Solar system for a 7 marla house in Lahore

The 7 marla layout and what it leaves on the roof

Seven marla is 175 square yards, close to 1,575 square feet of plot. In Bahria Town, Wapda Town and the newer parts of Iqbal Town the standard 7 marla build covers about 1,250 square feet per floor with a car porch at the front and a small back courtyard. The top roof usually gives 750 to 850 square feet of clear deck.

Two things eat into it. The mumty on 7 marla houses is bigger than on 5 marla, often a full room with a bathroom, and it throws a long shadow across the north half of the roof through winter. And the overhead tank on these houses is frequently mounted on a raised platform rather than sitting on the slab, which is worse, because a raised tank shades a moving strip of roof for four hours a day.

Work around both and 12 to 14 panels of 585W go on cleanly. That is 7 kW to 8.2 kW. Room exists for more, but the inverter and the household load stop being the reason to add them.

Size by the ACs, not by the bill

Bills lie. A family that travelled for six weeks last summer has a low July reading that means nothing. Counting compressors is more reliable.

ACs running	Other heavy load	System size	Panels (585W)
Two, 1.5 ton inverter	Fridge, freezer, water motor	6 kW	11
Three, mixed inverter and non-inverter	Plus washing machine and iron daily	7 kW	12
Three, plus a tenant portion upstairs	Second fridge and second motor	8 kW	14

A non-inverter AC is the item that quietly ruins sizing. It draws close to full rated current the entire time it runs, where an inverter AC settles to a third of that once the room is cold. One old window unit or one non-inverter split adds about 1 kW of continuous demand. If the household has two of them, the honest recommendation is to replace the ACs before spending on extra panels, because that is cheaper per unit saved. Details on summer AC behaviour are in the summer AC load article.

What 7 kW costs in Lahore right now

Line item	Specification	Amount (PKR)
Panels	12 × 585W tier-1 @ 19,500	234,000
Hybrid inverter	6 kW single phase	158,000
Lithium battery	5 kWh	285,000
Mounting	Standard, 7 kW @ 7,000/kW	49,000
Electrical items kit	Protection, combiner, earthing	35,000
Cabling	DC 90m, AC 20m	25,000
Labour	3 day crew	20,000
LESCO net metering file	Application to meter change	15,000
Turnkey with 5 kWh		821,000
Turnkey with 10 kWh	Second 5 kWh module added	1,106,000
Turnkey, no battery	Hybrid inverter kept for later	536,000

Elevated mounting, which lifts the array above the mumty and gives the roof back as usable floor, costs PKR 12,000 per kW instead of PKR 7,000. On 7 kW that is PKR 35,000 more. On a house where the family sleeps on the roof in May it is money well spent.

Battery sizing for a 7 marla house

This is where quotes diverge wildly and where customers get burned. Battery capacity is bought in kWh, and the only honest way to size it is to add up what has to run, for how long, and then add 25 percent because lithium should not be pulled to zero every night.

Tier one: essentials only, 5 kWh

Ten fans at 75W, twenty LED points at 12W, a fridge cycling at an average 90W, one TV, and the router. That is about 1 kW of continuous draw. A 5 kWh battery at 90 percent usable depth gives four and a half hours. This is the right size for a household that gets two or three hours of load shedding at a stretch and does not mind the AC stopping. Cost of the module is PKR 285,000, or PKR 195,000 for a 3.5 kWh Pylontech if a shorter run is acceptable.

Tier two: one AC overnight, 10 kWh

Add a 1.5 ton inverter AC averaging 900W over the night once the room is cold, and the draw goes to about 1.9 kW. Ten kWh runs that for roughly five hours, which covers midnight to 5 am. Two 5 kWh modules, PKR 570,000 of battery. This is the most common request from 7 marla owners in Bahria Town and Wapda Town.

Tier three: two ACs and no compromise, 15 kWh

Three modules, PKR 855,000. At that point the battery costs more than the entire solar array, and the payback argument disappears completely. It is a comfort purchase. Some customers want it and that is fine, as long as nobody pretends it saves money. The battery bank sizing guide works through the arithmetic in more detail, and Pylontech rates and Dyness rates are listed separately.

Tubular batteries remain an option at PKR 48,000 to PKR 52,000 for a 200Ah unit, and six of them get close to 5 kWh of nominal capacity for about PKR 300,000. The catch is usable depth. Tubular should not go below 50 percent, so the real delivery is half of nominal, and the bank needs replacing in four to five years. Run the comparison on the lithium versus tubular page before deciding on price alone.

The backup board is what makes a battery useful

A hybrid inverter does not automatically back up the whole house. A separate backup distribution board has to be built, and the circuits that matter get moved onto it. On a 7 marla house that means deciding, in advance, which two bedrooms get AC backup and which sockets stay on the grid side. Customers who skip this conversation end up with a 10 kWh battery draining into a water motor and an electric iron at 11 pm.

Our crews split it as follows on most 7 marla jobs: all lights and fans on backup, fridge on backup, one AC circuit on backup, water motor and washing machine on grid only, kitchen sockets on grid with two exceptions for the microwave and the freezer. That layout is explained further on the hybrid and battery service page.

Monsoon, smog and what the numbers do

July and August in Lahore bring cloud that cuts generation by 30 to 45 percent on wet days, though the rain washes the panels and the days immediately after a storm are the best of the year. November to January is the harder period. Smog scatters light and the panels sit under a haze that does not lift until noon. Expect December generation to be roughly 55 percent of May generation on the same array. Neither is a fault. Both are covered in the monsoon output article.

What matters practically is that the winter shortfall coincides with low consumption, so bills stay low anyway. The problem month is not December, it is September, when the heat holds but the sun angle has started dropping.

Why 8 kW on a 7 marla roof is sometimes a mistake

Fourteen panels fill the deck. No walkway width left, no space for the cleaning crew to stand, and the back row shades the front row in December unless the tilt is flattened, which costs winter yield anyway. Under the 2026 export rules the surplus generated in spring is not bought back at anything close to the retail tariff of PKR 48 to PKR 65 per unit, so oversizing to export does not pay.

Eight kW is right if the house has three ACs running long hours or a tenant portion. It is wrong if it is being bought as a hedge against future needs, because panels can be added to a hybrid string later at whatever the price is then, and prices have been falling. Compare against the 8 kW price article before committing.

Booking the work

Survey fee is PKR 3,000, deducted from the final installation bill. The engineer spends about an hour on a 7 marla house, checks the sanctioned load on the LESCO bill, tests the existing earthing, marks the mumty and tank shadows, and comes back with a layout and a priced BoQ. Installation runs three to four days once material is on site, and the net metering file typically takes six to ten weeks through LESCO.

Estimate first with the solar calculator, read the hybrid with battery guide if the backup question is still open, or send documents through the contact page. Installation process detail sits on the installation page and paperwork on the net metering page.