A community building that runs hard in daylight
The Mosque & Islamic Centre of Brent sits in Cricklewood, in North West London. It is a busy place of worship and a community hub, open through the day with steady demand for lighting, heating, ventilation and audio right across the building. Most of that power gets used while the sun is up, which is exactly when solar earns its keep. Every pound spent on electricity is a pound that could have gone to the congregation and the work of the centre instead. As utility bills kept rising, that trade-off got harder to ignore.
Cut the bills, and keep the savings running after dark
The committee didn't want a token gesture on the roof. They wanted the maximum number of panels the building could safely carry, and enough storage to keep the benefit going into the evening, when a community centre is often at its busiest. That meant working a real roof, not a blank one, with shaded sections to plan around and a three-phase supply feeding a high-occupancy building. Get the sizing or the storage wrong and you either waste roof space or export cheap power you should have kept. They also wanted to show the congregation the centre was serious about cutting its carbon, not just its costs.
A 27.26 kWp three-phase system with real storage behind it
We filled the usable roof and built proper storage in behind it, sized for a building that draws power all day. We ran the whole job end to end, from feasibility and the DNO application through to installation and commissioning, and we kept disruption to the centre's daily activities to a minimum so worship and community life carried on. The panels were arranged to use every viable section of roof while planning around the shading.
- 58 × DMEGC 470W panels (27.26 kWp total), laid out around the roof's shaded sections
- 1 × SigenStor EC 25.0TP three-phase hybrid inverter
- 4 × SigenStor BAT 10.0 batteries giving 36 kWh of usable storage for evening use
- Bird mesh fitted to all pitched-roof panels, and the whole system G99 DNO-approved
Around 70% of the centre's power, made on its own roof
The system now generates about 25,900 kWh a year, which covers roughly 70% of the centre's electricity demand. Because the building is busy through the day and has 36 kWh of storage, almost all of that generation is used on site rather than sold back cheaply, which is the most valuable outcome for a community building. In cash that's around £5,440 a year off the bill, and about £136,000 across the system's life, with a payback of roughly six to seven years. It also keeps around 5,440 kg of CO₂ out of the air every year.
Generation and saving figures on this page are estimates, modelled from the system size and a typical UK yield. They are not meter readings. Your own figures depend on your roof, your usage and the weather in any given year, and we confirm them from a real assessment rather than a model.
