A care home that never switches off
Florence Care Homes Ltd runs a residential care home in Colchester. Heating, lighting, laundry, kitchens, care around the clock. A care home doesn't get to power down at night or close at the weekend, so the electricity meter never stops turning, and neither does the bill. Every pound spent on energy is a pound that can't go into resident care. The management team wanted that number down, and they wanted to run a home that was kinder to the environment their residents live in. So they came to us to see what a roof full of solar could actually do for a building that runs 24 hours a day.
Round-the-clock power, on a split roof, without disturbing residents
A care home is one of the hardest buildings to cut costs in, because you can't cut the load. The lights stay on, the heating stays on, people are being cared for at 3am the same as 3pm. On top of that, the roof wasn't one clean south-facing slope. It ran across south and east-facing sections at a 30° pitch, so a lazy panel layout would waste half the day. And whatever we did, it had to happen around residents and staff who were living and working in the building the whole time. No shutting the home for a fortnight while we fitted it.
A 23.8 kWp system, split across two roof faces
We turned the split roof from a problem into the plan. Panels went on both the south and east-facing sections, so the array catches the morning sun on one side and the midday sun on the other. That spreads the generation across the day, which suits a building that's drawing power from dawn to dark. We ran the whole job end to end, site visit and design through to install and commissioning, and scheduled it around the home so residents and staff carried on as normal. The total came to £21,000.
- 56 × Jinko 425W panels (23.8 kWp total), picked for efficiency and long life
- 2 × Fox G10.5kW single-phase inverters
- Dual-orientation layout across south and east roof faces at a 30° pitch
- Installed around a live care home with minimal disruption, and built to UK electrical and building regs
Up to 40% of a 24-hour building's power, made on its own roof
The system now generates 24,000 to 26,000 kWh a year, covering 35% to 40% of everything the home uses straight from clean power. In cash that's roughly £4,000 to £4,400 off the bill every year, about £367 a month, and £100,000 to £110,000 across the system's life, with the full £21,000 paid back in around 5.5 to 6 years. After that it's decades of near-free electricity, and the money saved goes back into care for residents.
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.
