About Brightfell
A small firm that would rather sell you fewer panels
Three of us, based in Kirkby Lonsdale, working across Cumbria, north Lancashire and the western dales. We started Brightfell after a decade of installing arrays that were sized to roofs instead of to households.
The reason most solar quotes are optimistic is not dishonesty. It is that the number is easy to produce and hard to check: take the array size, multiply by a generous yield, multiply by the import tariff, divide the install cost by the answer. Nobody is lying. Everybody is leaving things out.
We built a model that puts them back in, and then we put the model on the website rather than in a sales appointment. If it makes an array look worse than the quote you already have, that is the point.
In practice this means we specify smaller arrays than our competitors on the same roofs, we turn down about one job in five at the meter-data stage, and we publish what every finished install actually produced.
Who turns up
Three people, and you will meet all of them
NF
Nell Fairhurst
Founder and surveyor
Twelve years on roofs before she got tired of quoting arrays that were too big. Does every survey herself and writes every quote.
TE
Tobias Ekwueme
Electrical lead
NICEIC approved, does the design, the DC and AC first fix and the commissioning. Chooses the inverters, and will argue about them.
SG
Sinead Garvey
Install manager
Runs the scaffold, the roofers and the schedule, and is the person who tells you honestly when the weather has cost you a day.
Credentials
What we are registered with, and what that gets you
MCS
Microgeneration Certification Scheme. Without it your installation cannot be registered and you cannot apply for an export tariff.
NICEIC
Electrical competence, assessed annually. The certificate at handover is only worth what the scheme behind it is worth.
RECC
Renewable Energy Consumer Code. Sets what a quote has to contain and what happens if a job goes wrong.
Insurance-backed warranty
Our five year workmanship warranty is underwritten, so it survives us.
Next step
Come and argue with the figures
We would rather have the conversation before you buy than after. Bring the quote you already have and we will run it through the same model.