Most people arrive here holding something. A quote with a number at the bottom of it. A municipal bill that crept up again. A photograph of the roof they keep meaning to measure properly. The questions underneath are usually the same few: does the direction my roof faces actually matter, what does the battery really do once the sun is gone, and if power goes back the other way, who is keeping count at the meter?
Roof to Meter is where those questions get worked through in plain English, all the way from the tiles above your head to the reading on the municipal meter. The ground covered runs across roof orientation, how panels, batteries and inverters behave as a set rather than as separate shopping items, and how to size a system from a real bill plus a list of the loads you are not willing to lose. There is writing on SSEG applications and the standards that grid-tied work in this country has to meet — NRS 097-2-1, SANS 10142-1 — and on the quieter subjects that only surface later: monitoring, maintenance, warranty wording, and what the end of a system's working life looks like. Self-consumption, feed-in credits and payback get the same treatment, with every assumption left in plain sight so you can replace it with your own figures. The point is not to steer you towards one brand or one size. It is to hand you the vocabulary to read a proposal properly and judge it on your own terms.
We are The North-Facing Neighbours — South African homeowners and long-term renters who began exactly where many readers are standing now, with load-shedding, a municipal bill, and a pile of questions nobody close by could answer.
What sits on these pages comes out of ordinary living rather than a research desk. Bills kept and compared across seasons. Roofs walked with a tape measure and a compass, arguing about whether that tree counts. Load lists scribbled on the back of an envelope and rewritten the evening a kettle turned out to matter more than anyone expected. The same awkward question put to installers twice, to see whether the answer stayed the same. Battery apps opened at nine at night just to watch where the charge had actually gone. Across different houses and different municipalities, the paperwork and the lived result do not always agree, and the parts that held up are the parts worth passing on.
One thing said plainly: this is not an institution. Nobody here is your installer, your electrician or your engineer, and nothing on this site stands in for advice from a qualified professional who has been on your roof and opened your distribution board. Where a subject falls outside what we know from our own experience, that gets said out loud instead of padded over. Where numbers appear, so do the assumptions behind them. Knowing the edge of your own knowledge is not a weakness — it is exactly why a neighbour's account is worth more than a brochure's.
So take your time looking around. If something you came here for is not answered yet, or you have spotted a place where we have it wrong, that is worth an email. You can reach The North-Facing Neighbours at [email protected], or use the form on the contact page.