Community sports clubs live and die by running costs. Floodlights, showers, kitchen, bar fridges, changing-room heating — a clubhouse in use through a Scottish winter is a small commercial electricity bill arriving every month. Every pound the club spends on grid power is a pound that isn’t going toward pitches, kit, or juniors’ subs.
Kinross Rugby Club came to us wanting to change that equation.
The brief
The clubhouse runs a three-phase supply — sensible for a building with mixed heavy loads (hot water, cooking, floodlights, refrigeration) that hit different phases at different times. Any solar system had to be three-phase too, or two-thirds of the load would keep importing at full rate no matter how much sun was on the roof.
We also needed the install to be clean enough to not disrupt the club’s operations. Training nights, match days, social events — the clubhouse doesn’t have a quiet week to spare. So the work was staged around the fixtures calendar.
What we installed
- Rooftop solar array across the available clubhouse roof — the drone footage shows the layout
- 20 kW three-phase hybrid inverter — balances solar generation and battery discharge evenly across all three phases, so every phase of the clubhouse load benefits
- 10 kWh battery storage — carries evening loads (post-match showers, bar trading, lighting) on stored solar rather than imported grid
- Metering and monitoring so the committee can see the savings in black and white, not take anyone’s word for it
Why three-phase matters on a clubhouse
A single-phase solar system on a three-phase supply is a common installer mistake on commercial and community buildings. It generates fine — but only offsets the load on whichever phase the inverter is wired to. The other two phases carry on pulling from the grid at full tariff. On paper the system works; on the bill, two-thirds of consumption is untouched.
A proper three-phase inverter fixes that. Generation and battery discharge are balanced automatically across all three phases, so the whole building benefits. It’s a bigger piece of kit and more expensive, but on a three-phase supply it’s the only configuration that actually does what the customer was sold.
Working with Calum
Calum Love commissioned the project on the club’s behalf and was a pleasure to work with throughout — clear on what the club needed, realistic about scheduling around fixtures, and straight-talking about budget. Exactly the kind of customer relationship that makes a community project land well.
Outcome
Commissioned March 2026. Over a full calendar year, the system is sized to cover the bulk of the clubhouse’s daytime consumption directly from solar and carry evening loads from stored energy — cutting a meaningful chunk off the club’s electricity spend and reinvesting that saving into what the club actually exists to do.