Weekend Outage for V5 Release
SolarPlus will be offline from Friday 10th November 8pm Melbourne Time (5pm in WA) and will be back online by early Monday Morning.
Login
After release, there will be no change to your login. Still go to go.solarplus.co and login with your regular username and password.
Before release, you will be able to login to the Sandbox test environment to familiarise yourself with the new version. Go to v5.solarplus.co and use your existing username and password. Please note that the Sandbox is a limited test environment, and doesn’t have your business data in it. If you would like to test your custom proposals on the staging server, please contact support.
How to create a comparison quote presentation in v5
How to use the improved Map Design page
3D Image Capture
Quotes sent in v4 and edited in v5
If you have sent a quote to a customer in v4, and then you open up the quote in v5 and make a change, the performance calculations will be re-run. Because the method of calculation is improved in v5, the results will be slightly different. To avoid confusion with customers, if you have already sent them a quote and want to make changes, we encourage you duplicate the quote and work on the new one. If you make changes to the design, the performance calcs will have to be re-run - potentially resulting in a change to the solar production and therefore payback time.
To compensate for some of the changes in the performance calcs, the soiling de-rating % for quotes created in v4 will be changed from 5% to a more common industry standard of 2%. For more information on the performance engine changes to follow.
Auto image capture will be turned off
We have made some improvements to your options when capturing the panel layout map image.
The two new options available are:
Select a particular panel render to suit your panel choice
Switch to 3D view to capture an image to panel, roof and building perspective
Also, many users find there is wasted time when you navigate away from the map image to another page and have to wait for the image capture in the process, then you often return to make changes to the layout or design.
If you still want to use autocapture, you can switch it on in your User Settings.
Sending Proposals
There are two new customer-facing web pages to present proposals - the Comparison and Proposal webpages. Please check out this page in the Help Centre for more information.
You can still download and email the v4 Proposal PDFs as per usual.
The Comparison and Proposal webpages are built on Grape JS and designed to be editable. The editing feature will not be available immediately after release however, so in the time being, please contact Support for customisation requests.
Subscription Plan Pricing
We have updated our pricing plan to offer more flexibility and more equitability so that you only pay for what you use, and you can start small and add features and users as your business grows and the complexity of your designs increases.
Exisiting users will have access to everything they currently have access to, with the exception of Sales Reports. You can stay on your existing plan for a year, or choose to change to one of the new plans sooner if you like.
Additional premium features such as EV charging will be available to all users to trial for the first month after release.
Navigation
Use the sub-menu icons on each tab to go to related pages and use the Briefcase at the top left to manage quotes.
Inventory pricing that is GST inclusive will no longer be supported.
The vast majority of users list their inventory prices as ex GST. For the small number of people who have listed pricing as including GST, please update your inventory. The quickest way to do this is to export your inventory, adjust the prices in excel using a formula, and import it again as a .csv.
Old custom proposal PDFs that use Phantom JS will no longer be supported.
Please create another custom version based on one of the built-in proposals PDFs.
Site maps created in v4 with QR codes that link to the system handover manual
The QR codes will still open the system handover manual as per usual.
Features not included in the initial v5 release that aren’t far off being ready
shade de-rating calculations
more options for EV charging, Load shifting and Hot Water diverters
cable sizer page
seasonal electricity tariffs
editable SLDs (in the initial release you will be able to add Notes)
off-grid load profile builder - ability to re-use and upload profiles.