Getting Started: Your First Project

Amperage sizes solar from the bill, not the roof. You give it what the site pays and consumes, and it models every viable system against that. A project has five stages, in a fixed order. Each one unlocks the next. The guided tour covers the same ground the first time you open each page. This is the reference version.

1. Project details

Name the project, usually the customer's business name or site address. Link it to a client and set the location. The state and address matter. They select the weather data and the incentive schemes.

2. Bill data

Enter the tariff from a real electricity bill. That means flat rate or time-of-use, plus demand charges and daily supply charges where they apply. There are two ways to do it.

• AI extraction (Pro plan, and during the free trial): upload the bill as a PDF or a JPG/PNG photo. The fields are extracted and normalised, then shown for your review. Nothing reaches the model until you confirm.
• Manual entry: type the rates in. The calculated total should roughly match the customer's actual bill. If it's far off, a rate is wrong.

The field-by-field walkthrough is in Entering Bill Data. Not sure what a line on the bill means? The glossary covers TOU windows, demand charges, and daily charges.

3. Consumption

Drop interval meter data (CSV, Excel or NEM12) anywhere on the page. It is read and saved straight away, with Undo if it was the wrong file. Column detection is automatic. A mapping form only appears when it can't find the date or reading column.

A short review then asks three questions. Is it the right meter? Is it the right period (how much of the bill period the data covers)? Is it clean? Anything worth fixing gets a fix and its own Undo.

If the file covers less than a year, the missing months are estimated from your own data. Sizing and financials then run on a full year. You can switch that estimate off, but modelling needs 12 months to continue.

Then look at the shape. Daytime load is what solar can offset directly. Evening peaks are what a battery would need to cover. Accepted formats are listed in Uploading Consumption Interval Data.

4. Solar & battery

Set up what the sizing can work with. You don't pick a size here. That happens on Recommendation. The page has these cards:

• Usable Roof Area: trace the roof on the satellite view or enter it by hand. It sets the largest system the roof can take.
• Solar System: install year and month, panel direction, and the price per watt installed. Its switch turns solar off for a battery-only job.
• Battery Storage: switch storage on, set the cost per kWh, and choose the dispatch modes the battery runs.
• Compare options: optionally set up other batteries to compare against the Base one (comparing battery options).
• Incentives: switch on the certificate schemes that apply to this job.

From these, Amperage builds the sizing matrix. It crosses every solar size with every battery size and models each one hour by hour (how the modelling works).

5. Recommendation

This is the verdict page. It has four scenario cards picked from the matrix with fixed rules (how the recommendations are picked), the sizing matrix itself, Design Your Own, and the trade-off table. Choose the scenario you want to lead with. It shows in the Your pick bar at the top. Then send the Customer deck from the bottom bar. It is a 16:9 PowerPoint branded with your company details (exporting and sharing). A branded proposal (an editable A4 PowerPoint) comes from a Proposal project's Proposal stage, once the sizing is settled.