The Oaks

The brief

The Oaks is a holiday-let complex in Rock on the north Cornwall coast - six lodges, a farm shop, and a service room that powers the site's communal infrastructure. We've worked with them in phases since 2022, starting with the initial PV and electrical scope and building out the system as the development has grown. Further works are scheduled for Q3 2026.

The brief from the start was ambitious: design a renewable energy system that would generate clean electricity across every building, work alongside a ground-source heat pump providing communal heating, and stand up to the heavier daytime demand of a tourism business in peak season.

We were brought in early enough to integrate solar PV into the build from the start - in-roof modules detailed in alongside the slate, ductwork pre-installed for clean cable runs, and the system designed to support the ground- source heat pump (GSHP) plant room.

What we installed

Across the site:

• Six lodges, each fitted with 10 × 370W in-roof PV modules and its own 3.68kW inverter - flush, watertight and integrated into the slate roofing

• Farm shop - 20 × 370W modules with an 8kW inverter and export limitation, sized to cover the shop's daytime trading load

• Service room housing the communal infrastructure tied to the GSHP

• Hybrid inverters throughout - upgraded from the originally quoted spec to give the client full battery-ready hybrid functionality across every building from day one

• Per-lodge metering and monitoring, so every lodge is its own self-contained system.

Building into a live development - and returning for upgrades

In-roof systems leave no margin for error. The modules are the roof at that point, so the flashing, the timing and the coordination with the roofer all have to be right first time. Six lodges, one shop, one continuous build programme - the team worked alongside the main contractor through the development phase to keep everything on schedule.

What's harder to engineer is a four-year client relationship. Coming back to the same site to extend, upgrade and add capacity over multiple phases means knowing the existing setup intimately, planning new works around what's already there, and maintaining the client's trust over time with consistently high-quality work.

The result

• Roughly 30kWp of generation across the site today - building to 100kWp by end of 2026

• Six holiday lodges, a farm shop and a service room all generating their own clean electricity

• PV directly supports the GSHP providing communal heating - meaning more of the site's heating bill comes from sunshine rather than the grid

• A whole-site renewable build, providing guests with a sustainable getaway

• Four years of trust - and the next phase of works scheduled for Q3 2026.