Preliminary Engineering and Feasibility for Solar Projects

Every solar project starts with a critical decision: is this site worth pursuing? Preliminary engineering and feasibility work answers that question with data, before your sales team quotes a price or your ops team schedules a truck. RIH Engineering delivers preliminary designs, feasibility studies, and site assessments as an outsourced solar consulting service for US solar EPCs, installers, and developers. Our engineers produce the technical foundation your sales conversations, financial models, and permit workflows all depend on.

What you get

• Preliminary system sizing based on customer load profile, site constraints, and target production
• Roof or site feasibility assessment identifying obstructions, shading, structural concerns, and setback issues
• Production estimates using PVWatts, Helioscope, or Aurora Solar (per your preference)
• Financial inputs: 8760-hour production data, degradation assumptions, and system loss factor breakdowns
• Preliminary equipment recommendations (module count, inverter type, storage sizing if applicable)
• Bankable preliminary design PDFs for use in sales proposals or investor presentations
• Site sketches or CAD layouts suitable for early-stage design review
• Deliverables in 24 to 48 hours for straightforward residential; 3 to 7 days for commercial

What we handle for you

Feasibility work is fundamentally repetitive and time-consuming. Every project starts with the same question set: how many panels fit, what will they produce, what will it cost, and are there any deal-killers on this site. Doing this work in-house means your senior engineers spend hours on projects that may never close, instead of on projects already sold.

We take all of it off your plate: satellite imagery review, load analysis, preliminary sizing, production modeling, shading pre-check, and PDF report preparation. You send us the address and any customer bill data or load profile. We come back with a complete preliminary package ready for your sales team to present.

The cost of doing this in-house

Every solar company we work with was, at one point, having senior engineers spend 4 to 8 hours per week on feasibility work that a dedicated preliminary engineering team could handle in a fraction of the time. That's 200 to 400 senior engineering hours per year, at US solar engineer loaded rates of $80 to $150 per hour, which means $16,000 to $60,000 per year of engineering capacity spent on pre-sales work instead of billable project delivery.

Multiply that by the projects you don't quote fast enough because your engineers are backed up. The competitor who quoted in 48 hours won the customer. The one who took 10 days didn't. Preliminary engineering speed is directly tied to close rate.

Why RIH Engineering is safe to try

You don't hire us for a year. You don't sign a long-term contract. You send us one address or one project and see the output. If the deliverable doesn't match what your team would have produced, you tell us what to change and we adjust. If the quality doesn't work for your workflow, you don't send us the next project.

Our dedicated resource model means you get a named engineer assigned to your account from day one. Not a shared pool. Not a ticket queue. One engineer who learns your templates, your standards, and your project types, and who becomes an extension of your team.

Our process

1. You send us the project address, customer load or bill data, and any specific requirements (target system size, budget constraint, roof preference)
2. Our engineer pulls satellite imagery, verifies roof or site geometry, and identifies obvious constraints (shading, obstructions, structural concerns)
3. System sizing calculated against target production, customer offset goal, or budget
4. Production model run in Helioscope, Aurora, or PVWatts based on your preference
5. Preliminary equipment specification (modules, inverters, storage if applicable)
6. Feasibility report drafted with 8760 production data, financial inputs, and preliminary design PDF
7. Deliverables sent for your review, typically within 24 to 48 hours for residential and 3 to 7 days for commercial

Tools and standards

Our preliminary engineering team works in Helioscope, Aurora Solar, PVWatts, PVsyst, AutoCAD, SketchUp, and Google Earth Pro for site analysis. We also work with utility bill parsers, load profile tools, and financial modeling spreadsheets aligned to your standards.

Client-preferred tools: Our team can be trained to use the tool preferred by the client. If your workflow depends on a specific platform, template, or drafting standard, we adapt to it rather than force you into ours.