Somewhere in this country tonight, somebody is about to send money.

The quote came through on WhatsApp. The man was confident. He walked around the compound with
his phone out, looked up at the roof, and the number he gave is close to what she expected.
Now his account details are on her screen and her thumb is over the button.

She has never seen his work. She has never spoken to anybody he has worked for. Half the words
on the quote mean nothing to her, and it feels too late to start asking, because asking now
would feel like calling him a liar.

That moment is where most solar jobs in Nigeria are won or lost. Not on the roof. Not on
installation day. Right there, thumb over the button.

The twenty minutes before you pay

Buying solar is not like buying a fridge, and this is the part almost nobody says out loud.

A fridge either cools or it does not, and you know by that same evening. Solar has a cost, and
then it has a risk, and nobody ever quotes you the risk. The risk is that the money moves, the
work gets covered up, and you do not find out for six months whether you bought a system or an
expensive lesson.

A badly built system does not announce itself. It works beautifully for exactly as long as it
takes for you to pay and say thank you.

Before you pay, you have all the power in the conversation. You can ask anything, compare
anything, or walk away, and the worst it costs you is an awkward message. After you pay, you
have a receipt and a promise. The whole shift takes about twenty minutes.

Why the cheapest quote keeps winning

There is a joke among people who do this work. Nigerians buy solar two or three times before
they get it right.

It stops being funny once you have watched it happen. First the small system, bought on price.
It works for a while. Then the battery gives up, so a bigger battery goes in, which is the
second purchase and the one nobody plans for. Then eventually somebody sits down and works out
properly what the house needs. That is the third purchase, and it is the one that should have
happened first.

Here is why that is close to the default, and it is not because buyers are careless.

You asked how much. Everybody asks how much. But “how much” cannot be answered honestly until
somebody knows what the system has to carry, so the man who answers it fastest sounds the most
competent and quotes the lowest. He can win your job with a thinner battery and fewer panels,
and he knows the complaint will not arrive until the rains, by which time he has been paid.

He is not a villain. Really he is responding to what buyers reward. And every buyer who chooses on
price alone teaches three more installers to quote thinner next time.

Five kinds of people are quoting you

They are not five kinds of villain. Most are genuinely good at something, and that is what
makes it confusing, because a man can be excellent at his trade and still be the wrong person
for your house.

There is the market installer, who has wired more inverters than most graduates ever will and will absolutely get your lights on, but who never learned to calculate a load and has no address to go back to in eighteen months. Then the equipment seller, whose real business is moving stock, so the design follows his inventory rather than your load. Then the electrician who has added solar, and he is the trap, because he is the best of them at part of the job. There is the middleman, who subcontracts the actual work to somebody you never meet. And last, the engineering led installer, who asks about your house before he talks about equipment.

You do not have to identify them from a business card. You let your questions place them.

Eleven questions, and the pause before the answer

Eleven questions is all it takes, and the guide gives you every one of them with the good
answer, the weak answer, and what the weak answer actually tells you about the man in front of
you.

They start where every honest system starts. How did you size this to my house. On a bad night,
with guests and the ACs running, how many hours will the battery carry. What is the usable
capacity of that battery, not the number printed on the label. Are the panels sized for the
rainy season or for a good afternoon. Who carries the warranty, and what do I actually do when
something goes wrong.

But each question does two jobs, and the second one is the job people miss. There are the words
in the answer, and then there is what happens in the second before the answer arrives. We call
that second the pause. Once you learn to hear it, you cannot unhear it.

And this matters: a proper installer enjoys these questions. We get asked them and we are glad
to be asked, because it means we are talking to somebody who will still be happy in two years.
A good installer relaxes when the questions get real. A weak one gets uncomfortable. That
difference is the entire diagnostic, and it costs you nothing.

What should actually land on your site

The quote said one thing. Something arrives on the day. Nobody checks whether they match,
because by then everyone is busy and the lorry is blocking the gate.

Check the brand and the model against the quote, in writing, before installation day.
Photograph the serial numbers yourself, before anything goes on a wall. Confirm the units are
new rather than refurbished. Look at the battery pack: it should sit flat and square, never
swollen. And refuse, politely and completely, to let anything be installed and closed up before
you have seen it and recorded it.

None of that requires you to know anything technical. It requires a phone and twenty minutes.

What a good job looks like from where you are standing

You will never inspect an installation like an engineer, and you do not need to. Six things are
visible from the ground, and they tell you almost everything.

The roof, and how he sealed the fixings, because a leak two rooms away from the panel is still your leak. Protection on the solar side and the battery side, rated for that job. Cable somebody chose on purpose, seen before it disappears into conduit. Earthing that exists and that
he can point at. A board carrying labels, so the next person is not guessing. And a battery
living somewhere ventilated, dry, shaded and reachable.

Neat work matters, though not for the reason people assume. Neatness is not about pride. It is
the visible part of a habit that also applies to the parts you cannot see.

The payment schedule, and why our deposit is large

Most buyer advice says hold money back. We do not say that, and here is the honest reason.

Our terms are seventy per cent on order and thirty on completion, printed openly. A large
deposit is normal and correct in this market, because your installer is buying your equipment
with it, and equipment prices here move weekly. An installer who agrees to start on a very
small deposit is either funding your job with somebody else’s money, or buying the cheapest
thing available on the day.

So what protects you is not the size of the deposit. It is what the deposit is documented to
buy, and what the balance is tied to. Get a written specification of exactly what that money is
procuring, brand and model, before it leaves your account. Tie the balance to completion and
handover, not to a date. And never pay the balance before the system has been made to prove
itself on a real load, with NEPA cut, while you watch.

If it has already happened to you

Some people find this page after their first system, not before it.

If that is you, then let somebody say the thing nobody said at the time. You were not foolish,
and solar did not fail. You asked a reasonable question, you were handed a number instead of a
design, and the gap between those two things became your problem.

What can usually be recovered is more than people expect. Panels normally survive. Wiring, mounting and protection usually come right with a day of work. The battery is where the real loss tends to
be, because one that has been drained too deeply night after night has lost capacity
permanently, and no setting change reverses that.

So there is often a third option between living with it and starting again, which is correcting
what you already own. It is not always possible, and we will tell you plainly when it is not.
But bring us what you have before you buy everything twice.

What is inside the guide

  • The eleven questions, each with the good answer, the weak answer, and what the weak answer tells you
  • The five kinds of installer quoting in this market, and how to place the one in front of you
  • Five checks on the man himself, and the warranty trap that catches most buyers
  • What should arrive on site, and how to record it before anything is closed up
  • Six things you can see from the ground that tell you whether the job was done properly
  • How handover should work, and how to make a system prove itself before you pay the balance
  • A payment schedule that protects you, written against terms we actually offer
  • What can be recovered if you have already bought badly once
  • A pre-payment checklist, so the whole thing fits on one page beside you

Written by the team who design, supply and install these systems for homes, businesses and
government offices across Nigeria, and who run their own homes on the same equipment.

Get the guide

Most people buy solar three times before they get it right. This is how you buy it once.

Delivered as a PDF and an EPUB, so it reads on a phone as well as it prints.

Get the guide

Not ready to buy? Send us the quote you are holding. We will tell you honestly what we think of
it, and you get a straight answer whether you buy from us or not.

Or watch a few real installations first, on our YouTube channel.