Aberfeldy sits in the kind of Highland Perthshire landscape you drive through and don’t forget. The property on this install looks out across a valley that most people would pay to visit, let alone live on. Our brief was straightforward: add generation and storage without touching how the house reads from the road — slate roof, traditional proportions, nothing bolted on that shouldn’t be there.
Slate needs a different approach
Slate isn’t a forgiving surface. A careless contractor cracks tiles going up a ladder, let alone fitting rails. A properly planned install works with the slate:
- Fixings land on rafters, not on the slates themselves — identified via inspection from inside the roof before a single hook goes in
- Purpose-made slate hooks interleave with the existing slates so weather runs off correctly
- Any slate that comes out to access a rafter goes back in the same position, not thrown off the scaffold
- Flashings colour-matched to the existing roof so the result reads as one surface, not a patchwork
Cutting corners here shows up later as a leak, a split slate, or a line of panels that looks tacked-on rather than integrated. None of those are acceptable on a property like this.
What we installed
- On-roof solar array on the south-facing slate pitch
- 5 kW hybrid inverter — solar, battery, and grid handling in one unit
- 9.6 kWh battery storage — enough to carry a full evening’s base load on stored energy
- All fixings and flashings specified to match the existing roof detailing
Sized for a rural Highland home
Highland Perthshire in winter isn’t Glenrothes in winter. Properties up here tend to have higher peak loads — more heating, more lighting hours, more grid import on the shortest days. The 9.6 kWh battery was sized to absorb the best of summer generation for use through the darker months, and to reduce evening import year-round when solar production drops off.
Outcome
Commissioned December 2023. The system has now run through two full Scottish winters. The roof still looks like a slate roof. The house generates, stores, and uses more of its own power every year — and from the road, you’d barely know the panels were there.