Five lessons from year one in distributed solar

When we deployed our first hundred systems in 2024, we wrote down what surprised us. A year and four thousand systems later, here are the lessons that still hold.

1. The customer never sees the fault first

Telemetry catches degradation weeks before lights flicker. Battery cells drift. Charge controllers mis-route. Connectors corrode in coastal humidity.

By the time a customer notices, the loss has compounded for weeks. We learned to act on the signal, not the call.

2. The drive matters more than the parts

We service Kenya from Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu. A field visit to Marsabit takes a day. Carrying the wrong part costs another.

Dispatch with the right part in the van resolves 97 percent of faults on the first visit. Without it: 71 percent. The difference is the customer's trust.

3. Customers want to be told

A system that fails silently feels worse than a system that fails loudly. We send an SMS the moment our platform sees a fault.

"We see your system. Here is what it is doing. Here is what we are doing about it."

Customer satisfaction went up the day we shipped that text.

4. Cheap is the wrong question

The cheapest tariff is the one that fails. We learned to price for service, not just hardware.

A system without a service contract is a system that gets abandoned. We do not sell that one any more.

5. Most installs go right. Most service is preventive

By volume: 96 percent of installs need no service in year one. 87 percent in year two.

The hard work is keeping that curve up, not chasing the long tail of failures.

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We do not have all of this figured out. We are still learning what year three looks like. But the pattern is clear: the company that watches its fleet wins.