Questions
The questions clients actually ask
Cost, sizing, timelines, warranties and what happens when something breaks — answered with numbers where numbers exist, and with an honest "it depends" where they do not. If yours is not here, call and ask it.
Cost and payment
What it costs, when it is paid, and what the money buys.
- How much does a solar system cost in Pakistan?
- It depends on capacity, module and inverter selection, structure type and whether it is roof or ground mounted — so any figure quoted before those are decided is a guess. What I can tell you is how the cost is built: equipment at wholesale market prices with every original supplier invoice shown to you, installation at cost, and a 4% consultancy fee on the total invoiced after commissioning. You see the components rather than one number with an unstated margin inside it.
- When do I pay you?
- The consultancy fee is invoiced once the system is installed, tested and generating — not at signing, and not at delivery. If the system never runs, I am not paid. Equipment and installation are paid to the suppliers and contractors directly, at the prices on their own invoices, which reach you in their names.
- Do you take any commission from suppliers?
- No. That is the whole basis of the model. Equipment is bought at wholesale market prices and every original invoice reaches you in the supplier own name, dated and itemised. Wholesale prices for panels and inverters in Pakistan are checkable, and I expect clients to check them — the arrangement only works if the paperwork survives scrutiny.
- Is there a minimum project size?
- There is a point below which the arithmetic stops working, and I will tell you when you are under it rather than take the work anyway. Four percent of a small domestic job does not cover the engineering time that job deserves, so below roughly 20 kW I will either say so upfront or point you to an installer I trust. Industrial and commercial work has no practical upper limit.
- Can you help me get financing or a bank loan for solar?
- I am not a financing intermediary and I take no commission from any lender, so I have nothing to sell you here. What I can do is produce the technical documentation a bank asks for — the design, the bill of materials, the generation estimate and the cost breakdown — in a form that survives credit review. Several banks in Pakistan run solar financing products; the terms change often enough that you should get current numbers directly rather than from me.
Sizing and generation
How big a system should be, and what it will actually produce.
- What size solar system do I need?
- It is set by your daytime consumption, not by your roof area or your total bill. Since net billing arrived in February 2026, a unit you consume as you generate it is worth your full tariff while an exported unit is worth roughly a third of the old rate — so the capacity worth installing is the capacity you can use during daylight. The starting point is twelve months of bills, your sanctioned load and phase, and an honest account of which hours your heavy loads actually run.
- How much roof area does a solar system need?
- As a working figure, roughly 100 square metres of usable, unshaded roof per 20 kW with conventional module sizes and spacing. But area is a constraint rather than a design input: the system is sized against your consumption first and then checked against whether the roof can carry it. If it cannot, that is the point at which ground mounting or a smaller system gets discussed.
- Will solar eliminate my electricity bill completely?
- Almost never, and you should be sceptical of anyone who says otherwise. Grid-tied systems do not generate at night, most bills carry fixed charges that generation does not touch, and many industrial and larger commercial bills include a maximum-demand charge set by your peak draw — which solar only reduces if your peak happens to fall in daylight. A well-sized system substantially reduces a bill. It does not usually zero one.
- How much does solar generation drop in winter and monsoon?
- Meaningfully, and any projection that does not account for it is optimistic. Winter days are shorter and the sun is lower, so daily output falls well below summer peaks; monsoon weeks bring extended cloud. This is exactly why I publish the Simta Foods monitoring record with its downtime rather than a single headline figure — annual performance is what matters, and it is made of good months and bad ones.
- How long do solar panels last?
- Tier-one modules typically carry a 12-year product warranty and a 25 to 30-year performance warranty, with output degrading gradually rather than failing outright. In practice the module is rarely what ends a system life; inverters have a shorter service life, typically warranted 5 to 10 years, and are the component you should expect to replace at least once over the life of the array.
Timeline and installation
How long it takes, who does the work, and what it disrupts.
- How long does a solar installation take?
- For a domestic system, usually two to four weeks from order to commissioning. For an industrial project in the hundreds of kilowatts, six to twelve weeks is realistic — inverter procurement lead time is normally the binding constraint rather than installation labour. The net metering or net billing application with your distribution company runs alongside and can add several weeks on its own.
- Who physically installs the system?
- Installation teams I have worked with for years, available at around 24 hours notice. I do not carry them on payroll, which is part of why there is no overhead loaded into your equipment price. I am on site personally for the stages that decide whether a system lasts twenty years — structure anchoring, DC termination and earthing — and I commission it myself.
- Will installation disrupt my business or home?
- Less than people expect. Structure and array work happens around your operating hours. There is normally one unavoidable outage for the AC-side changeover and metering work, typically a few hours, and it is scheduled with you in advance rather than sprung on you. For a showroom or a plant that cannot stop, that window is agreed before the work starts.
- Does a solar installation damage my roof?
- It should not, and when it does the cause is almost always waterproofing detail at the penetrations rather than the array itself. This is one of the stages I attend personally, because it is invisible once finished and it is the most common source of regret I hear about from owners whose systems were installed by someone else. On a roof in poor condition, the honest advice is sometimes to repair it before mounting anything on it.
Net metering and policy
The regulatory side, with dates on every figure.
- What is the difference between net metering and net billing?
- Under net metering, units you exported offset units you imported at close to parity — the meter effectively ran backwards. Under net billing, introduced by NEPRA in February 2026 under the Prosumer Regulations 2026, export and import are priced separately and exported units are bought back at roughly a third of the old rate. The application process is broadly similar; what changed is the value of exporting, and therefore the system size that makes sense. These figures were last verified on 29 July 2026.
- Is solar still worth installing after net billing?
- Yes, but sized differently. The change barely touches a site that consumes what it generates as it generates it — a mill, a cold store, a factory on a day shift, a household with someone home through the afternoon. What it does penalise is capacity beyond your own daytime load, which now pays back roughly three times slower. Filling the roof stopped being the right default; matching your load did not.
- How long does net metering approval take?
- Several weeks is typical, varying by distribution company and by how complete the file is on submission. I will not promise a date because the timeline belongs to the DISCO rather than to me. What is within anyone control is starting the application alongside installation rather than after it, and attending the inspection with someone who can answer technical questions on the spot.
- Can I use my system before the net meter is installed?
- Yes. The system generates and offsets your own consumption from the day it is commissioned. What you cannot do until the bidirectional meter is fitted is receive credit for exported units. On a site whose load matches its generation well, most of the financial benefit is already arriving while the paperwork is still moving.
Maintenance, warranty and after-sales
What happens in year two, and in year eleven.
- How often do solar panels need cleaning?
- It depends on your site rather than on a standard interval. A plant beside an unpaved road in an agricultural district soils far faster than an urban rooftop, and both vary by season. The honest method is to measure output before and after a clean and set the frequency from what your own array actually loses — a generic quarterly schedule is a guess that is either wasting money or leaving output on the roof.
- Who provides the warranty, and what does it cover?
- The manufacturer, not me — and you get the paperwork. Tier-one modules typically carry a 12-year product warranty and a 25 to 30-year performance warranty; inverters typically 5 to 10 years, with an extension usually available at the point of purchase rather than afterwards. What I add is keeping the register with the expiry dates and raising claims on your behalf, because a warranty nobody chases is worth very little.
- What happens if something goes wrong after commissioning?
- You call the engineer who designed and commissioned the system, not a call centre. Generation checks, fault diagnosis and manufacturer warranty claims are included on projects I deliver rather than sold as a service contract. I do not publish a guaranteed response time in hours, because I am one engineer and a number I could not honour during a week spent commissioning elsewhere would be worse than no commitment at all.
- Do solar panels work during load shedding?
- A standard grid-tied system does not — it shuts down when the grid goes down, by design and by regulation, so that it cannot energise a line an engineer may be working on. Backup during an outage requires a hybrid inverter with storage and the appropriate changeover arrangement. If outage backup is what you actually want, say so at the start, because it changes the inverter specification rather than being something added later.
- Can you take over a system another company installed?
- Yes, starting with an inspection — I cannot be accountable for a system I have not seen. It is a common enquiry, usually because the original installer has become unreachable. That first visit frequently establishes that the recurring problem is a design fault rather than a lack of maintenance, which is more useful to know than any amount of ongoing service would have been.
Working with me
Scope, coverage and the things I decline.
- Where in Pakistan do you work?
- Industrial and commercial work is taken across Pakistan — delivered projects include Vehari, DG Khan, Rangpur and Sialkot. Domestic work is concentrated in Lahore and the cities around it, deliberately: the after-sales commitment on this site is that the engineer who commissioned your system comes back when you call, and that stops being true at a five-hour drive.
- Can I hire you for the design only and use my own contractor?
- Yes. You receive the single-line diagram, string layout, cable and protection sizing, earthing design, structural loading check and a bill of materials specified to model number, and you build it with whoever you like. The bill of materials being model-specific is what lets you verify that what arrives on site is what was designed.
- Will you review a quotation I have already been given?
- Yes, and it is often the best-value work I do. It is a short engagement that identifies what is missing — usually protection detail, cable sizing justification, string sizing at temperature extremes, or structural verification. Where three quotations differ by amounts nobody can account for, a review normally accounts for them.
- Do you ever tell clients not to install solar?
- Regularly. Sites whose load is almost entirely at night, buildings on a lease shorter than the payback period, roofs that cannot structurally carry an array, and cases where power factor correction or a motor replacement would save more per rupee than generation would. I have no margin on equipment, so a project I talk you out of costs me a fee and nothing else — which is precisely why the advice is worth having.
- How do I start?
- Call or message me with your city, roughly what you spend on electricity monthly, and whether the site is a home, a business or a plant. If it is worth a site visit I will say so and we will arrange one; if it is not, I will tell you that instead. Nothing is quoted before a site assessment, and the assessment starts with twelve months of your bills.
Not answered here
Ask the question directly
These answers are general by necessity. Your load profile, your tariff and your roof are not. Tell me your city, roughly what you spend on electricity each month, and whether it is a home, a business or a plant — and I will tell you whether a site visit is worth anyone's time.
Or call 0312 4945198