Your solar carport or pergola, engineered for your home
A solar farm worth millions of dollars is engineered site by site before anyone picks up a shovel: the weather of the exact place, the panels, the structure, the rules and the money, all checked. We are bringing the same depth of engineering to one carport or pergola at an Australian home, for a small fixed fee paid online.
You enter your address. We work through every check below, Namindo checks the energy engineering, and we send you a report you can take to a builder: the best design for your home, what it will make, how fast it pays back, concept drawings and the bill of quantities sheets. A project ready for your local engineer to design and certify, for council approval, and then to build.
What the report checks, step by step
Every step is run for your address, not for your suburb or a typical house.
- Your exact home
We place your home by its GPS coordinates, so the sun, the weather and the rules are the ones at your address.
- Which way it faces
We check the orientation of the house, the driveway and the garden, and what each direction means for each design.
- Your weather, hour by hour
A typical meteorological year for your location: sun, temperature and wind for every hour of a typical year.
- Your neighbours
From aerial and satellite imagery we check the buildings and trees around you for shade, and the boundaries and neighbouring windows the rules protect.
- Your council’s rules
Our library holds the carport and pergola rules of every state and the local council layer: height, setbacks, boundary walls, site cover, fire separation, and whether you need a permit or a planning approval.
- The gates
Every design must pass each gate before it reaches your report: it fits the site, meets the rules, stands up to your wind region, and pays its way. A design that fails a gate is dropped, and the report says why.
- Panel options and checks
Panels on the Australian market today, checked for fit on the roof, the structure, the standards and the warranty.
- Two-sided panels, checked
We check whether two-sided (bifacial) panels earn their place on your roof, from the light that reaches their underside at your home.
- Sizing
The system sized to the roof and to the way your household uses power, with a battery or an electric car if you have or plan one.
- The design, from a library of ten
Ten Namindo designs are tried on your site, from a plain flat solar roof to sun-following roofs. The one that does most for your home is the one we draw.
- Payback, fixed and sun-following
The years each design takes to pay back its extra cost over an ordinary carport or patio roof, worked out on your own power use and your own tariff and feed-in.
- Concept drawings and bill of quantities sheets
The carport or pergola drawn for your site as concept drawings, with indicative sizes for the footings, the frame and the solar roof, and bill of quantities sheets your builder can price. Your local engineer designs and certifies the structure.
- The full report, with ray tracing
Sunlight traced across your roof, your walls and your neighbours’ buildings, so shade and reflected light are counted, not guessed.
- Energy engineering, checked by Namindo
Every report’s energy engineering is checked by Namindo before it is sent to you. Your local engineer then designs and certifies the structure and your council approves it; if your engineer marks up the drawings in red, we redraw them to those notes. The first redraw is free; each further version is A$50.
- One round with your red pen, by email
You mark up the design in red pen with what you want and what your site needs, and email it to us with your registration code in the subject line. We revise the design and the drawings once, free. Each further iteration is A$50. How it works.
- A full year, simulated
An optional extra: your chosen design run through every hour of the year, month by month, so you see what it makes in winter as well as in summer.
Modelled by PV technologists, on a full year of your weather
Your report is not a rule of thumb or a postcode average. Namindo’s PV technologists, engineers from solar manufacturing and solar plant design, model your carport or pergola the way a solar farm is modelled before it is financed: hour by hour, through a whole year of weather at your exact location.
What is a typical meteorological year?
A typical meteorological year, or TMY, is one year of hourly weather built for one place from many years of real records. For each calendar month, the most typical month out of about twenty years is chosen: January may come from 2009 and February from 2017. Joined together they make a year with the normal sunshine, cloud, temperature and wind of that place, including its ordinary dull days, but without the freak extremes of any single year.
Banks and investors judge solar farms on this kind of year. We use public typical years, such as those of the European Commission’s PVGIS service, taken for your own coordinates.
What we do with it
We run your design through every hour of that year: where the sun is, how much direct and scattered light reaches each face of the panels, the shade from your house, trees and neighbours, how warm the panels run, and what the inverter delivers. The hours add up to a year of output for your home, month by month.
Why a whole year, not an average day
Winter sun is low and short, and a neighbour’s roof may shade yours only in June. A sun-following roof gains most in the early morning and late afternoon. Only an hour-by-hour year shows these, and they decide which design is best for you and how fast it pays back.
A library of ten designs, unveiled on 27 January 2027
The report does not start from one product. It tries the whole Namindo library on your site, from a plain flat solar roof to sun-following roofs, and keeps the one that suits your home and your budget.
The ten designs are unveiled a month after the service opens. Four of them, the fixed and step sun-following carport and pergola, are already on our carports and pergolas by city page.
What you get, side by side
What a homeowner usually gets from each of the other ways to plan a solar carport or pergola, against our site report.
| What you get | Namindo site report | Competitor AInstaller’s free quote | Competitor BIndependent energy adviser or audit | Competitor CDraftsperson or carport kit drawings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Independent: not selling you panels or a carport | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Your exact location and the way your home faces | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Hour-by-hour weather year for your location | ✓ | ✗ | ||
| Shade and reflected light, ray traced over your roof, house and neighbours | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | |
| Two-sided (bifacial) panels checked for your site | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| A choice of ten designs, fixed to sun-following, carport or pergola | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| An optimised design for your site | ✓ | ✗ | ||
| Payback of the extra cost over an ordinary carport or patio | ✓ | ✗ | ||
| State and council rules checked, and the approval pathway | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Neighbours checked from aerial imagery | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | |
| Concept drawings for your site with indicative sizes, for your local engineer to design and certify | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Bill of quantities sheets your builder can price | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| One design iteration from your red-pen notes, includedby email; further rounds A$50 each | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | |
| Redrawing to your local structural engineer’s red annotations ours: first redraw free, then A$50 a version | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Free choice of builder or installer | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structural design, certification and council approval you arrange these locally, whichever way you go | ✗ | ✗ | ||
| What it usually costs | A small fixed fee, first 25 homes free | Free, recovered in the price of what they sell | About A$200 to A$550 | About A$800 to A$1,500, engineering extra |
✓ yes partly or sometimes ✗ not usually Competitors A, B and C stand for the usual alternatives open to a homeowner, not for named businesses. What each one offers varies; the table shows what is typical, from published Australian offers and prices in 2026.
One design does not fit every home
Every home, family and street is different, so we do not hand you a fixed product. You get three things:
Any design from the library, any builder or installer. The report is yours to use as you wish.
The design that does most for your home, worked out for your site, your weather and your power use.
Mark up the drawings in red pen with what you want and what your site needs, email them back, and we revise the design and drawings once, free. Further iterations are A$50 each.
The engineering of a solar farm, for one carport
What a utility-scale solar project gets before it is built, and what your report gives your home.
| Check | Utility solar farm | Your site report |
|---|---|---|
| Exact location and orientation | Surveyed site | Your GPS position and the way your home faces |
| Hourly weather of a typical year | Site weather year | Your location’s typical year |
| Shade and reflected light | Ray-traced energy model | Ray traced across your roof, walls and neighbours |
| Panel choice, two-sided panels | Module selection study | Market panels checked for your roof |
| Structure | Design to Australian Standards | Concept drawings with indicative sizes, for your local engineer to design and certify |
| Planning and building rules | Approvals study | Your state and council rules, and the approval pathway |
| Money | Financial model | Payback of the extra cost, on your own power use |
| Ready to build | Drawings and bill of quantities | Drawings and bill of quantities sheets for your builder |
What you receive
- The best Namindo design for your home, and why the others were set aside
- What it makes in a typical year, and month by month
- The payback of its extra cost, fixed and sun-following, on your own power use
- The rules that apply at your address and the approval pathway
- Concept drawings of the carport or pergola on your site, with indicative sizes
- Bill of quantities sheets for your builder to price
- The ray-traced report of shade and light on your roof
- The local structural design, certification and approvals still needed before you build
- One red-pen design iteration by email, free; further iterations A$50 each
- Redrawing to your local structural engineer’s red annotations: the first redraw free, then A$50 a version
- Optional: the full simulated year
What we check, and what stays local. Namindo checks the energy engineering of every report: the weather year, the panels, the output and the payback. The drawings are concept drawings with indicative sizes. Before you build, a local registered structural engineer must design and certify the structure, and your council or building surveyor must approve it; these are not part of the report. If your local structural engineer marks up the drawings in red, we redraw them to those notes: the first redraw is free, and each further version is A$50. Your first red-pen design iteration is free and each further one is A$50. We work by email only, at sitereport@modelphotons.com, with your registration code in the subject line. The bill of quantities sheets come with the report. Prices in the report are estimates until your builder quotes.
See the designs city by city
With all the solar power used on site, a fixed solar carport pays back its extra cost over an ordinary carport in one to two years, and our step sun-following carport in three to seven years, across the capitals. Your report works it out for your own home.