Shading in ninety seconds: the skyline photo
Installers pay around £300 for a SolarPathfinder — a polished dome you photograph to see what blocks the sun. The idea is simple: if you know the outline of everything around you, and you know where the sun is at every hour of the year, you can count the hours the panels are in shade.
Inkaroom does the same with the phone. Stand in the garden below the roof face, hold the phone upright and turn slowly on the spot. The app reads the skyline as you turn — next door, the trees, your own chimney — and runs the sun-path method published in MCS MIS 3002 against it. You get a shading factor, a per-object breakdown and the hours of the day the panels actually see sun.
It is a survey figure, not a certificate: Inkaroom is not MCS certified, and the installer's own calculation is the one that counts. But it means the quote they build starts from a measured skyline rather than a guess.