As the City of Cape Town’s website states: “By investing in a small wind turbine for your roof or installing a solar photovoltaic system, you can start generating your own electricity. This is perhaps the greatest contribution you can make to ensuring energy security for the future.”

This we decided to do, so we hunted around on the Internet for a suitable installation company in Cape Town (as one can imagine, it is quite a capital investment and one is very wary of “fly by night” companies). Eventually we decided — mainly from the testimonials and the projects completed on one website — on mSolarPower. We contacted them.

Mark Becker, a most passionate advocate of alternative energy generation visited us in his Nissan Leaf, and armed with a laptop full of case studies convinced us that a 4kW PV system with battery backup (for Eskom planned load shedding events) would be the most suitable as our average consumption from the grid is about 25kWs a day.

As they were quite busy, we had to wait a month before installation could begin, but with his most competitive quote (far less than I had imagined) we gave Mark the go-ahead. It took three days to install. And I cannot stress how professional one of his installers, Allan and his team, proved to be. Neat, on time, polite and most knowledgeable (and a great character to boot). It should be noted that each installation is bespoke… each location has its own challenges. With us being at the coast with strong salt-laden SE winds with inevitable corrosion, mSolar used stainless steel supports for the 30 degree angled, north-aligned panels, and doubled up on the possible stress loads that the PV panels would be subjected to.

To date, we are generating more power than our household requires. And can look forward to another 25 or more years of free power, free from load shedding whilst reducing our electricity bill dramatically.

Obviously we have no experience of other installers but I cannot fault mSolarPower with their crew, professionalism, equipment and costs. I heartily recommend them.