The farm’s large roofs, set against the farm’s consumption.

Draw the first building on the aerial photo and continue with Draw next building part: the barn, the machinery shed, the farmhouse or an extension. Each building gets its own roof, its own pitch and its own roofing material.

The roof faces are listed with the building’s name first, so you can see which roof the panels are on. The shading analysis takes every drawn building into account, and trees and poles are added as obstacles that cast shade.

A long gable roof is raised with the built-in Gable option, or with Inner edges when the building has an extension. You set the pitch between 0 and 60 degrees, and the ridge is dragged in 3D until the roof matches.

Sheet-metal roofs are common on farm buildings. The register has mounting systems for both standing-seam and trapezoidal sheet metal from Weland and Nordmount, and for clay and concrete tiles on older buildings. Fill a roof face with panels, and the designer keeps the edge distance and the clearance around chimneys and vents.

The designer has profiles for houses, housing associations and businesses, but none for agriculture. A farm with milking, grain drying or cooling has a rhythm of its own, and it only shows in the hourly readings.

Download the hourly readings from the grid operator’s customer portal as CSV and upload the file in step 2. Quarter-hour values are summed to hours, summer time is converted and a file that spans several years gives the latest twelve months. Gaps are filled with the same hour from the week before, and the designer warns you about it.

The farm and the consumption are shared, while panels, inverter, battery and mounting belong to the variant. For example, put only the barn’s south-facing slope in one variant and both buildings in the next, and see what each gives.

The comparison shows the variants in columns: system size, annual yield, self-consumption, self-sufficiency, price, savings and payback period. Up to eight variants fit in one project, and the report can show them side by side.

The inverter is chosen from the register, with search by power, brand or model. String automatically lays out as few and as long strings as the inverter allows and checks every string against the datasheet: the open-circuit voltage at −25 °C, the operating voltage at 70 °C and the current per input.

Enter the ground snow load from Boverket’s Swedish snow map and the reference wind speed for the site. The designer calculates the snow on the roof and the wind pressure to the Swedish BFS 2024:6 with Eurocode, roof face by roof face, and gives the number of fixings per panel and the largest c/c spacing per rail for the chosen system. Other countries’ National Annexes are not applied.

Under More load options you choose the safety class and whether the roof has snow guards, which stop the snow from sliding off and make the shape coefficient at least 0.8. Under BFS 2024:6, chapter 2, §§ 6–7, larger agricultural buildings may be assigned to safety class 2 and smaller ones to safety class 1. The calculation is preliminary and is confirmed in the manufacturer’s calculation before ordering.

If the farm is run as a business, choose Business as the customer type, and the price is calculated excluding VAT. The electricity prices in step 2 are then also entered excluding VAT.

The savings per year are calculated from the yield, the farm’s consumption hour by hour and the electricity prices. The payback period is the price divided by the savings per year. Both are estimates and are presented as such in the report.