How to Check Your Solar Installer Is Actually Qualified

Three checks, before any money moves. One: a NEMSA competency certificate you have verified, not seen a photo of. Two: a payment structure where the deposit buys named equipment delivered to your address, and the 13% that is site work waits for the site. Three: an itemised bill of materials with model numbers on it.

Check 1 — NEMSA certification

Almost nobody tells Nigerian buyers this exists. The Nigerian Electricity Management Services Agency is the statutory body responsible for electrical safety standards and the enforcement of technical standards in the Nigerian electricity supply industry, and it runs a published competency certification scheme covering electrical installation personnel, including renewable-energy contractors.

What to do with that: ask for the certificate, by name and number, and verify it directly with NEMSA rather than accepting a photograph on WhatsApp. Certificates are easy to fake and trivial to check, which is the best possible combination for a buyer.

Be fair about what the absence means. Plenty of competent Nigerian solar technicians are not NEMSA-certified, because the market grew far faster than the certification did. A missing certificate is not proof of incompetence. But it moves the burden of proof, and it should change the other questions you ask — about completed installations, about who signs off the electrical work, and about what happens if something burns.

Alongside it, the basics: CAC registration you have looked up rather than been told about, a physical address you could actually visit, and past installations with photographs you can trace to a real customer.

Check 2 — make the deposit buy equipment, not a promise

The commonest way Nigerians lose money in solar is not a bad installation. It is a deposit paid to somebody who then stops answering the phone — documented cases run from tens of thousands of naira upward, and the pattern is always the same: a large up-front payment, a promise, then silence.

The defence is structural rather than moral. Look at where the cost actually sits on a real build — our how many solar panels do i need for a 3 bedroom flat in nigeria? Standard system, ₦5.67M – ₦9.66M installed:

Computed from our quote engine at September 2026 prices. Quote SB-6K-MTQ55T.

Read the share column carefully, because it cuts both ways. Around 87% of a Nigerian solar price is hardware, so a large up-front payment is not in itself a red flag — the installer genuinely has to buy your equipment before he can install it. That is exactly why “pay a small deposit” is useless advice here, and why the defence has to be different.

The defence is that the deposit must convert into identified equipment you can see. Model numbers on the invoice, delivery to your address rather than his, and serial numbers recorded on arrival. And the remaining 13% — mounting, protection and labour — is work that has not happened when the deposit is requested, so there is no legitimate reason for it to be paid in advance. An installer asking for 100% before anything is delivered is asking you to carry his entire commercial risk for him.

Two practical additions. Pay a company account, not a personal one — it is the difference between a commercial dispute and a police matter. And get the equipment delivered to your site before installation day, not held at his. Equipment you can see is equipment that exists.

Check 3 — demand an itemised bill of materials

A lump sum is not a quote. An itemised bill of materials — every component, with its model number, quantity and unit price — is the single document that protects you against all three of the common failures at once.

• •Substitution at the door. The most specific betrayal in this market: panels or an inverter of a different brand arriving on installation day, with an explanation that your brand is no longer available. If the model number is on the quote, that is a breach rather than a debate — and you can say so before anything goes on the roof.
• •Silent downgrading. A lump sum lets the specification quietly fall to whatever protects the margin. Model numbers make that impossible.
• •Warranty orphaning. You cannot claim on a warranty for a product you cannot name. The serial numbers of what was actually installed belong on your handover document.

If a quote you have been given is a single number, ask for it broken down. The reaction to that request is itself the test. Our calculator produces an itemised build for exactly this reason — you can take it to any installer and ask them to price against it line by line.

Price discrimination, and why we publish prices

One of the stories that circulated in Nigerian solar in 2026 was a man publicly accusing an installer friend of charging him considerably more than the same installer had quoted somebody else for comparable work. It is an ugly story and it is also completely ordinary, because price discrimination is what happens in any market where the buyer has no reference point.

That is the whole reason we publish prices. Not as a service — as a mechanism. A dated, per-unit, per-brand price list means the question stops being “is this a fair price?”, which you cannot answer, and becomes “why is this line above the published range for that model?”, which the person in front of you has to answer. Our per-brand prices are on the brands pages with the date we saw each one.

A quote above the published range is not automatically wrong, incidentally. Distance, a difficult roof, three-phase work and better cable all cost real money. What matters is that the person quoting has to name the reason instead of relying on your not knowing.

Commissioning: what should be tested and handed over

The job is not finished when the lights come on. Before the final payment, these should be demonstrated in front of you:

1. Earthing, proven. Not “we earthed it” — shown, with a reading.
2. Array output under load. PV voltage and current on the inverter display in daylight, against what the panels are rated for.
3. Battery charge and discharge. A full charge, then a run on battery with a known load, and the time it holds.
4. Changeover behaviour. Grid off, grid back on, generator in and out. This is the part that most often turns out to have been assumed rather than tested.
5. Protection devices. DC isolator, breakers, surge protection — present, correctly rated and labelled.
6. The handover pack. Serial numbers of everything installed, warranty documents, a wiring diagram of what was actually built, and the monitoring app set up in your name, not the installer’s.

That last point is not a detail. A monitoring account registered to the installer means you lose visibility of your own system the day you fall out with him.

Warranty routing — who do you call?

Ask before you buy, and write the answer down: if the inverter fails in year three, who do you call, and what do they need from you? There are usually three separate warranties in play — the manufacturer’s on each product, the importer or distributor’s in Nigeria, and the installer’s workmanship warranty — and they cover different failures.

The workmanship warranty is the one people forget to ask for, and it is the one that covers the leaking roof fixing and the undersized cable. Get its term in writing. Then check what the manufacturer actually publishes for the brand you are buying: we list the published warranty and the Nigerian service presence for every brand we track on the brand pages, and where a brand publishes nothing we say so rather than repeating a seller’s claim.

Red flags, in order of how often we see them

• •A lump-sum price with no component list.
• •Full payment, or near-full payment, demanded before anything is delivered.
• •A personal bank account.
• •A price well below the published floor for the components claimed — which usually means the components are not what is claimed.
• •No physical address, or an address that is a phone number.
• •Reluctance to put the model numbers in writing.
• •Sizing offered before your appliances have been asked about.
• •Pressure to decide today because of a price that expires tonight.

The last one deserves a note. Equipment prices in Nigeria genuinely do move with the naira, so an expiring quote is not automatically a trick. What tells you which it is: a legitimate expiring quote names the components and the date it was priced, so you can check the movement yourself. A pressure tactic does not. The related check — whether the hardware itself is what it claims to be — is in how to tell a real solar panel from a fake one.

How we do it

You should hold us to everything above. Our process: you build an itemised quote in the calculator and get a quote code; we confirm every line against current vendor stock before anyone pays; we source the equipment and manage an installer we have vetted through to commissioning. What our vetting actually involves is written out on how we vet, and the end-to-end process is on how it works.

For choosing between installers in a specific city, we have a companion guide on choosing a solar installer in Lagos. And if you have a quote in front of you right now and want a second opinion on it, send it to us — we will tell you which lines look wrong even if you never buy anything from us.

Common questions