Sunbeam Solar designs solar and battery systems for Gauteng homes and businesses — sized to what you actually use, engineered to keep the lights on through every stage of load-shedding.
Thabo Nkosi spent nine years as a distribution engineer at City Power Johannesburg, watching rotational outages harden from an occasional inconvenience into a permanent fixture of South African life. In 2016, he left to found Sunbeam Solar with one van, a small toolkit, and a handful of residential installs around Bryanston and Sandton.
The premise was simple: most installers were sizing systems off a sales target, not a household's actual usage. Sunbeam started by pulling twelve months of municipal bills before quoting anything — a habit that's still policy today.
A decade on, that approach has taken the company from one garage to a Bedfordview head office and a Midrand satellite depot, a team of more than 60 engineers, installers and monitoring staff, and over 3,200 completed installations across Gauteng — from single-family homes to manufacturing plants.
From a single rooftop array to a multi-building commercial retrofit, every job runs through the same sizing and sign-off process.
Grid-tied and hybrid systems sized from twelve months of your actual municipal bills, not a rough estimate. Panel, inverter and lithium battery combinations built to keep fridges, wifi, geysers and home offices running through Stage 6.
Rooftop and ground-mount arrays for warehouses, retail parks and manufacturing sites, engineered around your production schedule and demand charges. Three-phase inverter configurations up to 500kVA.
Retrofit battery and inverter backup for homes and businesses already on grid power. Automatic changeover in under 10 milliseconds, sized to your specific load-shedding stage pattern — no diesel, no fumes, no manual switching.
Convert an electric geyser to a solar PV-boosted or direct solar hot water system. Geysers account for roughly 40% of the average Gauteng household's bill — usually where the fastest payback in the whole system sits.
Scheduled panel cleaning, inverter firmware updates and remote performance monitoring through the Sunbeam app, with guaranteed callout response times. We flag underperformance before you notice a higher bill.
Pay-as-you-save lease structures and rent-to-own agreements through our panel of green-finance partners, so a system pays for itself out of the savings it creates rather than a lump sum upfront.
A mix of residential, commercial and industrial work — each system sized and engineered for the site it sits on.
Runs the full household — including a home office and two geysers — through Stage 6 without the system ever dropping essential circuits.
Cut daytime grid draw by 61% and kept the pick-and-pack floor running through outages without pausing dispatch.
A 100kWh battery bank backs up lifts, server rooms and access control across three floors of a multi-tenant building during outages.
A ground-mount and rooftop hybrid array reducing peak demand charges for a metal fabrication plant running two shifts.
A discreet retrofit on a heritage-zoned property, paired with a solar geyser conversion — panel placement and colour approved by the heritage committee.
Sectors served across Gauteng — residential, retail, logistics, offices and manufacturing.
Start Your ProjectMost quotes we replace were sized off a sales target, not a usage profile. Here's what changes when an engineer runs the numbers instead.
Twelve months of usage data before we quote — so you don't pay for capacity you don't need, or get caught out at Stage 6 with too little.
Every install is designed and signed off by an ECSA-registered engineer before it's commissioned — not just a certified installer.
Import lead times can strand a project for months. Sunbeam holds inverter and battery stock at our Bedfordview depot, sized to local demand.
Not a manufacturer pass-through — our own maintenance team handles callouts, not a call centre reading from a script.
Two of the people who set the standard every Sunbeam installation is held to.
Thabo spent nine years as a distribution engineer at City Power Johannesburg before founding Sunbeam Solar in 2016, convinced that homes and businesses shouldn't have to wait for the grid to catch up. He holds a B.Eng in Electrical Engineering from Wits and sits on the board of the Gauteng Renewable Energy Forum.
Marike leads Sunbeam's design and commissioning team and signs off every system before it goes live. A registered Professional Engineer with ECSA and a certified SAPVIA installer, she spent six years designing utility-scale PV plants in the Northern Cape before moving into rooftop and commercial work.
"Before Sunbeam installed our battery system, Stage 6 meant candles and a cold dinner. Eighteen months later, I genuinely don't check the load-shedding schedule anymore."
"Our electricity bill at the warehouse was climbing past R40,000 a month before the array went in. It's down by nearly two-thirds, and the payback period Sunbeam quoted us was almost exactly right."
"Three different installers wanted to sell us the biggest system possible. Sunbeam's engineer actually pulled our municipal bills and sized it to what we use. That's the reason we went with them."
No call-centre sales pitch — one of our engineers reviews your details and municipal usage before proposing a system, then follows up within one business day.
Get a free, engineer-reviewed quote and see what a system sized to your usage actually costs.