A few weeks ago I found myself looking through a handful of solar quotations. They’d all been produced for different homes, by different companies, at different prices, yet as I read through them it struck me just how similar they all looked. There were different brands of panels, different battery capacities and slightly different projections of annual savings, but beyond that there wasn’t much to separate them. If you weren’t familiar with the industry, I imagine they’d all appear perfectly sensible.

It made me wonder whether homeowners are sometimes asking quotations to answer a question they were never really designed to answer.

A quotation can tell you what you’re buying. It can list the equipment, explain the warranty and estimate how much electricity the system might generate over the coming years. What it can’t do is tell you what the experience of dealing with that company is actually going to be like, and if you’re making an investment that’s expected to sit on your roof for the next twenty-five years, I think that probably matters more than many people realise.

I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had where somebody has asked, “Which panels are the best?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question, but I sometimes think it’s a little like asking which ingredients make the best meal. The ingredients matter, of course they do, but they’re only one part of the story. Give the same ingredients to ten different chefs and you’ll end up with ten very different results. Solar isn’t quite as dramatic as that, but the principle isn’t a million miles away. Two companies can install equipment from the same manufacturer and still deliver completely different experiences.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve come to believe that choosing a solar installer has far more in common with choosing an architect than buying an appliance. You’re asking somebody to understand how you live, how your home works and what you’re hoping to achieve over the next decade or two. The best recommendation doesn’t always come from squeezing another couple of panels onto the roof or fitting the biggest battery that will physically fit in the garage. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes the most valuable advice is explaining why you don’t need to spend any more money than necessary.

It’s one of the things I’ve always admired about the way Gavin approaches a survey. He rarely starts by talking about equipment. He starts by asking questions. How many people live in the house? Is somebody at home during the day? Are you thinking about an electric vehicle? Is this your forever home or are you likely to move in five years? Those questions aren’t small talk. They’re the foundation of every recommendation that follows, because without understanding the people, it’s impossible to design the right system for the property.

Perhaps that’s why we’ve always invested so much time in education. Discovery Days weren’t created because somebody in marketing decided they would generate leads. They came from a much simpler idea. Most people only buy solar once, so why should they be expected to understand everything before they meet an installer? Giving homeowners the opportunity to see a real installation, ask awkward questions, handle the equipment and hear from people who already live with solar seemed like a far better place to begin than a sales presentation. The fact that so many people leave saying, “I understand it now,” tells us we’re probably on the right track.

The same thinking runs through everything else we do. We film real customers instead of actors. We publish genuine case studies rather than hypothetical savings. We encourage people to read our reviews before they ever speak to us. In truth, we’d much rather somebody spent a few hours researching properly than made a rushed decision because of a special offer that expires on Friday. Good decisions rarely come from pressure, and we’ve never wanted pressure to be part of the way people remember GJM Energy.

When I read our reviews, very few of them begin by talking about panels or batteries. They talk about feeling looked after, about having things explained clearly, about never feeling rushed and about knowing there was somebody they could pick up the phone to after the installation was complete. Those comments have always interested me because they’re describing something that was never written on the quotation in the first place.

Perhaps that’s the point.

The quotation tells you what you’ll receive. It doesn’t tell you how you’ll feel about the decision in five, ten or twenty years’ time. That comes from confidence. Confidence that the advice was honest, that the recommendation was made with your interests in mind and that, if you ever need help in the future, the people who installed the system will still be there to answer the phone.

For me, that’s the part of solar that’s hardest to measure, but probably the most valuable. It’s also the reason I’ve come to believe that peace of mind was never something you could compare on a quotation anyway.

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