Solar Installation: 9 Solar Panels in Calahonda, Mijas

Like many households on the Costa del Sol, our client was watching their electricity costs climb and wanted to take back control of them. Their goal was twofold: to generate as much of their own power as the roof would allow, and to store enough of it to keep drawing on solar energy after the sun went down rather than buying expensive grid electricity through the evening.

The client is one of a growing number of homeowners we’ve worked with on installations in Mijas, and the project began the same way they all do – with a free solar survey. We visited the property in person, flew a drone over the roof to capture its exact shape and pitch, scanned for shading from nearby trees and structures, and fed everything into our energy modelling software to build a proposal sized around the client’s real consumption.

The assessment confirmed an annual spend of €1,731.70, with bills sitting around €144 a month before solar. It also confirmed the defining challenge of the property. Our survey engineer Alan Manning found that the usable south-facing roof was limited and split across two pitched faces of the terracotta roof, which capped how many panels could sensibly be fitted.

Our energy assessment took into account:

• A split-orientation array spread across two faces of the pitched terracotta roof, limiting the usable south-facing area
• Mature pine and palm close to the south-west corner as potential shading sources
• An annual electricity spend of €1,731.70, weighted toward the cooler months
• The client’s wish to use stored solar in the evening and keep essential circuits live during any grid outage, which shaped the battery and back-up recommendation

That split-roof constraint shaped the whole proposal. With only two modest south-facing planes to work with, nine 600W panels was the sensible maximum – enough to make a real dent in the bill without crowding the roof or compromising output. Battery storage was built in from the start so the client could keep using their own solar into the evening, and we added a back-up box to keep essential circuits running through any grid outage. As with our 15-panel installation in Mijas, that client also wanted a system sized to make the maximum dent in rising energy costs, with storage to extend the benefit into the evening hours – the same priorities driving this project. On that basis the proposal projected a saving of €1,117.34 a year, cutting the average monthly bill from €144.31 to around €51.20 in the first year. The home joins our wider portfolio of solar installations across Málaga.