Short answer. A solar installer in Algeria wins in 2027 on two things: quote speed (a roof photo, a Sonelgaz bill, a catalogue at today’s prices, a written quote the next day instead of the next week) and fleet visibility (every system reports its production, the installer sees the ones that stopped before the client sees it on their bill). The first decides how many jobs get signed; the second decides whether you sell maintenance contracts or only hardware. Both are built on one platform: quotes, jobs, stock, monitoring, client app, dashboard.
This guide is for the installer fitting five to thirty systems a month, the importer supplying a dealer network, the manufacturer or farmer who has equipped several sites, and the diaspora founder paying from France for their parents’ or their factory’s system. It does not cover feed-in tariffs or grid-connection rules, which belong to Sonelgaz and the regulator CREG; it covers what a company builds to sell, fit and follow.
What the numbers say
The market changed scale in one year. According to the Global Electricity Review 2026 by the research centre Ember, based on Chinese customs data, Algeria imported 2.1 gigawatts of Chinese solar panels in 2025, against 0.35 gigawatts in 2024, six times more; Africa as a whole imported 18.8 gigawatts, up 48 %. Over the twelve months to June 2025, Ember already ranked Algeria the continent’s third importer, behind South Africa and Nigeria. A specialist outlet reports a quieter first quarter of 2026, around 0.31 gigawatts against 0.46 a year earlier, without naming its source; the level remains far above 2024.
Part of those panels goes to the national programme’s plants. Before the Assembly’s finance committee on 21 October 2026, the energy minister said 760 megawatt-peak were in service out of the first phase’s 3,200 megawatts, 21 plants in 14 wilayas, and that 2,440 megawatt-peak remained to be completed in 2027. The same presentation plans 1,000 public buildings fitted with rooftop panels, more than 2,500 isolated households electrified with solar kits and 100 solar pumping systems for farms. On 28 April 2026 the minister had called for panels on the roofs of homes and administrations to become general and for local manufacturing.
The rest goes to households, shops, factories and farms, fitted by private companies whose number nobody publishes. Hardware prices quoted by sector engineers in February 2025 give the order of magnitude: about 25,000 dinars for a 400-watt panel, 30,000 for 500 watts, up to 50,000 dinars for a battery; they may have moved since. The 2026 finance law, published in the Official Journal on 31 December 2025, cut customs duties to 5 % on components used to make panels and from 30 to 15 % on solar water heaters, and lets companies deduct renewable-energy spending up to 5 % of taxable profit, according to the bill’s presentation. We found no public framework allowing a household to sell its surplus to the grid: systems are sized for self-consumption, backup during outages and off-grid use, not for feed-in.
A system in six moments
A solar job is won before the fitting and kept after it. Six moments, from the first call to the month-12 visit.
The request comes by phone or through a relative. What to capture fits in three items: the Sonelgaz bill, which gives quarterly consumption and the tariff band, a photo of the roof, and the outages suffered, often the real reason for the call. Sizing and the quote are done on those three items with a catalogue at today’s prices: power in kilowatt-peak, batteries or not, autonomy in hours, total price, lead time. A written quote the next day gets signed; a quote the following week gets compared with three others. The deposit reserves the stock, and the serial numbers of panels and inverter enter the file at that moment, because they carry the warranty.
The job follows a photo checklist: structure, wiring, protections, earthing, each step photographed by the fitter from their phone, which protects the installer as much as the client. Commissioning is the moment that counts: the inverter is connected, production is visible the same day on the client’s app and the installer’s dashboard, alerts are active. Month 12, finally, is a visit, cleaning, torque check, battery test, and the renewal of a contract that monitoring has made obvious.
Why monitoring is the product
The inverter manufacturer’s app shows one system to its owner. The installer needs the opposite view: the whole fleet, sorted by what is not producing.
The field reports data in three ways. Most inverters sold in Algeria come with a manufacturer portal and a programming interface the platform can query, system by system. When the manufacturer offers none, or the site has no reliable connection, a gateway reads the inverter or the meter directly over Modbus and sends the readings by 4G; that is the case for pumps in the field and villas without a router. We describe this kind of chain in the internet of things in Algeria: sensor or gateway, SIM card, server, dashboard.
Monitoring compares: today’s production with yesterday’s, one string with another, a system with its neighbours in the same town. Zero production at noon under a clear sky raises an alert within the hour; a string producing 30 % less than its neighbour opens a visit ticket. Operations are the daily work: quotes, jobs, stock by serial number, deposits, tickets, visits, parts under warranty. The client sees today’s production, the kilowatt-hours not bought, and can open a ticket. Management sees signed quotes, jobs in progress, the installed base and, in red, the systems that are down. That last list is what turns a hundred past jobs into a hundred maintenance contracts.
«The manufacturer’s app shows one system to its owner. The installer needs to see the whole fleet, sorted by what is not producing.»
A worked example
An example on assumptions, to redo with your numbers: an installer receiving forty requests a month who has fitted two hundred systems in three years.
The quote. With a survey app (roof photo, bill, outages) and a catalogue at today’s prices, the written quote goes out the next day instead of five days later. If the signing rate goes from 20 to 30 % on forty requests, that is four more jobs a month; at 600,000 dinars per average job, a system of a few kilowatt-peak with batteries, about 2.4 million dinars of extra sales a month. Both rates and the average price are assumptions; replace them with yours, the reasoning holds.
The fleet. Two hundred systems fitted, whose state nobody knows. If 5 % are down at any moment, inverter fault, tripped breaker, dead battery, that is ten clients paying Sonelgaz at full rate while believing they produce, who find out on the quarterly bill and then tell people. With monitoring, those ten systems are known the same day and repaired within the week; without it, they become ten bad references in ten neighbourhoods. That is the maintenance contract’s argument, and it sells at commissioning, when the client looks at their production for the first time.
Six silent failures
None of these failures gives warning. All cost the client kilowatt-hours paid at full rate, and the installer their reputation.
The stopped inverter is the most frequent failure: grid fault or overheating in summer, a red light in a garage nobody enters. The under-producing string comes from dust, the shadow of a neighbouring building that went up after the fitting, or a loose connector; it only shows when strings are compared with each other. The battery drained early is the summer failure: deep cycles every night of air conditioning, autonomy melting away, and the client discovering an outage that was not covered.
The tripped breaker after a storm leaves the system offline for weeks; the platform sees the lost communication together with the zero production and calls the client. The offline gateway is the reverse: the Wi-Fi changed, the router was replaced, the SIM expired; the platform must tell “no data” from “no production”, or it cries wolf. The warranty expired without a visit is the commercial failure: the inverter breaks a month after the warranty ends, and the client pays for what a visit planned before the deadline would have had covered.
Seen in France: what installers have, what changes here
In France, residential solar is a mass market that has been tooling up for ten years. According to Enedis open data reported in late October 2026, 28,264 self-consumption systems under 36 kilowatt-peak were connected in the third quarter of 2026, down 25 % year on year after subsidies were cut, and the installed base exceeds 1.36 million systems. French installers work with three tools Algeria does not yet have: the quote from a satellite image of the roof, the inverter manufacturer’s monitoring app for each client, and, among the best organised, a fleet view that sorts systems by production.
What changes in Algeria decides the product. Electricity is cheap: bill calculators cite a progressive low-voltage grid from 1.78 to 5.48 dinars per kilowatt-hour by quarterly band, in force since 2016, to be checked on your bill. Solar is therefore not sold on an ordinary household’s payback, as a sector engineer noted in February 2025, but on outages, air conditioning, sites without grid, pumping and factories whose bill sits in the top band. Surplus cannot be sold: the system is sized on real consumption, read on the bill, with batteries. Roofs are flat and dusty: cleaning after summer is a visit to sell, not an option. The tool must therefore be built around the Sonelgaz bill, batteries and visits, not copied from software designed for feed-in and subsidies.
«Solar is not sold here on payback: it is sold on outages, air conditioning and sites without grid.»
From France: paying for the parents’ solar, following a factory
Two requests keep coming from the diaspora. The first: equip the parents’ house with panels and batteries so summer outages do not leave them without air conditioning or a fridge, and pay from Paris or Marseille. The second: follow a factory, a farm or a warehouse fitted with solar, whose manager in Algeria says “it works” without anyone being able to show it.
The answer is the same client app, seen from another country. The payer receives the written quote, sees the job photos step by step, then daily production and alerts, with the maintenance contract in their name and a monthly report. The site owner sees production, self-consumption, outages covered by the batteries and the cost avoided each month, site by site. For the installer, that app is a sales argument with a clientele that pays in euros and asks first: “how will I know it works?”. We describe the same remote-oversight logic in keeping an app alive from France: accounts in the payer’s name, a dashboard, a written report.
Who you are
Six profiles, six first versions. The first column is built in twelve weeks; the second follows as the fleet grows.
The installer starts with sales and the job: survey, catalogue, quote, photo checklist, deposits, then monitoring and contracts. The importer or distributor has a different problem: a dealer network asking for stock and today’s price by phone; a portal with stock, prices, serial numbers and warranties settles both. The factory, farm or retail chain that has already equipped several sites wants a multi-site dashboard with production, self-consumption and covered outages, then alerts and a monthly report.
Agricultural solar pumping is off-grid by definition: a 4G gateway reports flow, level and production, and a “dry pump” alert avoids burning a motor. The diaspora founder wants the payer’s app described above. The company on a public contract, with the 1,000 buildings announced, needs tracking per building, progress, photos, commissioning, and a production report per site ready to hand over, required or not. In every case the first version fits in twelve weeks, as we detail in how long it takes to build a platform in 2027.
The 2027 calendar
Solar has two seasons: selling, before the heat, and service, during and after. The tool is built to that rhythm.
January and February: the sales tool. Catalogue at today’s prices, survey app, written quote, jobs with photo checklist, deposits. It is the quiet season; that is when you build. March and April: monitoring on twenty systems. The last twenty jobs get a gateway or a connection to the manufacturer portal; alerts are tuned on real data, the first tickets come out. May and June: selling before summer. Requests rise with the heat; the one-day quote and the kept lead time make the difference, and every commissioning activates monitoring.
July and August: service. Peak production, peak failures, overheating inverters, batteries in deep cycles; that is what monitoring is for. September and October: the cleaning and visit campaign, after the summer dust, with warranties coming due. November and December: annual reports sent to every client, the year’s production, kilowatt-hours avoided, and contract renewals for 2028. An installer who follows this calendar reaches summer 2027 with a proven sales tool and a tested monitoring, instead of discovering both during the season.
What makes this kind of platform fail
- Monitoring planned “later”. A gateway not fitted during the job costs one more visit per system; fit it from the first job, even if it is not used straight away.
- A catalogue without today’s prices. Hardware prices move with the dinar and with China; a quote on three-month-old prices is signed at a loss.
- No serial numbers. Without them, no warranty enforceable against the supplier, and the broken part is paid twice.
- Alerts that cry wolf. If the platform does not tell “no data” from “no production”, the team stops reading alerts within a month.
- A client app without a useful number. Raw production says nothing; kilowatt-hours not bought and outages covered do.
- The maintenance contract sold a year later. It sells at commissioning, when the client looks at their production for the first time.
- Accounts in the provider’s name. Manufacturer portals, SIM cards, server: in the installer’s name from day one, or the fleet belongs to someone else.
Frequently asked questions
The questions we get from installers, importers and site owners.
- Can inverters of different brands be monitored on one platform?
- Yes, in two ways. Most manufacturers offer a portal with a programming interface the platform queries system by system; when that is not the case, a gateway reads the inverter or the meter over Modbus and sends the readings by 4G. An installer platform mixes both, with the same dashboard.
- What about sites without internet, such as a pump in a field?
- A gateway with a 4G SIM card is enough, powered by the system itself; it reports production, flow or level every few minutes and keeps readings in memory when the network drops. SIM renewal goes into the maintenance contract.
- How long until a usable quoting and job tool?
- About twelve weeks for the first version: survey, catalogue, written quote, jobs with photo checklist, deposits and dashboard. Monitoring is then set up on twenty systems and extended to the fleet. We detail real timelines in the guide on how long a platform takes to build.
- Can the client sell surplus to Sonelgaz?
- We found no public framework allowing it for a household or a shop at the date of this guide. Systems are sized on real consumption, read on the bill, with batteries for backup; check with Sonelgaz and CREG for your case, the rules may change.
- I am in France, how do I equip and follow my parents’ house?
- You receive the written quote, the job photos step by step, then daily production and alerts on an app, with the maintenance contract in your name and a monthly report. Payment goes to the installer, in dinars on site or as you agree with them.
- Does a distributor need the same tool as an installer?
- No. The distributor needs a dealer portal, stock, today’s prices, serial numbers, warranties, and a view of what their installers fit. Monitoring can be offered to them white-label to retain the network, but the first version is the portal.