Solset Design Studio
From a pin on a map to a priced quotation.
Trace the roof, pack the array, study the shade, stand the structure up and price it — inside the CRM that already holds the customer. The drawing, the bill of materials and the quotation are one record.
Unit 2 shed
Greenfield Foods
28.61° N
site coordinates
Satellite
imagery loaded
- 10 solar designs/mo
- on the Professional plan
- 25 solar designs/mo
- on the Growth plan
- ₹499
- one design, on any plan, no subscription
- 5
- design states — approving is separate from drawing
A design tool that knows who the customer is.
Most solar companies draw in one product, price in a spreadsheet and sell in a third. Every hand-off is a chance for the quotation to stop matching the drawing.
Create a 3D solar design in about 5 minutes
Recorded in the product: trace the roof, lay out the panels, see it in 3D, then take the bill of materials and the STAAD.Pro export.
A 3D design, start to finish, in five minutes — roof, panels, 3D view, bill of materials and the STAAD.Pro file, recorded in the product.
Included from Professional — 10 / month, and 25 / month on Growth. Also sold on its own as a Flexi module — or buy a single design for ₹499, on any plan including Free. See plans
Point at the panel that loses the sun.
Shading is the difference between a design that performs and one that disappoints. Drag the hour and the month and watch a water tank take the corner of the array.
Shade study
Drag the hour and the month. Watch the tank's shadow cross the array.
9:00 am · Dec
Sun 23° up, bearing 136°
An illustration. The sun position is real — the same calculation the Studio uses, for 28.6° N. The roof, the tank and the flat projection are schematic. In the Studio the outline is your own, obstruction heights are measured from elevation data, and every panel is scored on irradiance across the whole year.
Every panel is scored, not the roof
Solar access is computed per module across the year, so a partly-shaded panel is flagged individually rather than averaged into a roof-wide figure.
A moment, and a year
One frame — December, 9 am — is always harsher than the annual average. Both are shown, and never presented as the same number.
Obstructions are measured
Heights come from elevation data for the site where it is available, and are labelled as measured or assumed. The tool never quietly guesses a tank is two metres tall.
Tilt it up and fewer panels fit. “Is this the best we can do?”
The classic rooftop trade-off, computed rather than estimated: the slider runs the Studio's own row-pitch function — the same one the packer uses — and the worked example below runs the configuration-gap engine on the same job.
An illustration of a real calculation: the pitch is computed by the Studio's own requiredRowPitch, which walks the sun across the worst day of the year at 28.6° N and keeps each row clear of the one behind between 9 and 3 solar time.
- Row pitch
- 2.93 m
- Row packing (GCR)
- 77%
- Modules on 300 m²
- 90
- Capacity
- 52.65 kWp
Against 5°, this tilt costs 11 modules on the same roof (101 → 90).
You can override the pitch and the Studio applies it exactly as typed — a cleaning walkway, a target capacity or an MMS the customer already bought all beat the solstice. What it will not do is quietly derate the yield to match: a tight pitch makes the estimate optimistic, and the Studio says so beside the number it inflates.
A worked example on the 30.42 kWp shed above: what the chosen plane gives up against the best one — and what chasing the best one would actually cost.
+2,480 kWh
a year, 5.4% more
At the best plane (30° / 180°) instead of the chosen 10°, the same 30.42 kWp would make 48,344 kWh rather than 45,865 — worth ₹19,840 a year.
- Attributable to tilt
- +2,480 kWh
- Attributable to bearing
- none
-23 modules
off the same roof
A steeper tilt throws a longer shadow, so the rows have to move apart. On 300 m² of usable roof that is 23 fewer modules — capacity the headline figure quietly assumed you would keep.
−9,875 kWh
a year, ₹79,000 worse
Net of the modules it costs, the “best” plane loses on this roof. The Studio says so in words rather than recommending a tilt that generates less — and that is the whole reason this calculation exists.
Both planes are compared with shading held constant, so the only thing moving is orientation — which is why the 45,865 kWh here is a little above the 44,100 kWh the finished design estimates for the same roof, where the parapet and the tank are in the way. An illustration of one worked example.
The money figure only appears when the customer's own tariff is known from a bill they uploaded — there is no default rate, because an invented one ends up inside a quotation. And the optimum is a benchmark, not a recommendation: on a flush roof the tilt and bearing are the building's, and no software should tell somebody to turn a shed.
The steel is part of the design. And the analysis will fail it.
Pick the frame the way a fabricator names it, and the takeoff follows: legs per position, member lengths, ballast and cost per watt. Then wind loads to IS 875 Part 3, a 3D frame actually solved, an IS 800:2007 member check, and a STAAD.Pro .std file your engineer can open.
Seven mounting types, named the way a fabricator names them
Double pole, static
Front and back legs at a fixed tilt — the commonplace RCC rooftop frame.
- Legs per position
- 2
- Front height
- 0.30 m
- Back height
- 1.49 m
Table designer
2P × 13A plant's structure is engineered as ONE table and replicated — “2P × 13” is two modules high in portrait, thirteen across.
Per table — what an engineer certifies
14.93 m
Length
4.58 m
Slope depth
14
Columns
Per plant — procurement only
624
Modules
336
Columns
365.0 kWp
Capacity
Wind force and uplift per column belong to the table, and do not grow because the plant is bigger. Building 400 of these does not load one column any harder than building one.
What it is not
- It is not a substitute for a signed structural certificate.It is engineering work your engineer can check and take responsibility for — never a document to hand a DISCOM or a customer in place of one.
- Only hollow steel sections get a verdict.Square and rectangular hollow sections are checked exactly. Channels, angles and pipes carry placeholder stiffness and return not checked, with the reason. Aluminium is governed by a different code and is not checked either. A confident wrong verdict would be worse than an honest refusal.
- We do not claim the numbers match STAAD.Pro.The exported model is built from the same geometry and loads the report solves, but we have not run it through STAAD.Pro and compared reactions. Treat the export as a starting model for your engineer, not as a verified agreement.
- Expect red on default sections.The wind coefficient is deliberately conservative, so a default frame at a high basic wind speed can come back well over 100% utilisation. That is the check working.
Nothing reaches a customer until somebody says so.
A design has a life of its own: drawn, checked, sent, decided. The person who draws it does not have to be the person who clears it.
Five states, not two
- 1DraftStill being worked on.
- 2In reviewWith a colleague for a technical check.
- 3SharedSent to the customer.
- 4FinalThe option being taken forward.
- 5SupersededAn option that was not taken. Filed away.
Parts you can actually order. Four documents, one design.
Modules and inverters come from your own product catalogue, with the datasheet figures that matter to the maths — so the bill of materials is a purchase order waiting to happen, and the documents all describe the same design.
ALMM and DCR flagsIndia
ALMM List-I/II and Domestic Content flags on a module, for grid-connected and subsidised work under the Indian market's own rules. An unticked flag means unknown, not “ineligible” — so it warns rather than blocks. These fields only appear for Indian workspaces.
A rate only ever comes from a product the line actually matched
Nothing is interpolated or averaged. An unmatched line arrives at zero and the builder tells you how many still need a price — because a blank gets filled in, and a plausible guess gets sent to a customer.
The ones an engineer asks.
Design your next job before lunch.
Create a free workspace and put one real roof through it — your first design is free. Take it as far as a quotation. If that is not faster than how you work today, you have lost an hour.