Solar panels on the roof of a red-brick Durban home with a covered patio and swimming pool.

Solar Systems for Your Home

Residential Solar Installations

Most solar quotes open with a panel count and a price, then leave you to work out whether it actually suits your home. We do it the other way around. A good residential solar power installation starts with how your household uses electricity, when your geyser kicks in, what’s still running at 7pm, how much you’re actually paying Eskom or your municipality each month, and the system is sized from there. That way you pay for the power you use, not for capacity sitting idle on your roof.

Residential Solar Installation, Built Around How Your Home Actually Uses Power

Before anyone quotes you on panels, it’s worth understanding your own consumption. A three-bedroom home where everyone’s out during the day has a very different load profile to one with a pool pump, a home office and air-conditioning running from midday. A residential solar installation matched to that profile does two things: it covers the loads that matter, and it stops you overspending on a system bigger than you need. We start every project with a consumption assessment based on your last few months of bills and the appliances you run. From there the numbers get specific, the right system size in kW, the panel count and whether a battery is needed.

Get a residential solar quote

Residential home with solar panels installed on the roof surrounded by green plants.

Assess your usage

from your bills

Size the system

right kW, no waste

Install and certify

CoC and SSEG handled

Four solar panels installed at a residential property in Kloof, Durban.

10kW hybrid, Pinetown

16 panels · 10kWh storage

Two workers installing solar panels on a tiled roof in Kloof, Durban - with a ladder leaning against the roof and palm trees in the background.

8kW backup, Hillcrest

12 panels · 8kWh storage

Deye solar inverter and battery system mounted on a brick wall, with a distribution board and wiring alongside.

6kW hybrid, Kloof

10 panels · 6kWh storage

What size solar system do I need?

The quickest way to size a system is to look at what you spend on electricity each month.

Under R1,500

3 kW

Lights, fridge, TV, Wi-Fi, small appliances

R1,500 – R3,000

5 kW

The above, plus a geyser element or pool pump

R3,000 – R5,000+

8 kW+

Aircon, multiple fridges, home office, heavy loads

Panel count follows from there, and this is where a lot of online guides go vague. A four-bedroom house in South Africa typically needs somewhere between 12 and 18 panels, but the real number depends on three things: the wattage of the panels used (higher-output panels mean fewer of them), how much of your roof faces north, and how much of your evening load you want to pull from a battery rather than the grid. Run a pool pump and two fridges and you’ll sit at the top of that range; a modest family home with gas cooking sits nearer the bottom. For a household without the bedroom detail, the same logic applies: most South African homes are covered by 8 to 16 panels, scaled to daily usage rather than floor area. A three-bed home running lights, a fridge, a TV, Wi-Fi and a washing machine is a different animal to one heating water electrically around the clock. If you’d rather not guess, we’ll size it for you. Book a free consumption-based assessment and you’ll get a recommended system size backed by your actual usage, not a ballpark.

Not sure which fits? We'll size it from your actual usage

Book a free assessment

Battery Backup Power

Residential solar battery storage solves solar’s obvious limitation, panels only produce while the sun’s up, but the heaviest household demand comes after dark. Storing your midday surplus lets you run the evening on your own power instead of buying it back at peak rates, and keeps essentials alive through an outage. A representative modern lithium (LiFePO4) home battery holds around 5kWh of usable energy per unit, discharges to roughly 90% depth of discharge without harm, and is warrantied for something like ten years or several thousand cycles. Units stack, so you scale storage to the home rather than the other way round. Storage also does something less obvious to the payback: it lifts how much of your own generation you actually use. A panels-only system spills its surplus to the grid, often for little in return. A battery captures that surplus and spends it at night, so more of every rand you invested displaces electricity you’d otherwise buy - which shortens the payback compared with panels alone.

Grid Tied, Hybrid or Off Grid Solar Systems?

Grid-tied systems are the cheapest to install. Your panels feed the home during the day, and where your municipality allows it, any surplus can be exported to the grid. The catch: a grid-tied system shuts down the moment the grid does. This trips up a lot of first-time buyers, grid-tied inverters are required by law to switch off during an outage so they don’t feed live power into lines that technicians may be working on. No grid, no solar, no backup. They suit homes with a stable supply that are purely after lower bills. Hybrid systems add a battery. You get the daytime savings of grid-tied plus stored power for the evening peak and for load shedding whenever it returns. This is the default for most residential installations. Off-grid systems cut the connection entirely and run the home on solar and batteries alone. They cost the most, because they need enough storage and generation to carry you through cloudy stretches with no grid to fall back on. They make sense for remote properties where a grid connection is poor, expensive or absent.

System Type	Backup Power	Relative Cost	Best suited to
Grid-Tied	No	Lowest	Homes with a stable supply, chasing bill savings only
Hybrid (with battery)	Yes	Mid-range	Most South African homes - savings plus backup
Off-grid	Yes, fully independent	Highest	Remote properties with poor or no gridconnection

The installation process, start to finish

The physical install on a typical home takes one to three days. The site assessment, system design, quote and municipal approvals around it add some lead time, so it's worth starting a few weeks ahead of when you want to be running on solar. Two pieces of paperwork matter more than most homeowners realise. A Certificate of Compliance (CoC) confirms the electrical work meets South African standards - without it the installation isn't legally usable, your insurer can decline a related claim, and you can't transfer the property until the wiring is signed off. SSEG registration is the second: any grid-connected system must be registered as Small-Scale Embedded Generation with your municipality, even if you never export a watt.

1

Site assessment

and consumption analysis

2

System design

and a fixed quote

3

Installation

one to three days on site

4

CoC and SSEG sign-off

certified and registered

Choosing the Right Solar Panels for Your Roof

Panels aren’t a single default product. The right choice depends on your roof - its size, its pitch, its material and how much of it catches the sun. Matching panel wattage and mounting to the specific roof is what pulls the most generation out of the space you have, rather than bolting on a standard kit and hoping. Residential solar panels have crept up in output over the years, with high-end models now well above 550W each. A higher-wattage panel is worth paying for when roof space is tight - fewer, more powerful panels let a small or awkward roof still reach the system size you need. On a large, unobstructed roof the wattage matters less, and value per rand becomes the deciding factor.

Adding storage can cost as much as the rest of the system combined, which is why a panels-only quote and a hybrid quote look so different. A few roof-specific points worth knowing. Flat roofs are fine, panels sit on angled frames to hit the right tilt, which adds a little to the cost but often gives more freedom over orientation. Tile roofs need proper hooks and flashing to stay watertight and carry a bit more labour than a metal IBR or Chromadek roof, which is the quickest to mount on. Flat concrete slabs are handled much like flat sheet roofs, with ballasted or bolted frames.

Component	Roughly what it accounts for
Solar panels	15–25% of the system cost
Inverter	15–25%
Battery storage (if included)	Often the largest single line, can match the rest combined

Frequently asked questions

A 5kW inverter comfortably covers a household's everyday load, fridge, TV, Wi-Fi, lighting, a washing machine and a few kitchen appliances running together. Where it gets tight is high-draw items like a geyser or air-conditioner switching on at the same time as everything else, which is exactly why sizing starts with your actual usage pattern rather than a generic spec sheet.

Neither is automatically better, it comes down to your load, not a straight upgrade. A 5kW system suits the typical three to four-bedroom household described above; an 8kW system earns its cost when you're running a pool pump, multiple fridges, air-conditioning or a home office on top of the everyday load. Sizing against your bill, not your budget, tells you which one you actually need.

Our 5 kW package costs R85,800 excluding VAT (R98,670 including VAT), covering a Deye 5 kW hybrid inverter, a 5.3 kWh lithium battery, eight 590 W Tier 1 panels, labour, travel and a CoC. Final pricing is confirmed after a free site inspection, as roof type, cabling and storage needs can change the cost.

The personal income tax rebate for solar panels - 25% of panel cost, capped at R15,000 - ended on 29 February 2024 and hasn't been renewed. It also never covered inverters or batteries, so it was a smaller saving than people expect even while it ran. The stronger financial case now is the payback from lower bills, not a rebate.

Yes, unless you've gone fully off-grid, which very few residential systems do. A hybrid system still draws from Eskom or your municipality when solar and battery aren't covering the load, so you'll keep a connection and a monthly bill.

Yes - any grid-connected solar system has to be registered as Small-Scale Embedded Generation (SSEG) with your local municipality, even if you never export power back to the grid. The process and paperwork vary by area, which is why it's handled as part of the installation rather than left to the homeowner.

In some municipalities, yes, through a feed-in or net-billing arrangement - but it isn't universal, and most residential systems are sized to use their own generation rather than export it. It's worth checking what your specific municipality allows before counting on it as a source of income.

For most South African homes, a hybrid system is the best choice. It runs your home on solar during the day, stores the surplus in a lithium battery for the evening, and keeps essentials running during load shedding, with the grid topping up when needed. Grid-tied systems cost less but shut down when the grid does, and off-grid suits remote properties with poor or no grid connection.

Most homes need between 8 and 16 panels, and a typical four-bedroom house needs around 12 to 18. The exact number depends on your monthly electricity use, the wattage of the panels, how much north-facing roof you have and how much evening load your battery needs to cover. With 590 W panels, our 5 kW package uses 8 panels and our 10 kW package uses 10.