A care home that never switches off
Limes Care Home sits in Birmingham, postcode B38. It runs around the clock. Heating, lighting, call systems, laundry, and the specialist equipment residents rely on, all of it pulling power day and night, every day of the year. That constant load makes a rising energy bill a genuine problem, not something you trim by switching a few things off at night. The management wanted their utility costs under control and their carbon footprint down, without ever unsettling the people who live there. The tricky part was overhead.
Cut the bills without disrupting the residents
Two things made this harder than a standard commercial job. A care home can't be shut down while you work. You can't close a wing, and you can't have weeks of noise and strangers unsettling elderly residents. On top of that, the roof didn't face one clean direction. It was pitched at 27° across east, south and west faces, which takes more thought to design for than a single south slope. Size it wrong or lay it out badly and you leave generation on the table. Limes needed a system big enough to move a 24/7 energy bill, engineered around a working home full of people who couldn't be moved.
A 79.65 kWp system across three roof faces
We used the multi-orientation roof instead of fighting it. Panels went on the east, south and west slopes so the array catches sun from first light through to late afternoon, not just at midday. We ran the whole job end to end, from site visit and design through to install and commissioning, and planned every stage to keep disturbance to residents down. The total came to £55,000.
- 177 × DMEG 450W panels (79.65 kWp total), Tier 1 for stable long-term output
- 1 × Fox V50 50kW three-phase inverter
- Pitched roof at 27°, spread across east, south and west faces
- Installed around a live care home, planned to keep disruption to residents down
Close to 40% of the home's power, off its own roof
The array now generates between 73,000 and 80,000 kWh a year. That covers roughly around 40% of everything the home uses, straight off its own roof. In cash it works out at about £10,800 off the bill every year, close to £900 a month, and £270,000 across the system's 25-year life, with the full £55,000 paid back in about six years. After that the power is close to free, on a home that runs every hour of every day.
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.
