Designing on the New OpenSolar Design Experience

Summary

The new OpenSolar Design experience makes it easier to find components and build your bill of materials, while keeping your existing design workflows the same.

To learn more about why we’re making these changes, read our blog: [Insert blog link].

Table of Contents

• Adding Systems
• Building Out Your Bill of Materials
• Choosing Components

Adding Systems

Click Add System as you normally would, then choose to add a new system or duplicate an existing one.

The workflows for retrofits and Auto Design also remain the same, so you can continue designing as usual.

You can also choose to customise the summary metrics you see on each Design, by clicking into the header and selecting up to 5 metrics. 

Building Out Your Bill of Materials

Add your panels, batteries, inverters, mounting, balance of system (BOS), heat pumps and EV chargers as usual. OpenSolar tracks your progress through each section as you go.

Note: The tick boxes are optional. You do not need to complete every section, only those relevant to your design.

What’s Changed?

• Dedicated heat pump and EV charger sections: These components now have their own sections, separate from BOS, making it easier to create heat pump-only or EV charger-only systems.
• Country-specific subsections: Depending on your country, you’ll see subsections such as isolators and cables to help organise your bill of materials.
• Focus on what’s relevant: For a battery-only design, you can leave the battery section ticked and ignore unrelated sections. The same applies to heat pump-only and EV charger-only designs.

Choosing Components

Selecting and adding components works much as it did before, with a few updates to make finding the right equipment easier.

What’s Changed?

• Filters across the top: Filters are now grouped at the top of the component selector, making them easier to use and helping you see which filters are active.
• Simpler default sorting: The selector shows all components by default, with your recently used My List components prioritised so your usual equipment is easy to find.
• Component substitutions: When a component is out of stock with a distributor, substitution prompts help you find an alternative that is available to order.