rest of the design as normal.
It runs in the browser, so there is nothing to install and nothing for anyone’s IT to approve. The designer adjusts what it draws to suit the machine it is running on, and the render setting can be turned down for older ones.
Look at a roof takes any address and shows you what is there, with no customer record and no job behind it. Useful while someone is still on the phone deciding whether to ask you out.
A design can be sent for approval before it is quoted. Whoever checks it can approve it, send it back for revision, or reject it with the reason written down. If you have one person who knows the awkward roofs, this is how everyone else gets the benefit of that, and how the reason a design was changed is still on the job a year later.
Better you know before you start than after.
The design is the start of the job, not a drawing you file away.
What has to be known about a roof before the price is written, from the desktop look to the checked design.
Read the guidePut in one real enquiry, draw the roof, check the design and send yourself the quote. You will know within the hour whether Installa would have caught the things that went wrong last month.
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