How Contact Solar, one of the UK's leading solar PV and battery installers, replaced tape measures and reference photos with a 360° capture and a shared digital model the whole team works from.
Contact Solar is based in Chorley and has been designing and installing domestic and commercial solar PV and battery systems for over a decade. In February 2024, EDF acquired Contact Solar as part of its strategy to offer integrated net zero home solutions, bringing solar, battery storage, EV chargepoints, and heat pumps under one roof.
Today, Contact Solar completes 200 to 250 surveys and installs per month across more than 10,000 UK homes, operating a nationwide network of qualified local installers covering residential, local authority, housing association, and developer projects. The field operation runs on a team of seven surveyors supported by five internal design engineers.
The question Contact Solar were trying to answer: could the whole survey-to-design loop be tightened further, without compromising on what makes the business work?
Before AIM, the survey-to-design workflow relied on a surveyor visiting each property with a tape measure and camera, capturing manual measurements and reference photos per roof and elevation. A single missed measurement or unclear photo could force a return site visit, delaying design, quoting, and install.
Contact Solar had already ruled out the obvious alternatives:
Weather dependency, flight restriction zones, and CAA training made fleet rollout impractical.
Devices like the NavVis VLX at £40k per unit were uneconomic, and ground-based scanners cannot see the roof plane.
Manual capture worked, but had no built-in way to validate measurements before they reached design.
On a manual survey prior to AIM, a surveyor failed to account for the roof overhang when taking measurements. The incorrect dimensions were passed to the internal design engineers who worked from them in good faith. The error was not caught until install day, when the job could not proceed. A wasted visit, a delayed customer, rescheduling costs.
It is exactly the kind of downstream failure that a clear, shared digital model of the roof eliminates at source.
The turning point came when AIM released its 360° capture solution. Where previous options had fallen short, AIM offered a workflow that fit the business as it actually operates.
A consumer-grade 360° camera anyone can use. Not £40k specialist hardware.
An extendable 6m pole gives surveyors a full view across the roof plane. No more blind spots.
Every photo and measurement in one digital model that surveyor, designer, installer, and customer can walk through.
Before rolling out, AIM and Contact Solar ran an on-site pilot across 10 properties, comparing AIM-produced digital models against traditional surveys. The headline outcome was clear: AIM removes the ambiguity, giving every downstream party the same information to work from.
One surveyor visits the property and captures it in 360° using AIM with an extendable pole for elevated roof views. The full capture takes around 12 to 15 minutes on site. The data uploads to AIM and a digital model is built automatically.
An office-based design engineer then picks up the model and designs the solar PV system directly from it, taking measurements, checking shading, and planning panel layout without needing a return site visit. Where third-party installers are involved, the same digital model is shared with them, so everyone works from the same information.
The result has been a meaningful improvement in data accuracy at the point of capture, which flows through to cleaner calculations and fewer errors on day of install.
In March 2026 alone, Contact Solar captured 167 properties, covering 166,600 m² of residential roof, driveway and elevation area, making them AIM's highest-volume customer to date.
“AIM has changed how we survey and design. One surveyor, one 360° capture, and the whole team, office designers, installers, even the customer, is working from the same model. We have taken the guesswork out of the process, cut the back-and-forth, and given our teams the confidence to get it right the first time.”
Contact Solar is at an early but committed stage of AIM adoption. Full system integration with their job management platform is underway. Given the typical lag between survey and install, statistically meaningful ROI figures will follow once integration is complete and sufficient volume has moved through the full pipeline.
What we can confirm at this stage:
Contact Solar is scaling AIM across its survey operation and is actively integrating the platform with its job management system to unlock full workflow efficiency. Beyond design, the team is exploring how the same capture can support commissioning, installer handover, and customer handover.
The 360° capture capability has direct relevance to regulatory compliance. The updated PAS 63100 standard launched on 15th April 2026 places greater emphasis on documented site evidence for battery and solar PV installations. AIM's immersive digital capture provides exactly the kind of verifiable, timestamped site record that supports compliance with BS 7671 Amendment 4 requirements.
Longer term, there is significant potential to extend AIM's use across the wider EDF Zero Carbon Homes portfolio, including Pod Point EV charger installations and EDF heat pump surveys, where the same survey accuracy and shared-model benefits apply.
15 minutes. A real property, captured and digitised. See exactly what your team would be working with.
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